By Geeta Dayal

Robert Ashley, 2006 (Photo: Joanne Savio)

Friends and collaborators of influential US composer Robert Ashley remember his life and work

The composer Robert Ashley died last week at his home in New York, age 83. Though he is best known for radically reinventing opera in the 20th century — most famously in the television opera Perfect Lives in the early 1980s — his life and career had many stages. He was a key part of the legendary ONCE Group in Ann Arbor, beginning in 1961, and formed the Sonic Arts Union in 1966 with fellow composers Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman. In 1969, Ashley became the director of the nascent Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in California. At Mills during the 1970s, he mentored a generation of groundbreaking artists and composers. Ashley’s last opera, CRASH, which was completed three months before his death, will receive its world premiere at the Whitney Biennial next month, directed by musician and composer Alex Waterman, along with performances of the operas Vidas Perfectas (Perfect Lives revisited in Spanish) and The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity. Here, 23 of Ashley’s friends and collaborators look back on his life and work.
– Geeta Dayal

Robert Ashley, 1989. (Courtesy: Mimi Johnson; Photo: Jack Mitchell)

Alvin Lucier
Composer and emeritus professor, Wesleyan University; co-founder of the Sonic Arts Union with Ashley, Mumma, and Behrman

Throughout a long career Robert Ashley did an astonishing thing. He turned speech into music. The origins of speech and music are mysterious. One cannot be sure which came first. One can imagine that the first human utterances were intoned, chanted, if not melodic. Song may have been the precursor of speech. Or they both may have developed simultaneously. It is lovely to imagine early humans singing to each other. Ashley’s speech-song seems to me to be a combination of both. It is fascinating to hear the characters in Bob’s operas singing and talking at the same time. The listener’s attention moves to three places: the meaning of the words, the melody they create and a combination of both.

Basically, Ashley regarded speech as music. I remember standing with him at gatherings after concerts in the Midwest, simply listening to people talking. He once remarked that, to his ears, the dull roar of many people talking was symphonic. Once as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham event in New York, Bob simply assembled a group of friends to sit on stage and have a conversation. There was no text, no instructions, no enhancements, no musical accompaniment. It was amazing just how riveting this experience was. One left the event wondering how Bob could have made this happen.

Gordon Mumma
Composer; emeritus professor, University of California – Santa Cruz; veteran of ONCE Festivals, Sonic Arts Union, Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Robert Ashley lived off the land and in the landscapes. With the people therein he shared the surroundings. The following early history displays some roots of his lifelong creativity.

Beginning musically as a solo pianist, it was a path Ashley might have followed, but pianos are heavy. Words have a different kind of weight, combining naturally in ensembles of verbal communities. His involvements with spoken words and communications of language invited participations with others. Nourishment came from the visual artists in his life, beginning in the 1950s with Mary Tsaltas, filmmaker George Manupelli, architects Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer, and visual-projection sculptor Milton Cohen.

Ashley’s early use of recorded media — magnetic tape — in both fixed and live-performance was integrated by working with others. He and I collaborated and developed music for Milton Cohen’s SPACETHEATRE, constantly evolving and with ongoing public performances for several years. Ashley composed music then mostly for ensembles — small and large, and I still treasure the touring duo-performances of our music and that of others.

That’s old history — the developing of his early creative gardens. But as roots develop, so did Ashley’s social strands. He was wonderful in working with others, though not fully as a ‘director.’ He invited people to collaborate, appreciating their uniqueness, as though having a long party. Ashley’s ingredients for these activities came from his entire life. The surrounding and luminescent Americana libretti of his words are now an ongoing new history.

‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny
Composer and pianist; music, Perfect Lives, Celestial Excursions, Dust

We first met in 1962; I’d come up from Texas. I was 17 years old and I had just left home and had all my belongings in a paper bag and I decided to come to Ann Arbor because I was doing new music in Texas as a teenager, working with my friend Philip Krumm. [Ashley] said ‘You gotta come up here, these people are doing wonderful new stuff’… I decided that was where I wanted to go. I took my student composer’s award, which was about $500, and took the plane first to New York to do a Juilliard audition, but then caught the bus to go to Ann Arbor… I went to Ann Arbor and stayed in Gordon Mumma’s place for a couple days, and then Mary Ashley and Bob helped me get a job at the Institute for Social Research. And that gave me a place to live. It didn’t work out to go to the university — I wasn’t terribly interested anyway. But I worked with Bob for over 50 years.

We were close friends, of course. The whole ONCE thing wasn’t just a festival we put on once a year; it was a continuous lifestyle. It was the beginning of the ‘60s. Everything went into it; it was always there every day. For everybody involved it was happening all of the time. Bob was one of the main movers of the activity of the ONCE Group, and the ideas. ONCE started as a new music concert, in ’61, actually. They had the first one the year before I came up there. I believe John Cage was with that, and David Tudor…all the newest music of the time.

I stayed in Ann Arbor from ‘62 to ‘70. Then Robert invited me to the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, to help put the studio together. When I got there, it was two small rooms. We expanded the whole thing down one half of a building and made it non-profit, public access. Which was the expansion of an idea that Robert had. Robert with Gordon Mumma, in Ann Arbor they were calling it the cooperative studio of electronic music, and [had] basically two electronic setups in their houses but they wanted to expand it, to make it public access so that anybody could use it. So that’s what the Center for Contemporary Music came from…anybody from the public could use it, and the students could show people how to do things. Part of the learning was to teach others how to use synthesizers, or the film editing equipment…to anybody from the community.

So, yes, Bob and I worked together for many years, and made Perfect Lives. He invited me to write the music that I was familiar to play with. It was a different kind of relationship, sort of like co-composition. I wrote the melodies and the harmonies and all that stuff, and that gave me something that I could develop the character of Buddy the piano player, who comes to town and teaches everyone boogie-woogie and that sort of thing. He’s the eternal optimist. Then there was Raoul, the eternal pessimist, the bartender, always questioning things. It sort of described us (laughs) We were interested in everything.

Pauline Oliveros
Composer; professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

In the early ’60s, we were in snail mail contact with Robert Ashley. We (Ramon Sender Barayón & Morton Subotnick) were excited about connecting with Bob and the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor — the only group that seemed to be working with tape and electronics in ways parallel to what we were doing in San Francisco.

In 1964, we took our group on a national tour and met Bob and the ONCE Group in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. They attended our concert; then we all went to Ann Arbor for a wonderful party and exchange of information.

Following on are some of my continuing encounters with Bob:

Early ’60s snail mail exchange with Bob & Ramon. Hearing Bob’s tape music at our San Francisco Tape Music Center.
1964 meeting Bob in person in Michigan on our tour and hanging out with him and the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor.
The Wolfman in LA [1968] – jaws dripping with feedback!
Experiencing The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer… with Anne riding on Bob’s shoulders in a theatrical trance at UCSD circa 1970.
Kittyhawk [c.1965] with the ONCE Group at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
On location in Joshua Tree National Monument for Dr. Chicago— a George Manupelli film with Ashley sound and Alvin Lucier as Dr. Chicago.
Music with Roots in the Aether— my theatrical interview with Bob at Mills College, Oakland.

All these encounters touching deeply the curious flow of our music and friendship.

Robert Ashley, Automatic Writing, (cover of 1996 CD release)

John Bischoff
Composer and associate professor, Mills College, Oakland

I first saw Robert Ashley in person when I was a 19-year-old composition student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1969. Ivan Tcherepnin, who taught the Composition Seminar course I was taking, had lined up guest composers to lecture to the class. Bob was one of them. He was the only guest who didn’t play recordings of his pieces—he just sat in front of the class and talked extemporaneously for an hour straight. I remember being transfixed.

It wasn’t clear to me at the time that he even composed music, at least from what he said that day—but it didn’t matter. That experience was what led me to apply to Mills for graduate school a few years later, and to end up studying with Bob. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Maggi Payne
Composer, video artist, professor and co-director, Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College; sound engineer, Music with Roots in the Aether

I first encountered Bob Ashley when he performed Wolfman at the University of Illinois at Urbana [in 1969], when I was about to enter graduate school there. Although I know that his vocalizations were extremely soft, the amplitude through the sound system was so intense that I managed to stay inside the concert hall for only a few seconds before making a hasty retreat to the lobby with my fingers in my ears. Luckily there was a window in the door to the concert hall and there was certainly no difficulty hearing that amazing performance through the door, which was vibrating against my hand as I peered through the glass.

Gordon Mumma was in residency the year I was there. When I was trying to decide whether to stay for a further degree at Illinois, Gordon Mumma said ‘go to Mills College to study with Bob Ashley,’ advice which I took, and a decision I never regretted for a moment. It was such a pleasure working closely with Bob while at Mills, and especially as sound engineer for several interviews and performances for Music with Roots in the Aether.

Between the production crew skinny dipping to cool off in the intense heat at Terry Riley’s Sri Moonshine Ranch, to the quarry shots of Gordon Mumma and Tandy Beal at dawn, to being whisked to the top of Angel Island for David Behrman’s interview with that wonderful helicopter opening, to Phil Makanna’s intricate mirror setup for David’s Music with Melody-Driven Electronics, and Bob’s brilliant idea of having signers interpret involuntary utterances in his Title Withdrawn— it was all magical.

Prior to the Terry Riley shoot, I remember him recounting that he ordered a cheeseburger without the meat at a hamburger chain, but the kid refused to make it for him. Bob asked him to ‘hold the meat’ just like one would say ‘hold the mayo,’ but the kid would have none of it. Bob couldn’t make any headway with that kid, and he remained perplexed as to why it was such a problem for the kid for weeks after that incident.

I can’t really imagine this world without Bob. He was one of the most charismatic people I’ve known. He is a major influence in 20th and 21st century music. It’s as if his influence becomes part of one’s DNA without one really being aware of it.

Terry Riley
Composer

I can’t remember the first time I met the incomparable Bob Ashley, but it must have been around the time I heard him perform the terrifying Wolfman. It was shocking and exhilarating!

What I do remember was that I was touring with Pandit Pran Nath in Scandinavia in 1971 and having breakfast in an Oslo hotel, when the waitress told me there was a telephone call from the States. On the other end of the line was Bob who was inviting me to come and teach at Mills College in Oakland.

Whatever gave him the idea that I would entertain the notion of teaching in an institution, and how he found out where I was in Norway I don’t know, but when I came back to the table and told Pran Nath-ji that I had been invited to teach at Mills, he said ‘take it.’

That became a beautiful 10-year period where I would frequently run into Bob, Robert Sheff and composer David Behrman (my producer during my CBS years in New York and good friend) and often would end up in Berkeley having long conversations into the night with Bob, David, my wife Ann, Bob’s then wife Mary and others. Bob’s amazing and precocious son Sam would move like a shadow though the house, often contributing brilliant insights to the talking back and forth.

When I saw a production of Perfect Lives at Mills, I was impressed by the exciting direction that Bob was taking ‘opera.’ Along with Cage, I felt Bob Ashley had found a vital living form and given his performers the freedom to be ‘in the moment.’ It all felt like an extension of and continuation of the ongoing party that always seemed to be attached to his relaxed persona.

He did not let academia become too serious. He changed it instead of it changing him, and the east end of the Mills College music building became a 24-hour free access clubhouse.

We both left Mills around 1980, and Bob moved to New York. I only saw him a couple of times since, and then only casually at New York concerts. Bob relieved the opera world of the Bel Canto arias and other 19th century trappings that cloud direct emotional impact and found a stasis of beauty in ‘the ordinary.’ I am grateful to have been his friend, and value his work as a fresh start for music theater.

Paul DeMarinis
Electronic media artist and composer; professor, Stanford University

From a 1976 B&W reel-to-reel videotape – Cathy Morton and Bob Ashley:

(Bob is wearing a beautiful suit that looks as if it is tailored from a striped cotton tablecloth.)

Cathy Morton: This is hereditary. I‘m not sure if Bob can do it, but I can do it. (turns to Bob) Can you do it? (whispers)

Bob Ashley: (mumbles something, smiles)

Cathy Morton: We’re going to sing an A, a perfect A 440. Ready Bob?

On Cue {

Cathy Morton: Aaaaahhhhh (sings A 440)

Bob Ashley: eeeeeehhhh… (sings C)

—-

At one point in my graduate career at Mills, the time when any responsible teacher would have had to lay it out that I just didn’t have it, Bob said to me, out of the blue,

‘You should become a visual artist.’

I said, ‘but I like to make music.’

Bob said, ‘That’s ok. You can just keep on doing what you’re doing. You’ll just make different friends.’

‘Oh.’

Laetitia Sonami
Sound artist, composer, and performer

If you peered at the group of students in Bob Ashley’s seminar at Mills College in the late seventies, you would think you stumbled on one of his operas, exhibiting the oddest brochette of characters. I was young, still fresh from Paris and I could not believe where I had landed — there were so many incredible thinkers, budding artists, engineers, inventors, misfits, and everyone looked odd and thought in ways that seemed so foreign to me, and we were all completely set on fire by Bob’s charisma and generosity.

I could not say what Bob taught us — we still joke that we are not even sure he was there that often — going back and forth as he was between Beach St. and the Lake Merritt Hotel (‘Being in Oakland is like being in heaven’ – this, when San Francisco had not colonized the area yet.)

David Behrman, John Bischoff, Maggi Payne, Phil Harmonic, Nick Bertoni, Frankie Mann, Rich Gold, Bill Farley, Paul DeMarinis, Blue Gene Tyranny and so many more before and then — we still see each other, bounded by a love for the edges.

Bob wanted to be enchanted, delighted — and he created a huge place for you to unfold — Did not care about good or bad, just that you had to relish what you were doing, occupying all possible pockets of dead space, and f*** the conventions whenever possible.

Oh boy… was he there when he was here — now that he is not here, I think he is as much there…

Robert Ashley Perfect Lives, 1978–83

William Farley
Director and filmmaker

During the early ’70s, I was privileged to have dinner with the Ashleys a couple of nights a week, and they always played unusual music from around the world. It was background when Bob and Mary were cooking and did not interrupt the flow of conversation. They had played one particular album of African music for a couple of weeks until Bob complained one evening that his pants were getting tight around the waist. Mary agreed that they were both gaining weight? At the time I had the metabolism of a hummingbird and had not noticed any fluctuation of my weight. Bob picked up the album and read the English translation below the French, and in the small print discovered that we had been listening to Pygmy food gathering music. And realized that listening to hungry people looking for food in the rainforest of Central Africa was making us all overeat. Needless to say that album went back on the shelf and I never heard them play it again.

David Rosenboom
Composer; professor and dean of the School of Music, CalArts

I’ve never forgotten coming away from one of many inspiring conversations with Bob — probably sometime in the ‘70s — in which an important principle about composing emerged in our dialogue. I still pass the idea on to my students today. It went something like, ‘Whenever you believe you have a new idea, always imagine what bigger idea this one is just a part of.’ Few individuals can lay claim to having created a new language for music, so thoroughgoing, original and complete as to recast a constellation of notions about music, performance art, language, narrative form, opera, new media, history, time, collaborative strategies, form and structure, sociocultural themes in art and the evolution of musicianship, to name a few, in an integrated synthesis that challenges and deeply informs our searching as participants in the evolution of music. On another occasion — maybe in the ‘80s — we were talking again, and he said something like, ‘I’m becoming more interested in producing than composing, it’s certainly more important than orchestration.’

I treasure many memories. But here’s a wild one. In the late ‘60s I was managing productions for a multimedia concert series at the Electric Circus in New York called ‘Electric Ear.’ On May 26th, 1969 our project was to produce a performance by the ONCE Group from Ann Arbor of Bob’s The Trial Of Anne Opie Wehrer And Unknown Accomplices For Crimes Against Humanity. Well, a great swirl of confusion and curious tension bubbled up when the unanticipated political stumping of Norman Mailer bumped up against Bob’s presentation. I believe our producer, Thais Lathem, had a history in political campaigning. If I’m not mistaken, I think she worked on the Hubert Humphrey campaign.

Well, she had somehow gotten involved, maybe only peripherally, maybe more, with Norman Mailer’s campaign to become mayor of New York City. Somehow, it came to pass that Norman’s entourage arrived in the Circus environment to make a public showing just prior to the start of Bob’s concert. But the idea to combine the two didn’t work out so well, and as I recall, Bob wasn’t too pleased about the distraction. There was mayhem. Finally things settled a little, Bob’s performance began, and I helped him with the unique, Electric Circus control technology that had been designed by Don Buchla. His piece was a talking piece, with Anne Wehrer, George Manupelli, the great experimental filmmaker, and others. Anne had been in Andy Warhol films and was married to Joe Wehrer at the time, a famous architect at the University of Michigan. I recall five people on stage. I believe they were Mary Ashley, Cynthia Liddell, George Manupelli and Joe Wehrer, with Anne in the middle being cross-examined by two others on each side. Anne was a virtuoso talker – talk, talk, talk – an amazing person, and Bob knew how to orchestrate extraordinary people. It’s a legendary piece. I don’t know how it could have been done without Anne. In the end, Norman’s earlier appearance was no match for her with Bob and his team, not even close.

There are many stories to tell, like when we produced the CD of Bob’s opera, Improvement, in ‘80s summer recording sessions at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Each singer delivered individual phrases from an isolation booth, over and over, seemingly endlessly, while waiting for feedback and receiving almost none. After some exasperation they would ask Bob, ‘What are you looking for?’ And his reply would simply be, ‘I’ll know it when I hear it.’ After one session, we all went out to gawk at lowrider cars.

Honorific appellations, in America at least, usually go to those whose work takes less time to understand and recognize within extant, a priori conceptual frameworks than Bob’s does. Bob’s work is simply too challenging to be understood fully until those attempting to do so can strip away their assumptions about what art and music can be. I’m reminded of a moment in the early ’70s when I was editing a journal and had asked Bob to contribute an article. It arrived, and I read its unforgettable title referring to the problematic of music notation, ‘When The Virus Kills the Body And Is Buried With It, The Virus Can Be Said To Have Cut Its Own Throat,’ a good place to stop for a bit of contemplation.

Rhys Chatham
Composer; music director of The Kitchen, 1972–1973 and 1977–1980

I booked Bob at The Kitchen during the mid-‘70s. That was how I met him, through my friends Peter Gordon and Jill Kroesen and others, who studied with him at Mills College. I was in my mid-20s; Bob was in his early 50s. His take on me as a concert producer was as follows: ‘Rhys wants to be a composer, but we don’t need more composers, we need FANS! Rhys is a FAN!’ Bob was right — I was a fan. I still am, in fact!

I somehow managed to muddle my way through things, and also became a composer. My role model was Bob. Heck, I loved his music, but what I wanted to be, when I attained his age, was not to write music exactly like his, but to BE like him. Why, I’d go to his house and see instruments all over the place and Susan Sontag’s book On Photography on the table, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy guacamole, this is what being a composer is all about.’ Never mind his cool shades and sleek look, and his winning way with words; this was a beautiful man, someone to look up to, as virtually all of my close personal friends of my generation did.

Bob inspired us to become what we could become. Hell! His music was so weird, and he didn’t do so badly, maybe we could do the same thing. That was my thought, at least. People who studied directly with him like Jill and Peter could tell you.

So I wrote this piece in his memory. It’s for an orchestra of a lot of alto and C flutes. I’m playing all the parts for now. You wanna download it? Be my guest! Music should be free, just like love, would be my thought. If you do so, just make sure to tell your friends: this one is for Bob!

Download link here

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Thomas Buckner
Baritone vocalist and performer; singer on Atalanta (Acts of God), Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions, Concrete

The first time I heard an opera performance by Robert Ashley was on record, when I arrived home one evening around 1980. A friend who was babysitting at my home was listening to the new recording of a solo performance of two scenes from Perfect Lives— ‘The Bar’ and ‘The Park’ — with Bob, ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny on keyboard, and ‘Chris’ on tabla. Ironically, I didn’t get it at first, but my friend, (whom I married years later), insisted I listen some more. Soon thereafter, I was singing at the Autumn Festival at the American Center in Paris, and Bob was performing a solo version of the same music, with the players on a recording. I was blown away, and he became one of my favorite composers. We had a very interesting conversation, in which Bob spoke of the necessity to get one’s music out there at every opportunity, no matter what venue. It was just what I needed to hear. His spirit was infectious.

Why did I reject this music at first, and then become so enamored of it later? I think it is because Robert Ashley’s music represents a radical, in the sense of root, departure from not only the music of the past, but from western music’s assumptions about the relationship of speech and music. For him, speech is music, and it took the experience of a live performance for me to hear this. Also, in live performance, Bob’s charismatic presence was not to be denied, and the effect was both mesmerizing and awakening.

So when the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music — which I co-founded and co-directed with composer/conductor Robert Hughes in Berkeley, California — was given a consortium grant to commission a composer, I readily agreed to his suggestion of Robert Ashley, whom he called ‘the most original mind in new music.’ I stipulated that the work be for voice and ensemble, as I wanted to experience this music from the inside. Because he had heard me sing, Robert Ashley chose to set text from his then-current opera, Atalanta (Acts of God), rather than a new text. Little did I know that this would be an audition.

Bob had written out the speech rhythms in conventional notation, since we were not going to be working together on the piece. This was very complicated, in order to capture the subtle nuances, the music, of vernacular speech. I understand why Bob never used conventional notation for the singers in his operas; it is very inefficient. I practiced it with the great hand drummer Big Black, who was my roommate at the time, and we really got it locked in. So when I sang it for Bob he was very happy. He came out to San Francisco for the performance and then invited me to sing in the next performance of Atalanta (Acts of God), which was in Rome. I have sung in every opera since, as well as in many concert performances of shorter works he has written for me. I learned more about music and performance from working with Bob than from any other experience in my life. Each piece is unique, though recognizable as Bob’s work. He reinvented opera every time he wrote one.

Jill Kroesen
Composer and performer; ‘Isolde/Gwyn’ in Perfect Lives

Bob Ashley was brilliant, open and generous. I was privileged to study with him at Mills College. To be his student was to be in the best hands. He exposed us to as much contemporary art and music and he could and then left us on our own with his unconditional support. The only requirement was that our work be innovative. He treated us with the respect of an equal and listened to our work with awe. He was there if we needed help or feedback and listened with an open heart. I worked with him later on Perfect Lives and with that and all his other compositions there was never any ego artifice, just pure art.

Peter Gordon
Composer and associate professor, Bloomfield College; music producer for Perfect Lives and Vida Perfectas

I was a graduate student at the University of California-San Diego, where music was all about expanding parameters and ever-increasing control. The music campus was a former marine base: the classrooms and studios were barracks and quonset huts. This gave a nice edge to the place. The one “nice” building was commandeered by a well-funded musical think tank, where experimentalist pedagogues picked through the entrails of linguistics and cybernetics.

Robert Ashley came down for a weekend to rehearse and perform his opera Kit Carson. He used music and art student volunteers. Bob was the lead voice, reading a series of newspaper articles that were covering a big scandal at the time, involving ITT Corporation, the CIA and the Republican Party fundraising (Nixon had just been re-elected.) In his introductory remarks, Bob explained how the opera was entitled Kit Carson because the structure of the work was based on the political, economic and social dynamic of the Wild West.

I loved it – weird music, sharp politics, and the rehearsals were a good hang. I knew that I had to work more with Bob, and immediately applied to transfer to Mills College, where Bob was on the faculty. Some of the things that struck me about Bob: a.) He made everything seem so effortless. There were things to be done and one just did them – no drama. b.) He was extremely kind to everyone working for him. c.) Bob was interested in people – he’d talk to folks, regardless of stature, position, nature of connection. d.) Bob was able to see music within a social context – with political awareness, as well as an appreciation for popular culture. e.) Bob was rigorous in thought and action. His works were meticulously planned, with layers of connection and specific formulae in which things should work. f.) Notwithstanding b. above, Bob did have high standards regarding technology, and was very clear in his tech specifications. He expected these to be met and woe unto the presenter who tried to cut corners.

I moved up to the Bay Area, enrolled at Mills. The program that Bob had created (along with ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Maggi Payne, Terry Riley, et al) was a polar opposite to what I had experienced at UCSD. There was the dedication to experimentalism, but there was also a sense of what Bob had described as ‘music as news.’ And pop music was considered part of the dialogue. The Center for Contemporary Music, which housed the MFA music program, featured a room with a Moog, a room with a Buchla synthesizer, and an 8-track professional recording studio. ‘Blue’ Gene was the head engineer, and major musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area would come to record. The mid-‘70s seemed to be the time of the great migration. We had heard tales out in California about the exciting stuff happening in downtown New York. I moved to the East Village in ’75; Jill Kroesen was already here and Bob was commuting between Oakland and New York. Everyone was out of school, one way or another, and Bob (with Mimi, now) was the center of our community of artists. Before I met Bob, I recall a UCSD professor making some derisive comment about ‘Those folks at Mills – they are like insurance salesmen: businessmen.’ It is true, however, that Bob had a good sense of the connection of music to commerce. This is not to say that he was in any way creating ‘commercial music’ – but his experience in industrial film and applied music and sound production definitely informed his technological awareness.

And Bob knew how to put on the charm, in particular when doing business. The big piece of Bob’s that I worked on was Perfect Lives. I was music producer and, working with Bob and ‘Blue’ Gene, we spent hundreds of hours recording in 24-track studios. This was primarily at Right Track Studios – first at their W. 24th Street facility in New York, later on W. 48th Street. We treated the studio as one great big modular synthesizer: we made it a point to utilize all of the available outboard gear, and there was a great selection available, indeed. We pushed the studio engineers to use the gear in unusual ways. Today, I am revisiting the process, but this time using Ableton Live (musical software) on a laptop.

At one of the first Robert Ashley concerts I attended, there was this strange mechanical rhythm sound on a track (I think this was for a live performance of the score to George Manupelli’s film Portraits). It seemed slightly incongruous at first, but I became fascinated with the repetition. It turns out that this was a keyboard instrument called the ‘Chamberlain.’ It is similar to the Mellotron, in that it is comprised of tape loops that are triggered by the keyboard. But the Chamberlain had a whole set of rhythmic presets, designed in particular for Hollywood television shows. The mechanical rhythm of the Chamberlain (there was one in the Mills studio) was the precursor to the Gulbransen organ rhythms of Perfect Lives; both might be seen as precursors to musical software such as Ableton.

Bob was my teacher, my colleague, my collaborator. He was my guru, my mentor, my inspiration, my friend.

Robert Ashley Perfect Lives, 1978–83

David van Tieghem
Composer and performer; ‘“D”, the Captain of the Football Team’ in Perfect Lives; vocals on Atalanta (Acts of God)

I was privileged to work with Bob on Perfect Lives and Atalanta (Acts of God) from 1978 to 1983. I’ll never forget his gentle, humorous nature, and his generous trust in me to find my own way into and through his work as a performer. His voice hypnotized me, and forever influenced the way I perceive the rhythm of words and imagery.

John Sanborn
Video artist; director of the television opera Perfect Lives

Bob had the ability to teach you just by being Bob. His first major manifestation was the video interview collection called Music with Roots in the Aether, which I found objectionable when I first heard that a musician thought he could make video. I was wrong, because 1. Bob was the conductor of bands that could do anything (I was going to join one) and 2. Bob taught me how to control the content AND the context. When you do that you leave NO ROOM for the competition.

Then came Perfect Lives, a sweet rumour for a while, and then a set of smoky temperaments that I was invited to connect with by Carlotta Schoolman. I was the hot young video artist whose prowess was abbreviated by pronounced context, but slender content. But Bob changed that. When we worked together I understood how to construct yourself — sometimes in real time — with language, perspective and commentary. Bob would not so much tell you what he wanted, as ‘guide’ you to a target (sometimes of your own making) that would make him laugh. ‘Good one, John’ he would say, and cover his famously bad teeth when he smiled.

I saw how deep and intense his commitment to the text and the concept of Perfect Lives was — this was no trivial love affair. And when we were invited to make a pilot of the piece with Belgian TV (weeks and weeks in Liege drenched in old school technology, beer and twins) and we could not agree to a contract with their administration — we found ourselves breaking into the studio, stealing the master tapes, and driving all night to Amsterdam. Just like a Bob Ashley opera. Oh, boy.

Yes, Bob absorbed your talent in his name, yes; he pulled your strings and seduced you with his force of personality (so subtle is his will that you have given up the ghost before breakfast.) And yes, there is the time when you have to leave the band to go do your own thing — no hard feelings. BUT— how glorious is was to be playing with Peter, Blue, Jill, David and Bob to create something that — STILL and MAYBENEVER— will never be beat.

So through my head run the lines that I know by heart. Whose meaning maybe (maybe) only I know (since I spent weeks talking through each word of seven episodes to divine how to show that which cannot be seen.) And when I am in a sort of doubt, or panic, or miasma I hear– ‘short ideas, repeated, massage the brain.’ And Bob lives on, forever.

Jacqueline Humbert
Artist and performer; costume designer and makeup, Perfect Lives, Atalanta (Acts of God); performer in several operas including Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions

It is difficult to express how significant an impact, how great an influence one life can have on another. I will make an attempt though it will be incomplete and inadequate.

I had known of Robert Ashley’s innovative music for years before beginning to work with him in 1980, first as a designer and subsequently as a performer. I admired his great intelligence and astonishing imagination. He was astoundingly prolific as well. Over the years he became a north star for me, an inspiration, a creative genius and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

It was both an honour and a pleasure to have worked with Robert for so many years. Through his many operas the ensemble toured internationally, were recorded and broadcast widely, and given the chance to perform the vivid characters Robert created, so varied from opera to opera. Robert was incredibly generous in providing the many opportunities to all who worked with him for so many years and we are all so very grateful and humbled by the experience.

Robert had it all; grace, charm, wit, and a voice like velvet or smoke, depending on the character. He is already sorely missed. The world has lost one of the truly great ones.

Tom Hamilton
Composer; mixing, sound processing, and/or electronics on Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions

In 1990, Bob knew that I was a composer and audio engineer who was fairly new to New York. He asked me to start working on his electronic orchestras for the operas and perform sound mixing and processing in his ensemble, all which I continue to do to this day. I gained more insight about music in our very first meeting than I had acquired in many years. For me, working on his operas required using everything I had learned from my own checkered experience in music and audio production. Bob’s music provided the context for all of us in the ensemble to stretch our capabilities, each in our own natural direction. And I became connected to a large family of veteran artists, all connected to some aspect of Bob’s career. I think he gave us an original answer to the eternal question: ‘What else is Music?’

Robert Ashley, Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007)

Amy X Neuburg
Composer and performer; vocals on Improvement, Foreign Experiences, Now Eleanor’s Idea

A few simple examples of some of the many things I learned from working with him (and you can learn them just from listening): 1) it is perfectly okay to use lots of words; 2) the sounds and rhythms of vernacular speech are beautiful music; 3) if it’s clear to you what you are talking about, it doesn’t necessarily have to be clear to everyone else; they will make their own stories out of what you have said. My favorite of his operas is Foreign Experiences— I still go around quoting it 20 years later. Feeling both tearfully sad and incredibly honoured and grateful to have known him.

Kenneth Goldsmith
Poet and professor, University of Pennsylvania; founder, UbuWeb

I always said, when he was alive, that Robert Ashley was America’s greatest living composer. Like Charles Ives, he was doing things that were so original and unique that few knew in his time knew what to make of them. And like Charles Ives, history will bear out his genius. True to his vision, he never compromised; unlike many artists, he didn’t repeat himself — with each new work, there was a resolute sense of exploration and evolution. He was an artists’ artist. But he paid a price for it. While Steve Reich and Philip Glass made millions at opera houses around the world, Bob premiered works at places like La Mama and The Kitchen right up until the end. It broke my heart.

In my early 20s as a student, a professor of mine gave me a cassette of Perfect Lives. I was dumbstruck by its profundity and beauty. It hit me so hard that I became devoted to the avant-garde because of it. It’s no stretch to say that if not for Robert Ashley, there wouldn’t have been an UbuWeb today.

Robert Ashley Vidas Perfectas, 2011. Directed by Alex Waterman, Irondale Theater, Brooklyn, 2011

Alex Waterman
Artist and musician; director of three operas by Robert Ashley for the 2014 Whitney Biennial

My first recollections of Robert Ashley are on a yellow pad of paper. I had been sitting interviewing him at his studio on Beach Street for several hours, recording with a cobbled-together contraption of binaural microphones fed into a pre-amp and an iPod. My preamp ran on a 9-volt battery, and after the first five minutes it lost its charge. I captured five minutes of conversational warm-up and then dead air for the next two hours. I discovered my fuck-up as I was walking to the subway.

Distraught, I pulled out a yellow pad and tried to recollect everything I could from our conversation: Uncle Willard, school days, early years in Tennessee, the Post Office, the army band in Texas, George Payne, Frances Yates, involuntary speech… It was all still present but the order wasn’t. The stories and their structures were intact but the overall sequence wasn’t. It was outside of time.

One of Bob’s gifts has been to remind us that thought is always memory. We remember something new when we encounter his music. The stories that Bob told musically — his form of opera — is always on and off the page simultaneously. The illusion that the audience perceives, is that he and his band are just sitting reading together off of the same page.

In Robert Ashley’s music reading is also a memory exercise, produced through listening to the self and (an)other simultaneously. Musicians do this all the time when they are reading music on the page, but the same rules don’t always get applied to reading words (musically). Words contain magic, though, and Bob understood this in ways that the rest of us are trying to catch up with.

In Bob’s last opera, CRASH (premiering in April at the 2014 Whitney Biennial) knowing that he would be recollecting for the last time, Bob’s story of his life is given an order that perhaps only the finality of an end (‘eresanen’*) could provide.

Bob is at the center, and we are circling around him. His stories progress year by year, and cycle by cycle, measured by minutes and seconds — six cycles of 14 years in 90 minutes. A Perfect Life.

He writes his ‘last big event’ into CRASH, but allows for a coda: in the final ‘shot’ of the opera, Bob is walking home, helped along, on the arm of his wife.

• ‘eresanen’ (‘there is an end’) is the word that the character No Legs—from Ashley’s 1998 opera, Dust— keeps hearing in his head, and wants to understand.

Joan Jonas
Video and performance artist; professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; choreography on Celestial Excursions

Robert Ashley was a poet in the American tradition. He was charming, charismatic, brilliant. His songs are poems.

One of my favorite tasks was to do the choreography for Celestial Excursions in 2003. There were two versions. The first one I performed behind the readers/singers for the full two hours of the piece. This was challenging and led to new work. For the second version, performed a few years later, I performed only in the musical intervals between the sections with text, because, understandably, my continuous actions were a distraction from the text. I liked the challenge of condensing my actions from two hours to twenty minutes; I experienced different ways of working with time. Robert Ashley’s time. The more I performed the piece the more I realized what a beautiful composer he was.

I knew and admired Bob’s work, but the experience of working with him, the fantastic singers, and ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny was one of the most profoundly enjoyable moments in my life. This remains my longest continuous solo. The music was my inspiration, of course. I was a backdrop. Hearing the work over and over, especially while inside the sound, was deeply moving. If one loves a work of music it is necessary to listen again and again.

Sam Ashley
Mystic, composer, and artist; performer in Atalanta, Gentlemen of the Future, Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Now Eleanor’s Idea, Foreign
Experiences, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Empire, Love is a Good Example, Dust, Celestial Excursions, Concrete; performed the dance Seeing Things within early versions of Atalanta; created the two-voice version of Foreign Experiences

I learned a lot from Bob, and I feel honored that I was able to work with him for so many years.

Here’s something interesting: Bob based even his choices about death on an idea of 14 year cycles. This is musically brilliant because it shows what music should really be about: living your ideas; practicing what you preach, as they say. Some people might perhaps be annoyed that he decided to focus specifically on those cycles because of a curious book, and that’s understandable but it’s not really important in this context. And actually I disagreed with his specific focus on just those 14 year cycles. But still, however he might have gotten into the idea the fact that he would make the most fundamental sorts of choices accordingly is impressive as can be.

Just one example.

Outstanding.

By Bharti Lalwani

Manit Sriwanichpoom, _The Election of Hatred
, 2011, 36 photographs, each: 
60 x 90 cm. All photographs courtesy: Jakarin Tewtao

I’m sitting at a table, sipping jasmine tea and chatting with strangers while separating the roots from a sizeable mound of bean sprouts at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). We’ve been invited to join Amanda Heng, one of Singapore’s pioneering performance artists, as part of her work ‘Let’s Chat’ (first performed in 1996).

We are all here for the opening night of ‘Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia’, an exhibition of contemporary art from Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma and Cambodia. Curated by Singapore-based specialist on Southeast Asian art Iola Lenzi, with co-curators Agung Hujatnikajennong (Indonesia) and Vipash Purichanont (Thailand), the exhibition showcases 60 artworks by nearly 40 Southeast Asian artists of three generations.

‘Concept, Context, Contestation’ is the second significant institutional exhibition in recent years to examine Southeast Asian contemporary art within its own historical context rather than in relation to China, Japan or the rest of the world. The first, also curated chiefly by Lenzi was ‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011’ at the Singapore Art Museum in 2011. After ‘Negotiating Home…’, ‘Concept, Context, Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia’ expands on one of the 2011 exhibition’s key currents, conceptualism grown out of local context.

Amanda Heng (centre-right) with guests performing, Let’s Chat, 1996/2013, 
performance

‘Concept, Context …’ includes a different set of interactive installations, performance, photography, digital media and paintings by early innovators as well as younger artists from the region. Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (b. 1949, Philippines), FX Harsono (b. 1949, Indonesia), Amanda Heng (b. 1951, Singapore), Vasan Sitthiket (b. 1957, Thailand), Vu Dan Tan (1946-2009, Vietnam) and Lee Wen (b. 1957, Singapore) are some of the region’s pioneering artists featured. Exhibited together for the first time at BACC, their works show the extent to which the region’s art history and conceptual approaches to expression are interconnected. Recurring themes span issues of race, ethnicity, patriarchy, corruption, gender and social inequality and the use of religion as a political tool. Meditations on the same themes are also evident in the work of a younger generation of artists. Together, the connections between locally-rooted conceptual approaches and social ideologies in Southeast Asian art of the last four decades are made apparent.

As is well known, the latter part of the twentieth century was a troubled period in the region’s history, and with protests against Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government that began just the week before the opening, made CCC a timely show.

With the demonstrations going on in the heart of Bangkok, this exhibition quite astutely leads with works of Thai artists Sutee Kunavichayanont, Manit Sriwanichpoom and Vasan Sitthiket. Appropriately, the show opens with Sriwanichpoom’s The Election of Hatred (2011), a set of 36 large-scale photographs of election posters from all Thai political parties. Ordinary, except that these are photographs of portraits on promotional political banners around the city that have been mutilated by the people. Shinawatra’s mouth for instance has been slashed through, rendering her metaphorically mute and ineffective. Kunavichayanont, for his part, extends an earlier series with History Class II (2013). A set of 23 school desks are etched with salient imagery from Thai political history. The first edition of 14 desks, History Class (Thanon Ratchadamnoen), featured in ‘Negotiating Home…’ and was originally placed outdoors at the foot of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok in 2000. On each occasion of display, the public has been invited to sit and make rubbings on paper from the etched desks and take home an assortment of crucial events in Thai history that have been written out of (or excluded from) school textbooks. “History Class,’ Lenzi explains, ‘embodies Southeast Asian conceptual art in that it perfectly combines real social issues, the forceful involvement of the audience in discovering these histories, and an allusive, codified approach to critique, the desks referencing the state and the education system as nationalist propaganda.”

Vasan Sitthiket, Blue October (detail), 1996, tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 6 pieces, each 1.5 × 1.5 m

Blue October (1996) by Sitthiket, a set of six paintings, references the 1976 Thammassat University massacres in Thailand. Icy cobalt-blue surrounds monochrome scenes of brutality borrowed from media images of the day. Deliberately uncomfortable in their violent iconography, these stark paintings are also visually seductive. On close examination, small squares of gold leaf appear on the shoulders of the dead, marking them as martyrs. Re-contextualized, grounded in reality, this act of appropriation and reference makes up the conceptual core of the work. Blue October was first displayed for only three days at a small gallery in Chatuchak market in Bangkok in 1996. “These paintings had been forgotten”, said Lenzi, ‘and after their weekend stint at Chatuchak in 1996, were never seen in Thailand again until now. The paintings fit this show perfectly, illustrating how regional artists combine conceptual approaches and powerful images related to local issues to rope audiences in. With their mix of references that all Thais can read, and their print-media appropriated representation of the massacre, they are as scary-stunning today as when first painted nearly twenty years ago.”

Another artwork that attests to social and political instability, this time in Indonesia, is FX Harsono’s Pistal Krupuk Semoga Menjadi Piatal Beneran (What would you do if these crackers were real pistols?). This is the earliest work in the show, originally made in 1977 and specially recommissioned for BACC. Harsono piled pinkish edible gun-shaped rice-crackers on the gallery floor. Next to this cheerfully coloured mound, visitors can record their responses to the piece. Pistal … evolved from the steady clampdown on criticism of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime (1967–98). Harsono’s wafer-guns and Kunavichayanont’s desks operate as catalysts for social change rather than offering a simple reflection of it.

From the series ‘TOSS’, 2013, 
Japanese ink, seal ink, rubber soap on Nepalese handmade paper (10 pieces), 79 × 53 cm

Delicately tackling race, the young Singapore artist Tay Wei Leng presented a sound piece in which one hears the recitation of the Singapore Pledge of Allegiance. Recited in schools, on National Day Parade and by those taking up Singaporean citizenship, the Pledge specifically disregards race, language or religion in order “to build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. Tay had 30 foreigners recite the pledge, cryptically alluding to the migrants who have built the island-state. Tay plays on the image of multi-ethnic coherence that Singapore projects on the world stage and questions the veracity of this pledge in a society increasingly stalked by xenophobia.

However, where Tay is subtle, the first generation Singaporean conceptualist Tang Mun Kit is more unequivocal. His ‘TOSS’ series (The Other Singapore Story, 2013) openly critiques the state. In his direct assessment of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy, Tang juxtaposes recognizable symbols and political phrases on paper, levying layers of critical appraisal against the social and cultural policies of the ruling party over the last 50 years. He also poses uneasy questions to the citizen who has been willingly pliant over these decades in return for material affluence. Lee’s tenure from 1959 to 1990 yielded Singapore’s rapid economic growth. However, nation-building policies also eroded budding democratic, social and political constructs. The country’s 1979 ‘Speak Mandarin Not Dialect’ policy informs the social bean-sprout cleaning in Heng’s Lets Chat performance. Meant to unify the Chinese communities of Singapore by strengthening a single national language, this policy robbed independent communities of their cultural identities and also prevented the younger generation from communicating with their elders. A product of the successful campaign, the young Heng was left with no linguistic skill to communicate with her dialect-speaking parents. This experience, shared by many of her generation, left her devising other forms of connection. Through her invitation to audiences to embark on the routine chore of cleaning sprouts, Heng’s work reveals how she expands from the personal to address the communal.

Imelda Cjipe Endaya, The Wife Is a DH
, 1995, installation at BACC, 2013

The work of Philippine artist Imelda Cajipe-Endaya acknowledges the afflictions another community. Seated next to me during Heng’s performance on the opening night, she recounts a poignant incident that sparked the making of her installation, The Wife is a D.H (1995), also featured in the exhibition. As she separated root from sprout-tips, she recollected the case of Filipina helper Flor Contemplacion. Sentenced to death in Singapore in 1995, under allegedly strange circumstances, for the murder of another Filipina maid and her four-year-old ward, Contemplacion’s guilt was never accepted by the Philippine community.

In The Wife is a D.H the distinct shape of a woman steps out of a suitcase equipped with suggestive heels and a feather duster, as well as various symbols of the Catholic faith. Through literal and metaphoric prompts, Cajipe-Endaya articulates the vulnerability of domestic helpers and other economic migrants across the world, and beyond this social exclusion, a universal theme. Not just a nod to helpers from the Philippines, the work also iterates the sociological impact of a country whose economy is based on the export of female labour. The case of Contemplacion, instigated the rising voice of a collective in the Philippines against unfair working conditions and widespread exploitation of their nationals outside their country.

As the ongoing protests in Thailand attest, social, political and cultural tensions are far from resolved in Southeast Asia. The Wife is a D.H, among numerous other works in ‘Concept, Context, Contestation …’ captures the ethos of Southeast Asian artists as drivers of social change, addressing issues that concern their fellow citizens. Their ideologies, responses and iconographies are all grounded in local vernacular, history and intellectual discourse, rather than Duchamp. Through socially charged reference and allusion, these artists, as well as the author’s of the essays in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, offer a necessary perspective on Southeast Asia. In a region, where art histories are currently in the process of being written, exhibitions such as ‘Concept, Context, Contestation’ and ‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation’ offer canon-building discourse.

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‘Concept Context Contestation’ has been extended to March 16. A Southeast Asian contemporary art symposium on themes raised by the exhibition takes place at BACC on 5th and 6th of March 2014.

By Geeta Dayal

Robert Ashley, 2006 (Photo: Joanne Savio)

Friends and collaborators of influential US composer Robert Ashley remember his life and work

The composer Robert Ashley died last week at his home in New York, age 83. Though he is best known for radically reinventing opera in the 20th century — most famously in the television opera Perfect Lives in the early 1980s — his life and career had many stages. He was a key part of the legendary ONCE Group in Ann Arbor, beginning in 1961, and formed the Sonic Arts Union in 1966 with fellow composers Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman. In 1969, Ashley became the director of the nascent Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in California. At Mills during the 1970s, he mentored a generation of groundbreaking artists and composers. Ashley’s last opera, CRASH, which was completed three months before his death, will receive its world premiere at the Whitney Biennial next month, directed by musician and composer Alex Waterman, along with performances of the operas Vidas Perfectas (Perfect Lives revisited in Spanish) and The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity. Here, 23 of Ashley’s friends and collaborators look back on his life and work.
– Geeta Dayal

Robert Ashley, 1989. (Courtesy: Mimi Johnson; Photo: Jack Mitchell)

Alvin Lucier
Composer and emeritus professor, Wesleyan University; co-founder of the Sonic Arts Union with Ashley, Mumma, and Behrman

Throughout a long career Robert Ashley did an astonishing thing. He turned speech into music. The origins of speech and music are mysterious. One cannot be sure which came first. One can imagine that the first human utterances were intoned, chanted, if not melodic. Song may have been the precursor of speech. Or they both may have developed simultaneously. It is lovely to imagine early humans singing to each other. Ashley’s speech-song seems to me to be a combination of both. It is fascinating to hear the characters in Bob’s operas singing and talking at the same time. The listener’s attention moves to three places: the meaning of the words, the melody they create and a combination of both.

Basically, Ashley regarded speech as music. I remember standing with him at gatherings after concerts in the Midwest, simply listening to people talking. He once remarked that, to his ears, the dull roar of many people talking was symphonic. Once as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham event in New York, Bob simply assembled a group of friends to sit on stage and have a conversation. There was no text, no instructions, no enhancements, no musical accompaniment. It was amazing just how riveting this experience was. One left the event wondering how Bob could have made this happen.

Gordon Mumma
Composer; emeritus professor, University of California – Santa Cruz; veteran of ONCE Festivals, Sonic Arts Union, Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Robert Ashley lived off the land and in the landscapes. With the people therein he shared the surroundings. The following early history displays some roots of his lifelong creativity.

Beginning musically as a solo pianist, it was a path Ashley might have followed, but pianos are heavy. Words have a different kind of weight, combining naturally in ensembles of verbal communities. His involvements with spoken words and communications of language invited participations with others. Nourishment came from the visual artists in his life, beginning in the 1950s with Mary Tsaltas, filmmaker George Manupelli, architects Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer, and visual-projection sculptor Milton Cohen.

Ashley’s early use of recorded media — magnetic tape — in both fixed and live-performance was integrated by working with others. He and I collaborated and developed music for Milton Cohen’s SPACETHEATRE, constantly evolving and with ongoing public performances for several years. Ashley composed music then mostly for ensembles — small and large, and I still treasure the touring duo-performances of our music and that of others.

That’s old history — the developing of his early creative gardens. But as roots develop, so did Ashley’s social strands. He was wonderful in working with others, though not fully as a ‘director.’ He invited people to collaborate, appreciating their uniqueness, as though having a long party. Ashley’s ingredients for these activities came from his entire life. The surrounding and luminescent Americana libretti of his words are now an ongoing new history.

‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny
Composer and pianist; music, Perfect Lives, Celestial Excursions, Dust

We first met in 1962; I’d come up from Texas. I was 17 years old and I had just left home and had all my belongings in a paper bag and I decided to come to Ann Arbor because I was doing new music in Texas as a teenager, working with my friend Philip Krumm. [Ashley] said ‘You gotta come up here, these people are doing wonderful new stuff’… I decided that was where I wanted to go. I took my student composer’s award, which was about $500, and took the plane first to New York to do a Juilliard audition, but then caught the bus to go to Ann Arbor… I went to Ann Arbor and stayed in Gordon Mumma’s place for a couple days, and then Mary Ashley and Bob helped me get a job at the Institute for Social Research. And that gave me a place to live. It didn’t work out to go to the university — I wasn’t terribly interested anyway. But I worked with Bob for over 50 years.

We were close friends, of course. The whole ONCE thing wasn’t just a festival we put on once a year; it was a continuous lifestyle. It was the beginning of the ‘60s. Everything went into it; it was always there every day. For everybody involved it was happening all of the time. Bob was one of the main movers of the activity of the ONCE Group, and the ideas. ONCE started as a new music concert, in ’61, actually. They had the first one the year before I came up there. I believe John Cage was with that, and David Tudor…all the newest music of the time.

I stayed in Ann Arbor from ‘62 to ‘70. Then Robert invited me to the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, to help put the studio together. When I got there, it was two small rooms. We expanded the whole thing down one half of a building and made it non-profit, public access. Which was the expansion of an idea that Robert had. Robert with Gordon Mumma, in Ann Arbor they were calling it the cooperative studio of electronic music, and [had] basically two electronic setups in their houses but they wanted to expand it, to make it public access so that anybody could use it. So that’s what the Center for Contemporary Music came from…anybody from the public could use it, and the students could show people how to do things. Part of the learning was to teach others how to use synthesizers, or the film editing equipment…to anybody from the community.

So, yes, Bob and I worked together for many years, and made Perfect Lives. He invited me to write the music that I was familiar to play with. It was a different kind of relationship, sort of like co-composition. I wrote the melodies and the harmonies and all that stuff, and that gave me something that I could develop the character of Buddy the piano player, who comes to town and teaches everyone boogie-woogie and that sort of thing. He’s the eternal optimist. Then there was Raoul, the eternal pessimist, the bartender, always questioning things. It sort of described us (laughs) We were interested in everything.

It’s not possible to summarize here the compositions of Bob Ashley, but what characterized all of these pieces from the earliest electronic works to the operas was an admirable intelligence, a gentle humor. For example, the early work She Was a Visitor, for chorus and audience participation, has people taking very small parts of the phrase and sustaining the sound rather than the word itself. This creates another layer of meaning additional to the words, up to Perfect Lives, which is about the very subtle realities of everyday life in a small town. Which is a fascination that both Robert and I had, in our different compositions.

David Behrman
Composer; member of the Sonic Arts Union; faculty, Bard College

I owe a lot to Bob. A fortunate meeting with him and Gordon Mumma at the lobby of Town Hall around 1964. One thing led to another and pretty soon we were touring as Sonic Arts, together with Alvin Lucier. Touring in the States and in Europe. La vie d’artiste. Cigarettes and Jim Beam in dimly-lit hotel rooms after the gig, dividing up wads of foreign cash. (An early lesson from Bob: always take the gig’s sponsor out for a fine expensive dinner on the final night before leaving. Helps chances of getting invited back next year and besides, it feels good to do that.) Our first reviews in Europe. This one in French, maybe around 1967: ‘Does one applaud the dentist’s drill?’

At Mills College, at the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM), Bob did his best to invent new ways of handling things. There were wonderful concerts by students in the beautiful concert hall, but usually the house had many empty seats. At a meeting of the artist faculty, this came up: can we find more money for publicity, mail out more and bigger posters? Instead Bob suggested reverse ticket pricing. Get the word out that anyone who comes to one of our concerts will be paid one dollar at the door. (We were never able to try out that plan, unfortunately.)

Thanks to Bob for the job at CCM starting in 1975. Thanks to Bob for the policy of Public Access, which brought the Eva Sisters to the CCM studios, and led to my long-lasting marriage to Terri Hanlon. Thanks to him for the idea that Jacques Bekaert and I could buy a floor together in the former egg and cheese warehouse building in downtown New York, where he and Mimi Johnson were moving. And thanks to him for including me in Music with Roots in the Aether, his wonderfully inventive video-plus-music composer portrait series with fine sound design by Maggi Payne and great video by Phil Makanna.

Occasionally a spark gets ignited among a group of artists in a particular place at a particular time. That happened at Mills in the early ‘70s, when Bob assembled a group of stellar artists who together with him set the tone for the CCM at that time: ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Maggi Payne, John Bischoff, Paul DeMarinis, Nick Bertoni, William Farley, Terry Riley. Quickly a wonderful extended family sprang up, and there wasn’t a dividing line between faculty, students and artists who were part of the lively Bay Area scene. Among the members of that extraordinary community were Peg Ahrens, Ron Kuivila, Frankie Mann, Pat Kelley, Fast Forward, Laetitia Sonami, Peter Gordon, Kathy Acker, Joel Ryan, Jill Kroesen, Terri Hanlon and Fern Friedman (The Eva Sisters), Ben Azarm, Phill Loarie, Bob Gonsalves, Rich Gold, Marina La Palma, Jim Horton, Kathy Morton, Marcia Mikulak, Phil Harmonic, and Phil Makanna. And the Belgian artist, musician, journalist, wine expert and diplomat Jacques Bekaert was a frequent visitor and guest composer.

When new incoming students assembled at Mills for the first time, Bob had an introductory warning message to them: if you’re not weird, get out! For me, those Mills years were among the happiest memories of my almost lifelong association with Bob.

Pauline Oliveros
Composer; professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

In the early ’60s, we were in snail mail contact with Robert Ashley. We (Ramon Sender Barayón & Morton Subotnick) were excited about connecting with Bob and the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor — the only group that seemed to be working with tape and electronics in ways parallel to what we were doing in San Francisco.

In 1964, we took our group on a national tour and met Bob and the ONCE Group in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. They attended our concert; then we all went to Ann Arbor for a wonderful party and exchange of information.

Following on are some of my continuing encounters with Bob:

Early ’60s snail mail exchange with Bob & Ramon. Hearing Bob’s tape music at our San Francisco Tape Music Center.
1964 meeting Bob in person in Michigan on our tour and hanging out with him and the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor.
The Wolfman in LA [1968] – jaws dripping with feedback!
Experiencing The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer… with Anne riding on Bob’s shoulders in a theatrical trance at UCSD circa 1970.
Kittyhawk [c.1965] with the ONCE Group at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
On location in Joshua Tree National Monument for Dr. Chicago— a George Manupelli film with Ashley sound and Alvin Lucier as Dr. Chicago.
Music with Roots in the Aether— my theatrical interview with Bob at Mills College, Oakland.

All these encounters touching deeply the curious flow of our music and friendship.

Robert Ashley, Automatic Writing, (cover of 1996 CD release)

John Bischoff
Composer and associate professor, Mills College, Oakland

I first saw Robert Ashley in person when I was a 19-year-old composition student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1969. Ivan Tcherepnin, who taught the Composition Seminar course I was taking, had lined up guest composers to lecture to the class. Bob was one of them. He was the only guest who didn’t play recordings of his pieces—he just sat in front of the class and talked extemporaneously for an hour straight. I remember being transfixed.

It wasn’t clear to me at the time that he even composed music, at least from what he said that day—but it didn’t matter. That experience was what led me to apply to Mills for graduate school a few years later, and to end up studying with Bob. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Maggi Payne
Composer, video artist, professor and co-director, Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College; sound engineer, Music with Roots in the Aether

I first encountered Bob Ashley when he performed Wolfman at the University of Illinois at Urbana [in 1969], when I was about to enter graduate school there. Although I know that his vocalizations were extremely soft, the amplitude through the sound system was so intense that I managed to stay inside the concert hall for only a few seconds before making a hasty retreat to the lobby with my fingers in my ears. Luckily there was a window in the door to the concert hall and there was certainly no difficulty hearing that amazing performance through the door, which was vibrating against my hand as I peered through the glass.

Gordon Mumma was in residency the year I was there. When I was trying to decide whether to stay for a further degree at Illinois, Gordon Mumma said ‘go to Mills College to study with Bob Ashley,’ advice which I took, and a decision I never regretted for a moment. It was such a pleasure working closely with Bob while at Mills, and especially as sound engineer for several interviews and performances for Music with Roots in the Aether.

Between the production crew skinny dipping to cool off in the intense heat at Terry Riley’s Sri Moonshine Ranch, to the quarry shots of Gordon Mumma and Tandy Beal at dawn, to being whisked to the top of Angel Island for David Behrman’s interview with that wonderful helicopter opening, to Phil Makanna’s intricate mirror setup for David’s Music with Melody-Driven Electronics, and Bob’s brilliant idea of having signers interpret involuntary utterances in his Title Withdrawn— it was all magical.

Prior to the Terry Riley shoot, I remember him recounting that he ordered a cheeseburger without the meat at a hamburger chain, but the kid refused to make it for him. Bob asked him to ‘hold the meat’ just like one would say ‘hold the mayo,’ but the kid would have none of it. Bob couldn’t make any headway with that kid, and he remained perplexed as to why it was such a problem for the kid for weeks after that incident.

I can’t really imagine this world without Bob. He was one of the most charismatic people I’ve known. He is a major influence in 20th and 21st century music. It’s as if his influence becomes part of one’s DNA without one really being aware of it.

Terry Riley
Composer

I can’t remember the first time I met the incomparable Bob Ashley, but it must have been around the time I heard him perform the terrifying Wolfman. It was shocking and exhilarating!

What I do remember was that I was touring with Pandit Pran Nath in Scandinavia in 1971 and having breakfast in an Oslo hotel, when the waitress told me there was a telephone call from the States. On the other end of the line was Bob who was inviting me to come and teach at Mills College in Oakland.

Whatever gave him the idea that I would entertain the notion of teaching in an institution, and how he found out where I was in Norway I don’t know, but when I came back to the table and told Pran Nath-ji that I had been invited to teach at Mills, he said ‘take it.’

That became a beautiful 10-year period where I would frequently run into Bob, Robert Sheff and composer David Behrman (my producer during my CBS years in New York and good friend) and often would end up in Berkeley having long conversations into the night with Bob, David, my wife Ann, Bob’s then wife Mary and others. Bob’s amazing and precocious son Sam would move like a shadow though the house, often contributing brilliant insights to the talking back and forth.

When I saw a production of Perfect Lives at Mills, I was impressed by the exciting direction that Bob was taking ‘opera.’ Along with Cage, I felt Bob Ashley had found a vital living form and given his performers the freedom to be ‘in the moment.’ It all felt like an extension of and continuation of the ongoing party that always seemed to be attached to his relaxed persona.

He did not let academia become too serious. He changed it instead of it changing him, and the east end of the Mills College music building became a 24-hour free access clubhouse.

We both left Mills around 1980, and Bob moved to New York. I only saw him a couple of times since, and then only casually at New York concerts. Bob relieved the opera world of the Bel Canto arias and other 19th century trappings that cloud direct emotional impact and found a stasis of beauty in ‘the ordinary.’ I am grateful to have been his friend, and value his work as a fresh start for music theater.

Paul DeMarinis
Electronic media artist and composer; professor, Stanford University

From a 1976 B&W reel-to-reel videotape – Cathy Morton and Bob Ashley:

(Bob is wearing a beautiful suit that looks as if it is tailored from a striped cotton tablecloth.)

Cathy Morton: This is hereditary. I‘m not sure if Bob can do it, but I can do it. (turns to Bob) Can you do it? (whispers)

Bob Ashley: (mumbles something, smiles)

Cathy Morton: We’re going to sing an A, a perfect A 440. Ready Bob?

On Cue {

Cathy Morton: Aaaaahhhhh (sings A 440)

Bob Ashley: eeeeeehhhh… (sings C)

—-

At one point in my graduate career at Mills, the time when any responsible teacher would have had to lay it out that I just didn’t have it, Bob said to me, out of the blue,

‘You should become a visual artist.’

I said, ‘but I like to make music.’

Bob said, ‘That’s ok. You can just keep on doing what you’re doing. You’ll just make different friends.’

‘Oh.’

Laetitia Sonami
Sound artist, composer, and performer

If you peered at the group of students in Bob Ashley’s seminar at Mills College in the late seventies, you would think you stumbled on one of his operas, exhibiting the oddest brochette of characters. I was young, still fresh from Paris and I could not believe where I had landed — there were so many incredible thinkers, budding artists, engineers, inventors, misfits, and everyone looked odd and thought in ways that seemed so foreign to me, and we were all completely set on fire by Bob’s charisma and generosity.

I could not say what Bob taught us — we still joke that we are not even sure he was there that often — going back and forth as he was between Beach St. and the Lake Merritt Hotel (‘Being in Oakland is like being in heaven’ – this, when San Francisco had not colonized the area yet.)

David Behrman, John Bischoff, Maggi Payne, Phil Harmonic, Nick Bertoni, Frankie Mann, Rich Gold, Bill Farley, Paul DeMarinis, Blue Gene Tyranny and so many more before and then — we still see each other, bounded by a love for the edges.

Bob wanted to be enchanted, delighted — and he created a huge place for you to unfold — Did not care about good or bad, just that you had to relish what you were doing, occupying all possible pockets of dead space, and f*** the conventions whenever possible.

Oh boy… was he there when he was here — now that he is not here, I think he is as much there…

Robert Ashley Perfect Lives, 1978–83

William Farley
Director and filmmaker

During the early ’70s, I was privileged to have dinner with the Ashleys a couple of nights a week, and they always played unusual music from around the world. It was background when Bob and Mary were cooking and did not interrupt the flow of conversation. They had played one particular album of African music for a couple of weeks until Bob complained one evening that his pants were getting tight around the waist. Mary agreed that they were both gaining weight? At the time I had the metabolism of a hummingbird and had not noticed any fluctuation of my weight. Bob picked up the album and read the English translation below the French, and in the small print discovered that we had been listening to Pygmy food gathering music. And realized that listening to hungry people looking for food in the rainforest of Central Africa was making us all overeat. Needless to say that album went back on the shelf and I never heard them play it again.

David Rosenboom
Composer; professor and dean of the School of Music, CalArts

I’ve never forgotten coming away from one of many inspiring conversations with Bob — probably sometime in the ‘70s — in which an important principle about composing emerged in our dialogue. I still pass the idea on to my students today. It went something like, ‘Whenever you believe you have a new idea, always imagine what bigger idea this one is just a part of.’ Few individuals can lay claim to having created a new language for music, so thoroughgoing, original and complete as to recast a constellation of notions about music, performance art, language, narrative form, opera, new media, history, time, collaborative strategies, form and structure, sociocultural themes in art and the evolution of musicianship, to name a few, in an integrated synthesis that challenges and deeply informs our searching as participants in the evolution of music. On another occasion — maybe in the ‘80s — we were talking again, and he said something like, ‘I’m becoming more interested in producing than composing, it’s certainly more important than orchestration.’

I treasure many memories. But here’s a wild one. In the late ‘60s I was managing productions for a multimedia concert series at the Electric Circus in New York called ‘Electric Ear.’ On May 26th, 1969 our project was to produce a performance by the ONCE Group from Ann Arbor of Bob’s The Trial Of Anne Opie Wehrer And Unknown Accomplices For Crimes Against Humanity. Well, a great swirl of confusion and curious tension bubbled up when the unanticipated political stumping of Norman Mailer bumped up against Bob’s presentation. I believe our producer, Thais Lathem, had a history in political campaigning. If I’m not mistaken, I think she worked on the Hubert Humphrey campaign.

Well, she had somehow gotten involved, maybe only peripherally, maybe more, with Norman Mailer’s campaign to become mayor of New York City. Somehow, it came to pass that Norman’s entourage arrived in the Circus environment to make a public showing just prior to the start of Bob’s concert. But the idea to combine the two didn’t work out so well, and as I recall, Bob wasn’t too pleased about the distraction. There was mayhem. Finally things settled a little, Bob’s performance began, and I helped him with the unique, Electric Circus control technology that had been designed by Don Buchla. His piece was a talking piece, with Anne Wehrer, George Manupelli, the great experimental filmmaker, and others. Anne had been in Andy Warhol films and was married to Joe Wehrer at the time, a famous architect at the University of Michigan. I recall five people on stage. I believe they were Mary Ashley, Cynthia Liddell, George Manupelli and Joe Wehrer, with Anne in the middle being cross-examined by two others on each side. Anne was a virtuoso talker – talk, talk, talk – an amazing person, and Bob knew how to orchestrate extraordinary people. It’s a legendary piece. I don’t know how it could have been done without Anne. In the end, Norman’s earlier appearance was no match for her with Bob and his team, not even close.

There are many stories to tell, like when we produced the CD of Bob’s opera, Improvement, in ‘80s summer recording sessions at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Each singer delivered individual phrases from an isolation booth, over and over, seemingly endlessly, while waiting for feedback and receiving almost none. After some exasperation they would ask Bob, ‘What are you looking for?’ And his reply would simply be, ‘I’ll know it when I hear it.’ After one session, we all went out to gawk at lowrider cars.

Honorific appellations, in America at least, usually go to those whose work takes less time to understand and recognize within extant, a priori conceptual frameworks than Bob’s does. Bob’s work is simply too challenging to be understood fully until those attempting to do so can strip away their assumptions about what art and music can be. I’m reminded of a moment in the early ’70s when I was editing a journal and had asked Bob to contribute an article. It arrived, and I read its unforgettable title referring to the problematic of music notation, ‘When The Virus Kills the Body And Is Buried With It, The Virus Can Be Said To Have Cut Its Own Throat,’ a good place to stop for a bit of contemplation.

Rhys Chatham
Composer; music director of The Kitchen, 1972–1973 and 1977–1980

I booked Bob at The Kitchen during the mid-‘70s. That was how I met him, through my friends Peter Gordon and Jill Kroesen and others, who studied with him at Mills College. I was in my mid-20s; Bob was in his early 50s. His take on me as a concert producer was as follows: ‘Rhys wants to be a composer, but we don’t need more composers, we need FANS! Rhys is a FAN!’ Bob was right — I was a fan. I still am, in fact!

I somehow managed to muddle my way through things, and also became a composer. My role model was Bob. Heck, I loved his music, but what I wanted to be, when I attained his age, was not to write music exactly like his, but to BE like him. Why, I’d go to his house and see instruments all over the place and Susan Sontag’s book On Photography on the table, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy guacamole, this is what being a composer is all about.’ Never mind his cool shades and sleek look, and his winning way with words; this was a beautiful man, someone to look up to, as virtually all of my close personal friends of my generation did.

Bob inspired us to become what we could become. Hell! His music was so weird, and he didn’t do so badly, maybe we could do the same thing. That was my thought, at least. People who studied directly with him like Jill and Peter could tell you.

So I wrote this piece in his memory. It’s for an orchestra of a lot of alto and C flutes. I’m playing all the parts for now. You wanna download it? Be my guest! Music should be free, just like love, would be my thought. If you do so, just make sure to tell your friends: this one is for Bob!

Download link here

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Thomas Buckner
Baritone vocalist and performer; singer on Atalanta (Acts of God), Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions, Concrete

The first time I heard an opera performance by Robert Ashley was on record, when I arrived home one evening around 1980. A friend who was babysitting at my home was listening to the new recording of a solo performance of two scenes from Perfect Lives— ‘The Bar’ and ‘The Park’ — with Bob, ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny on keyboard, and ‘Chris’ on tabla. Ironically, I didn’t get it at first, but my friend, (whom I married years later), insisted I listen some more. Soon thereafter, I was singing at the Autumn Festival at the American Center in Paris, and Bob was performing a solo version of the same music, with the players on a recording. I was blown away, and he became one of my favorite composers. We had a very interesting conversation, in which Bob spoke of the necessity to get one’s music out there at every opportunity, no matter what venue. It was just what I needed to hear. His spirit was infectious.

Why did I reject this music at first, and then become so enamored of it later? I think it is because Robert Ashley’s music represents a radical, in the sense of root, departure from not only the music of the past, but from western music’s assumptions about the relationship of speech and music. For him, speech is music, and it took the experience of a live performance for me to hear this. Also, in live performance, Bob’s charismatic presence was not to be denied, and the effect was both mesmerizing and awakening.

So when the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music — which I co-founded and co-directed with composer/conductor Robert Hughes in Berkeley, California — was given a consortium grant to commission a composer, I readily agreed to his suggestion of Robert Ashley, whom he called ‘the most original mind in new music.’ I stipulated that the work be for voice and ensemble, as I wanted to experience this music from the inside. Because he had heard me sing, Robert Ashley chose to set text from his then-current opera, Atalanta (Acts of God), rather than a new text. Little did I know that this would be an audition.

Bob had written out the speech rhythms in conventional notation, since we were not going to be working together on the piece. This was very complicated, in order to capture the subtle nuances, the music, of vernacular speech. I understand why Bob never used conventional notation for the singers in his operas; it is very inefficient. I practiced it with the great hand drummer Big Black, who was my roommate at the time, and we really got it locked in. So when I sang it for Bob he was very happy. He came out to San Francisco for the performance and then invited me to sing in the next performance of Atalanta (Acts of God), which was in Rome. I have sung in every opera since, as well as in many concert performances of shorter works he has written for me. I learned more about music and performance from working with Bob than from any other experience in my life. Each piece is unique, though recognizable as Bob’s work. He reinvented opera every time he wrote one.

Jill Kroesen
Composer and performer; ‘Isolde/Gwyn’ in Perfect Lives

Bob Ashley was brilliant, open and generous. I was privileged to study with him at Mills College. To be his student was to be in the best hands. He exposed us to as much contemporary art and music and he could and then left us on our own with his unconditional support. The only requirement was that our work be innovative. He treated us with the respect of an equal and listened to our work with awe. He was there if we needed help or feedback and listened with an open heart. I worked with him later on Perfect Lives and with that and all his other compositions there was never any ego artifice, just pure art.

Peter Gordon
Composer and associate professor, Bloomfield College; music producer for Perfect Lives and Vida Perfectas

I was a graduate student at the University of California-San Diego, where music was all about expanding parameters and ever-increasing control. The music campus was a former marine base: the classrooms and studios were barracks and quonset huts. This gave a nice edge to the place. The one “nice” building was commandeered by a well-funded musical think tank, where experimentalist pedagogues picked through the entrails of linguistics and cybernetics.

Robert Ashley came down for a weekend to rehearse and perform his opera Kit Carson. He used music and art student volunteers. Bob was the lead voice, reading a series of newspaper articles that were covering a big scandal at the time, involving ITT Corporation, the CIA and the Republican Party fundraising (Nixon had just been re-elected.) In his introductory remarks, Bob explained how the opera was entitled Kit Carson because the structure of the work was based on the political, economic and social dynamic of the Wild West.

I loved it – weird music, sharp politics, and the rehearsals were a good hang. I knew that I had to work more with Bob, and immediately applied to transfer to Mills College, where Bob was on the faculty. Some of the things that struck me about Bob: a.) He made everything seem so effortless. There were things to be done and one just did them – no drama. b.) He was extremely kind to everyone working for him. c.) Bob was interested in people – he’d talk to folks, regardless of stature, position, nature of connection. d.) Bob was able to see music within a social context – with political awareness, as well as an appreciation for popular culture. e.) Bob was rigorous in thought and action. His works were meticulously planned, with layers of connection and specific formulae in which things should work. f.) Notwithstanding b. above, Bob did have high standards regarding technology, and was very clear in his tech specifications. He expected these to be met and woe unto the presenter who tried to cut corners.

I moved up to the Bay Area, enrolled at Mills. The program that Bob had created (along with ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Maggi Payne, Terry Riley, et al) was a polar opposite to what I had experienced at UCSD. There was the dedication to experimentalism, but there was also a sense of what Bob had described as ‘music as news.’ And pop music was considered part of the dialogue. The Center for Contemporary Music, which housed the MFA music program, featured a room with a Moog, a room with a Buchla synthesizer, and an 8-track professional recording studio. ‘Blue’ Gene was the head engineer, and major musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area would come to record. The mid-‘70s seemed to be the time of the great migration. We had heard tales out in California about the exciting stuff happening in downtown New York. I moved to the East Village in ’75; Jill Kroesen was already here and Bob was commuting between Oakland and New York. Everyone was out of school, one way or another, and Bob (with Mimi, now) was the center of our community of artists. Before I met Bob, I recall a UCSD professor making some derisive comment about ‘Those folks at Mills – they are like insurance salesmen: businessmen.’ It is true, however, that Bob had a good sense of the connection of music to commerce. This is not to say that he was in any way creating ‘commercial music’ – but his experience in industrial film and applied music and sound production definitely informed his technological awareness.

And Bob knew how to put on the charm, in particular when doing business. The big piece of Bob’s that I worked on was Perfect Lives. I was music producer and, working with Bob and ‘Blue’ Gene, we spent hundreds of hours recording in 24-track studios. This was primarily at Right Track Studios – first at their W. 24th Street facility in New York, later on W. 48th Street. We treated the studio as one great big modular synthesizer: we made it a point to utilize all of the available outboard gear, and there was a great selection available, indeed. We pushed the studio engineers to use the gear in unusual ways. Today, I am revisiting the process, but this time using Ableton Live (musical software) on a laptop.

At one of the first Robert Ashley concerts I attended, there was this strange mechanical rhythm sound on a track (I think this was for a live performance of the score to George Manupelli’s film Portraits). It seemed slightly incongruous at first, but I became fascinated with the repetition. It turns out that this was a keyboard instrument called the ‘Chamberlain.’ It is similar to the Mellotron, in that it is comprised of tape loops that are triggered by the keyboard. But the Chamberlain had a whole set of rhythmic presets, designed in particular for Hollywood television shows. The mechanical rhythm of the Chamberlain (there was one in the Mills studio) was the precursor to the Gulbransen organ rhythms of Perfect Lives; both might be seen as precursors to musical software such as Ableton.

Bob was my teacher, my colleague, my collaborator. He was my guru, my mentor, my inspiration, my friend.

Robert Ashley Perfect Lives, 1978–83

David van Tieghem
Composer and performer; ‘“D”, the Captain of the Football Team’ in Perfect Lives; vocals on Atalanta (Acts of God)

I was privileged to work with Bob on Perfect Lives and Atalanta (Acts of God) from 1978 to 1983. I’ll never forget his gentle, humorous nature, and his generous trust in me to find my own way into and through his work as a performer. His voice hypnotized me, and forever influenced the way I perceive the rhythm of words and imagery.

John Sanborn
Video artist; director of the television opera Perfect Lives

Bob had the ability to teach you just by being Bob. His first major manifestation was the video interview collection called Music with Roots in the Aether, which I found objectionable when I first heard that a musician thought he could make video. I was wrong, because 1. Bob was the conductor of bands that could do anything (I was going to join one) and 2. Bob taught me how to control the content AND the context. When you do that you leave NO ROOM for the competition.

Then came Perfect Lives, a sweet rumour for a while, and then a set of smoky temperaments that I was invited to connect with by Carlotta Schoolman. I was the hot young video artist whose prowess was abbreviated by pronounced context, but slender content. But Bob changed that. When we worked together I understood how to construct yourself — sometimes in real time — with language, perspective and commentary. Bob would not so much tell you what he wanted, as ‘guide’ you to a target (sometimes of your own making) that would make him laugh. ‘Good one, John’ he would say, and cover his famously bad teeth when he smiled.

I saw how deep and intense his commitment to the text and the concept of Perfect Lives was — this was no trivial love affair. And when we were invited to make a pilot of the piece with Belgian TV (weeks and weeks in Liege drenched in old school technology, beer and twins) and we could not agree to a contract with their administration — we found ourselves breaking into the studio, stealing the master tapes, and driving all night to Amsterdam. Just like a Bob Ashley opera. Oh, boy.

Yes, Bob absorbed your talent in his name, yes; he pulled your strings and seduced you with his force of personality (so subtle is his will that you have given up the ghost before breakfast.) And yes, there is the time when you have to leave the band to go do your own thing — no hard feelings. BUT— how glorious is was to be playing with Peter, Blue, Jill, David and Bob to create something that — STILL and MAYBENEVER— will never be beat.

So through my head run the lines that I know by heart. Whose meaning maybe (maybe) only I know (since I spent weeks talking through each word of seven episodes to divine how to show that which cannot be seen.) And when I am in a sort of doubt, or panic, or miasma I hear– ‘short ideas, repeated, massage the brain.’ And Bob lives on, forever.

Jacqueline Humbert
Artist and performer; costume designer and makeup, Perfect Lives, Atalanta (Acts of God); performer in several operas including Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions

It is difficult to express how significant an impact, how great an influence one life can have on another. I will make an attempt though it will be incomplete and inadequate.

I had known of Robert Ashley’s innovative music for years before beginning to work with him in 1980, first as a designer and subsequently as a performer. I admired his great intelligence and astonishing imagination. He was astoundingly prolific as well. Over the years he became a north star for me, an inspiration, a creative genius and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

It was both an honour and a pleasure to have worked with Robert for so many years. Through his many operas the ensemble toured internationally, were recorded and broadcast widely, and given the chance to perform the vivid characters Robert created, so varied from opera to opera. Robert was incredibly generous in providing the many opportunities to all who worked with him for so many years and we are all so very grateful and humbled by the experience.

Robert had it all; grace, charm, wit, and a voice like velvet or smoke, depending on the character. He is already sorely missed. The world has lost one of the truly great ones.

Tom Hamilton
Composer; mixing, sound processing, and/or electronics on Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions

In 1990, Bob knew that I was a composer and audio engineer who was fairly new to New York. He asked me to start working on his electronic orchestras for the operas and perform sound mixing and processing in his ensemble, all which I continue to do to this day. I gained more insight about music in our very first meeting than I had acquired in many years. For me, working on his operas required using everything I had learned from my own checkered experience in music and audio production. Bob’s music provided the context for all of us in the ensemble to stretch our capabilities, each in our own natural direction. And I became connected to a large family of veteran artists, all connected to some aspect of Bob’s career. I think he gave us an original answer to the eternal question: ‘What else is Music?’

Robert Ashley, Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007)

Amy X Neuburg
Composer and performer; vocals on Improvement, Foreign Experiences, Now Eleanor’s Idea

A few simple examples of some of the many things I learned from working with him (and you can learn them just from listening): 1) it is perfectly okay to use lots of words; 2) the sounds and rhythms of vernacular speech are beautiful music; 3) if it’s clear to you what you are talking about, it doesn’t necessarily have to be clear to everyone else; they will make their own stories out of what you have said. My favorite of his operas is Foreign Experiences— I still go around quoting it 20 years later. Feeling both tearfully sad and incredibly honoured and grateful to have known him.

Kenneth Goldsmith
Poet and professor, University of Pennsylvania; founder, UbuWeb

I always said, when he was alive, that Robert Ashley was America’s greatest living composer. Like Charles Ives, he was doing things that were so original and unique that few knew in his time knew what to make of them. And like Charles Ives, history will bear out his genius. True to his vision, he never compromised; unlike many artists, he didn’t repeat himself — with each new work, there was a resolute sense of exploration and evolution. He was an artists’ artist. But he paid a price for it. While Steve Reich and Philip Glass made millions at opera houses around the world, Bob premiered works at places like La Mama and The Kitchen right up until the end. It broke my heart.

In my early 20s as a student, a professor of mine gave me a cassette of Perfect Lives. I was dumbstruck by its profundity and beauty. It hit me so hard that I became devoted to the avant-garde because of it. It’s no stretch to say that if not for Robert Ashley, there wouldn’t have been an UbuWeb today.

Joan La Barbara
Vocalist and composer; performer on Your Money My Life Goodbye, Dust, Celestial Excursions, Now Eleanor’s Idea

I worked with Robert Ashley for four decades, learned many lessons and pondered many ideas: thoughts within thoughts, hypotheses, deliberations, considerations: When is music more than music? Is there a clear boundary between philosophy and storytelling? Does self-revelation necessarily involve pain? Can we be that raw and survive? As Diogenes, naked and searching, holding the lamp to illuminate the truth is how I might think of Bob as a writer, raw, revelatory, insightful, direct, confrontational, throwing a few obscenities in for emphasis. I will miss working with him and knowing him, but at least there are wonderful recordings to remember his voice and his visions.

Robert Ashley Vidas Perfectas, 2011. Directed by Alex Waterman, Irondale Theater, Brooklyn, 2011

Alex Waterman
Artist and musician; director of three operas by Robert Ashley for the 2014 Whitney Biennial

My first recollections of Robert Ashley are on a yellow pad of paper. I had been sitting interviewing him at his studio on Beach Street for several hours, recording with a cobbled-together contraption of binaural microphones fed into a pre-amp and an iPod. My preamp ran on a 9-volt battery, and after the first five minutes it lost its charge. I captured five minutes of conversational warm-up and then dead air for the next two hours. I discovered my fuck-up as I was walking to the subway.

Distraught, I pulled out a yellow pad and tried to recollect everything I could from our conversation: Uncle Willard, school days, early years in Tennessee, the Post Office, the army band in Texas, George Payne, Frances Yates, involuntary speech… It was all still present but the order wasn’t. The stories and their structures were intact but the overall sequence wasn’t. It was outside of time.

One of Bob’s gifts has been to remind us that thought is always memory. We remember something new when we encounter his music. The stories that Bob told musically — his form of opera — is always on and off the page simultaneously. The illusion that the audience perceives, is that he and his band are just sitting reading together off of the same page.

In Robert Ashley’s music reading is also a memory exercise, produced through listening to the self and (an)other simultaneously. Musicians do this all the time when they are reading music on the page, but the same rules don’t always get applied to reading words (musically). Words contain magic, though, and Bob understood this in ways that the rest of us are trying to catch up with.

In Bob’s last opera, CRASH (premiering in April at the 2014 Whitney Biennial) knowing that he would be recollecting for the last time, Bob’s story of his life is given an order that perhaps only the finality of an end (‘eresanen’*) could provide.

Bob is at the center, and we are circling around him. His stories progress year by year, and cycle by cycle, measured by minutes and seconds — six cycles of 14 years in 90 minutes. A Perfect Life.

He writes his ‘last big event’ into CRASH, but allows for a coda: in the final ‘shot’ of the opera, Bob is walking home, helped along, on the arm of his wife.

• ‘eresanen’ (‘there is an end’) is the word that the character No Legs—from Ashley’s 1998 opera, Dust— keeps hearing in his head, and wants to understand.

Joan Jonas
Video and performance artist; professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; choreography on Celestial Excursions

Robert Ashley was a poet in the American tradition. He was charming, charismatic, brilliant. His songs are poems.

One of my favorite tasks was to do the choreography for Celestial Excursions in 2003. There were two versions. The first one I performed behind the readers/singers for the full two hours of the piece. This was challenging and led to new work. For the second version, performed a few years later, I performed only in the musical intervals between the sections with text, because, understandably, my continuous actions were a distraction from the text. I liked the challenge of condensing my actions from two hours to twenty minutes; I experienced different ways of working with time. Robert Ashley’s time. The more I performed the piece the more I realized what a beautiful composer he was.

I knew and admired Bob’s work, but the experience of working with him, the fantastic singers, and ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny was one of the most profoundly enjoyable moments in my life. This remains my longest continuous solo. The music was my inspiration, of course. I was a backdrop. Hearing the work over and over, especially while inside the sound, was deeply moving. If one loves a work of music it is necessary to listen again and again.

Sam Ashley
Mystic, composer, and artist; performer in Atalanta, Gentlemen of the Future, Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Now Eleanor’s Idea, Foreign
Experiences, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Empire, Love is a Good Example, Dust, Celestial Excursions, Concrete; performed the dance Seeing Things within early versions of Atalanta; created the two-voice version of Foreign Experiences

I learned a lot from Bob, and I feel honored that I was able to work with him for so many years.

Here’s something interesting: Bob based even his choices about death on an idea of 14 year cycles. This is musically brilliant because it shows what music should really be about: living your ideas; practicing what you preach, as they say. Some people might perhaps be annoyed that he decided to focus specifically on those cycles because of a curious book, and that’s understandable but it’s not really important in this context. And actually I disagreed with his specific focus on just those 14 year cycles. But still, however he might have gotten into the idea the fact that he would make the most fundamental sorts of choices accordingly is impressive as can be.

Just one example.

Outstanding.

By Ela Bittencourt

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, 'A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness' (2013)

The Film Society at Lincoln Center has come under some scrutiny in recent months, with two articles in The New York Times, by critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, positing the need for more robust community outreach, particularly when it comes to younger audiences. Dargis’s piece wasn’t merely about The Film Society, for it discussed broader national trends, quoting a bracing statistic that only 13% of are-house movie patrons are children and students (though not mentioning how this number has changed over time, or how it compares to other national averages). A. O. Scott was more optimistic, but pointed out that The Film Society faces increasingly stiff competition, as Uptown Manhattan ceases to be the most desirable movie destination, losing out to locations that are more likely draws for young audiences, such as Downtown, and Brooklyn.

Regardless of the precise demographics of those visiting The Film Society on a regular basis, its recent offerings confirm that, should younger audiences seek it out, they would find vibrant programming of innovative films being made worldwide. As its two recent series, Film Comment Selects (February 17-27) and New Directors/New Films (ND/NF, March 19-30) attest, The Film Society continues to draw attention to key and emerging national and international talents.

One American production worth seeing at this year’s ND/NF Festival (held jointly with the Museum of Modern Art) was Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward off The Darkness (2013). The film’s overall aesthetic echoes the work that has come out from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, a project that wishes to untether non-fiction film from journalism, and has put forth some of the more formally audacious non-fiction films of the past few years, such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass (2009), Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), J. P. Sniadecki and Paravel’s Foreign Parts (2010) and People’s Park (2012), and most recently, Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakanama (2013).

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, ‘A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness’ (2013)

Shot in disparate locations, including Estonia, Finland, and Norway, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness tracks the political and philosophical musings of scruffy 30-something-year-olds, as they create communal living in the wilderness. With its languorous observational style, at times rapturously poetic, the film has an organic feel of peeping in on a secret society, whose, at times frolicking, naked, participants exult in a mixture of sensual exploration, fraternity, and self-reliance. There are witty, half-mystical exchanges about ecstatic intimacy in a communal sauna; there are other, more mundane moments, of families tending to their young, negotiating chores, or savoring a cigarette in woodsy silence. The forest backdrop strongly suggests Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), here cloaked as a post-industrialist desire to extricate onself from the chaos and the consumerism of cities, and to forge a more meaningful bond with nature. The idea of trance and the sublime are also strongly present, especially in the long sequence in which we shift from the picturesque, romantic backdrop of lush vegetation and a solitary lake at dusk to a death-metal concert. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness captures utopian impulses and the desire to find new ways, or rather to rekindle the ancient ones, of drawing upon nature for spiritual enlightenment – explored not as a critical analysis, or an attempt to explicate, but as an embodied, sensory experience, which invites us to partake in the wonderment.

Another ND/NF notable film, Roberto Minervini’s Stop the Pounding Heart (2013), is a work of fiction, but whose patient observation and emphasis on setting, work, and social interactions, rather than on traditional narrative thrust, evokes documentary aesthetic. In the film, young Sara (Sara Carlson), home-schooled and raised in the strict Christian faith, finds herself questioning her role as a young girl, whose prospects are limited to farming and marriage. Sara’s interest in a boy her age, Colby, a daring 14-year-old bull rider, stokes her discontent. Minervini’s camera stays close to the protagonists, and its handheld, unobtrusive presence creates intimacy, while the narrative unravels around Texas’s cultural attributes: from Bible study to shooting ranges and rodeos. A sociological portrait, with thick brushstrokes but finely delineated characters, Stop the Pounding Heart, particularly in the shots of Sara tending to goats, recalls Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). Like Bresson, Minervini employs nonactors. Similarly to the donkey, cast in Bresson’s film as a benevolent beast, the shots with the goats breathe an air of calm and acceptance, which clashes with Sara’s newfound rebelliousness. Minervini employs Bressonian emotional distance, where acting is reduced to a minimum, enhancing the film’s naturalism, and contradictions are sustained, without a nod to dramatic resolution.

Roberto Minervini, ‘Stop the Pounding Heart’ (2013)

Two other exciting new films, Fat Shaker and Fish & Cat, which screened respectively in Film Comment Selects and ND/NF, have come from Iran. Fat Shaker (2013), by Mohammad Shirvani, was billed as inaugurating a new stage in Iranian cinema – it may be too early to tell, but compared to such works as the iconic Iranian masterpiece, The House Is Black (1963), by Forough Farrokhzad, or to The Apple (1998), by precociously gifted Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Fat Shaker is striking as a work whose poetic power stems from reticence rather than effusion. Locked in an abusive relationship with his father (Levon Haftvan), a young mute boy (Navid Mohammadzadeh) draws strength from a mysterious photographer (Maryam Palizban), who poses him in her pictures. The three end up in an apartment that is raided by the police. The rudimentary plot belies the nuanced ambiguity of the three characters’ relationship, at once exploitative and yet open-ended, which jars with the brusque invasiveness of the officer that interrogates them. A film that takes on not so much patriarchy as any imposed constriction, and whose action unravels at the edges of incomprehension, Fat Shaker, with its unsteady camera and disjointed narrative, feels closest to something like a new postmodern YouTube aesthetic.

Shahram Mokri, ‘Fish and Cat’ (2013)

Shahram Mokri’s Fish & Cat (2013) also shows promise for new Iranian cinema, as one of the more mysterious and genre defying films at this year’s ND/NF. On the surface, a Blair Witch Project-like contrivance, in which conjecture is terrifying, Fish & Cat passes itself off as a news-based story (not unlike indie-horror aficionado Ti West’s The Sacrament (2013), which played at Film Comment Selects). The opening text announces that a rural restaurant was charged with serving human meat. From this grim intro we cut to two scruffy middle-aged men puttering about with sharp objects and scaring away a group of students driving to a wilderness camp. Though the two presumed perpetrators act like hapless stooges, and their peripatetic encounters with people meandering in the woods – an over-protective, lovelorn father sending off a boorish son to camp, a student lured into the woods to fix a water pump – betray absurdist touches, the film, captured in one continuous shot, builds tension with each exchange. There are layers of complications: Two mysterious twins in red overalls and with missing limbs, evoking Lynchian gallows humour; surrealist looping of dialogue and scenes, a déjà vu so eerie it’s evocative of the afterlife; and myriad internal monologues of students. Speaking to ghosts haunted by war becomes part of this loosely woven fable, which dares us to get lost in its maze.

Manuel Martín Cuenca, ‘Cannibal’ (2013)

A different kind of psychological maze was offered by the Film Comment Selects presentation of Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Cannibal (2013), in which Carlos (Antonio de la Torre), an upscale tailor in a quaint Spanish town, tries to keep his innate cruelty under the wraps, as he surreptitiously stores human meat in his freezer. In the first chilling sequence, Carlos causes a road accident, and drags his young female victim out into the snow. What follows – a naked body, its arms tied with rope and raised like a hunk of meat, the vulnerable delicacy of flesh and Carlos’s impassioned investigation of it – is a scene of at once great finesse and utter savagery.

The narrative in Cannibal bears marks of a Victorian love story, not unlike Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula (1897), in which sensuous Mina is possessed by the Count. Carlos too becomes smitten, with a fiery Romanian immigrant, Alexandra (Olimpia Melinte), a redhead who shatters his orderly routine. But with Alexandra’s disappearance, her despairing twin-sister, Nina (also Melinte), a more subdued ingénue beauty, brings on Carlos’s bouts of remorse. Alexandra/Nina can be read as the two sides of Mina, with Cuenca reveling in the richness of Stoker’s classic. A masterpiece of authorial conviction, Hannibal portrays Carlos’s condition so de-facto that it manages to evoke sympathy for a man whose desires are inhuman. Locked between his urge for subsistence, and his wish for self-restraint, Carlos is in inner torment. In a film whose tonalities are subtle and somber, Cuenca can make us flinch at most seamless gestures. Even more remarkable is the filmmaker’s daring linking of Carlos’s cannibalism to the Catholic faith, for as Carlos sits through a mass, during which worshippers are invited to consume Christ’s flesh, and to drink his blood, possession as oneness with one’s beloved takes on a whole new meaning.

By Jacob Lillemose

Lars von Trier

After being aggressively threatened at gunpoint by Smuck, who wanted to see her bra, Mimi goes to the toilet and vomits. In tears she exits the toilet and is met by Job, who encourages her to change her rugged way of life. It seems like there might be hope for Mimi, but suddenly she and Job are stopped by an alarming sound and a blinking red light placed in the corner of the room. They remain frozen for six beeps and blinks, then resume their conversation. But the situation has changed. Or rather Mimi and Job have changed. As if suffering from amnesia, Job walks out the door, saying that he cannot help her. Mimi says she is okay before sitting down on the bedside and nervously snorting a line of cocaine.

This schizophrenic situation was one of hundreds of live theatrical scenarios in Lars von Trier’s Psychomobile #1: The World Clock, realized by the Copenhagen exhibition space Kunstforeningen in 1996. The installation remains a little-known, one-off experiment in Von Trier’s artistic oeuvre. But nearly two decades after it attracted huge audiences to Kunstforeningen, its ‘psychosocial aesthetics’ still offer a challenge to contemporary art’s understanding of and engagement with the politics of human interaction.

Von Trier conceived the concept and set-up of Psychomobile #1 from 1994 to 1995. His idea was to create a radically heterogeneous cast of 53 characters – played by as many actors – who inhabited 19 differently designed rooms – such as ‘The Terminal’, ‘The Archive’ and ‘The Hippodrome’ – over the four floors of Kunstforeningen and in its outdoor courtyard. The three documents that dictated the core of his concept were all presented in the installation for the audience to read. Document 1 listed the age, gender, character traits, dreams and possessions of each of the 53 characters, as well as the physical characteristics of the 19 rooms. Document 2 outlined ‘Rules and Guidelines for the World Clock’, while Document 3 explained ‘The Logic of the World Clock and its Placement in Kunstforeningen’.

Still from Von Trier’s ‘The Idiots’ (1998)

From these three documents Von Trier, together with scriptwriter Niels Vørsel, developed a 270-page manual describing each character in detail, as well as stating his or her relation to each of the other 52 characters and the 19 rooms. The stage instructions for each of the actors were delegated to Morten Anfred, Von Trier’s co-director on his TV mini-series The Kingdom (1994–7). Using this manual, each of the actors had to develop his or her character in an ongoing process of improvisation. Though they had to stay true to the character as described in the general guidelines of the manual – in most cases a few sentences on their psychological make-up – they could also explore and elaborate on their characters. Moreover – again with the framework of the manual – they could move between the different rooms, which sometimes resulted in heavy traffic in the exhibition space.

The fox in Von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ (2009)

True to his shrewd interest in the intricate dynamics of rules and chaos, Von Trier added an extra challenge. In the entrance hall of the exhibition space, the audience was met with a live video feed of an anthill located in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Superimposed on top of the image were 19 small squares. Each square corresponded to one of the rooms in Kunstforeningen. Whenever four ants would pass through one of the squares, they would trigger a lamp in the corresponding room to change to one of four possible colours. The actors who happened to be in that room at the time would then freeze, waiting for the blinks and beeps to stop, before continuing the interaction in accordance with the altered state of mind that the manual ascribed to the new colour. In this way, the installation was actually dictated by a distant, non-human force, which not only incorporated a principle of endless variability but also involved an element of loss of control (Von Trier’s number-one fear, according to himself) that ushered in a reign of chaos (the true state of affairs in the world according to the talking fox in Von Trier’s 2009 film, Antichrist).

Still from Von Trier’s television series ‘The Kingdom’ (1994–7)

The installation ran for three hours a day, six days a week, over two months. During that time, it developed into a dramatic and intense experimental mix of soap opera, reality TV and absurd theatre, taking place around visitors who could walk freely among the rooms, frequently bypassing or bumping into the actors. Quite quickly the distinction between the fictive universe of the installation and ‘reality’ broke down for many of the actors. A schizophrenic collective state of mind ensued. Relationships of animosity and love continued ‘off-screen’ and fed back into the acting. One actor became so dedicated to his character that he refused to follow the rule that said he should die from a gunshot wound. Instead, he rose from the dead to go on a vengeful killing spree. Another actor concluded, ‘We had become insane, it was a good thing it ended when it did.’

Psychomobile #1 coincided with a general interest at the time from other directors, such as Peter Greenaway, in exploring the exhibition format as a way to expand cinema into a three-dimensional and non-linear experience. However, for Von Trier, the installation was not conceived as an attempt to predict the future of cinema but rather as a further investigation of the dark energies that he believes are at work in the dynamics of human interaction.

At the time Von Trier was preparing the second season of The Kingdom, which also depicts a multi-person universe caught in an evil spiral of malevolent intentions and destructive intrigues. His next film, The Idiots (1998), made two years later, tells the story of a collective of people that falls apart, haunted by inner demons as well as external circumstances. In that sense Psychomobile #1 is a direct continuation of the thematics underpinning his filmic oeuvre.

Still from Von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ (2013)

A less obvious but nevertheless significant reference, however, is the installation’s connection to so-called relational aesthetics, which characterized much contemporary art at the time. While many art works associated with this label nurtured the idea of open-minded, inclusive and democratic social spaces, Psychomobile #1 presented a nightmare of a social space, infested with aggressions, antagonisms and a vicious will to power. It debunked the modernist myths that social space can be designed and planned and that systems work according to laws of balance. As a perverted paranoid vision, it challenged the utopian promises of relational aesthetics with a view of society in a state of escalating psychosis beyond institutional repair by either government or art. To believe that things can be changed for the better is an illusion. That is just not the way the clockwork of the world ticks in Von Trier’s mind. As his recent film Nyphomaniac (2013) shows, he believes we are at the mercy of a complex chaos generated by the dark drives of human interaction.

Jacob Lillemose is a writer and curator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since the fall of 2013 he is chief curator at the research project Changing Disasters at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research.

By George Vasey

Hito Steyerl, Strike, 2010, AV Festival 14 installation view. Photograph: Colin Davison

The North Sea coast is often full of cargo vessels loaded with oil. These ships will wait patiently for the value of their contents to increase and then come ashore to take full advantage. It’s a curious strategy and one that illustrates the logic of modern capital, whereby raw material becomes something far more economically and socially complicated. This anecdote does much to sum up the concerns of this year’s AV festival.

Under the title ‘Extraction’, festival director Rebecca Shatwell has convened a number of strands exploring raw materials, their excavation and transformation, and global trade. Much of the work included is concerned with a thoroughly anthropogenic ecology. Surveying the relationship between industry and community, artists trace the movement of materials and interrogate the complex value systems that we attach to them. The theme feels timely, given the art world’s interest in materialism and the ecological concerns voiced in recent texts by writers such as Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour. Comparisons can also be made with the 2012 installment of Manifesta, ‘The Deep of the Modern’, held in Genk, Belgium, which similarly explored the coal industry.

Founded in 2003, the AV Festival is held biennially and has become the UK’s largest event dedicated to new media, film, and music. As the programme included over 36 film screenings and 10 concerts, my trip over the opening weekend allowed only a partial over-view, but it gave a sense of the festival’s scope and ambition. This year’s edition had international outlook, presenting many UK premieres and including projects from China, Japan and Eastern Europe, to name a few. On a domestic level, it was positive to see a shared energy between the region’s larger public galleries and smaller artist-run initiatives.

Walead Beshty, 20 inch Copper Boxes, installation view as part of ‘Metal’, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Courtesy: AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

Venues across Newcastle were given over to solo projects, while Sunderland’s Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) and Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (mima) presented two group exhibitions. Both shows, whilst full of good work, felt slightly hampered by constricted thematics. ‘Stone’ at the NGCA brought together 10 artists who working with this as both subject and material. In the gallery, Harun Farocki’s Transmission (2007) was exhibited near a selection of Vanessa Billy’s sculptures. Farocki’s film represents sites of memorial, exploring the symbolic use of stone and accumulated histories, which has little in common with Billy’s playful and understated clay over and above the titular theme. Better and more telling comparisons could be made across venues and throughout the programme. Dennis Oppenheim’s video Rocked Hand (1970) felt like a paradigmatic work. The artist created a jigsaw of pieces of stone on his hand, camouflaging his skin with the ground beneath. Enacting a type of symbolic burial, Oppenheim’s flesh became impounded by the earth. These opposing temporalities – deep ecological time and human endurance – were pervasive metaphors throughout the festival.

Vanessa Billy, installation view as part of ‘Stone’, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. Courtesy: AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

A corollary exhibition, ‘Metal’, at mima brought together work by Hito Steyerl, Simon Starling, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and Walead Beshty. Beshty’s 20-inch Copper (2009-ongoing) was representative in tracing the material histories of objects. For a number of years, the artist has been sending his work to exhibitions by FedEx. The sculptures, reminiscent of work by Donald Judd, evidence their transport by way of handprints and scuff marks on their surfaces. Beshty reminds us that behind the abstract figures and economic forecasts, trade remains an interaction between actual people and physical materials.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc,An Italian Film (Africa Addio), 2012, film still. Courtesy: the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris

Back in Newcastle, the Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui’s project The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle (2013-14), presented at The NewBridge Project, felt like another significant axis for the festival. The gallery was occupied by a large steel mesh borrowed from a local coal mine, which, as the artist explained to me, is used as a type of plug, closing the entrance to an old mine shaft. Looking like a rusted Sol LeWitt grid sculpture, the work felt like a full stop, closing a physical chapter of the city’s history and offering a symbolic foundation for its future.

The Laing Art Gallery provided two solo presentations by Jessica Warboys and Susan Stenger. Warboys’ installation felt anomalous in the context of other works. The artist’s signature large-scale paintings, created by staining raw canvas with pigment and seawater, offered a formal immediacy in contrast to most of the work seen elsewhere. If many of the projects in the festival explored a deep sedimented time, then Warboys’ canvases express a more urgent temporality.

Lara Almarcegui_,The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle_, 2014, installation view at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle. Courtesy:AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

Stenger’s Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland (2014) combined a sound installation alongside a geological map that served as its musical score. The map itself, made by mining engineer Nicholas Wood in 1830, was wondrous and full of rich detail. The use of local instruments such as fiddles, brass band and Highland pipes suggested an intimate and localised inscription of the monolithic.

Akio Suzuki’s exhibition at Globe Gallery, titled ‘na ge ka ke’ (to cast, to throw) was the Japanese artist’s first solo presentation in the UK. The show, alongside his performance at the Castle Keep on Saturday night, played on a similar fascination for the acoustic potential of the natural environment. Suzuki’s minimal performances involved affecting materials and then allowing the spectator to listen to the reverberations. Whether by banging two stones together, slowly scraping a sheet of cut metal with a pebble or playing a primitive instrument made from tubular perspex, Suzuki displays a keen sensitivity to the acoustic qualities of each material, eliciting an expansive range of sounds from austere means. His performance at the Castle Keep was the standout of the festival for many.

Susan Stenger, Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland, 2014, installation view at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.
Courtesy: AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

At The Mining Institute, Anna Molska presented The Weavers (2009). In the video, Molska transposes a 1892 play by German author Gerhart Hauptmann about a rebellion by poor textile workers to the contemporary Polish mining region of Silesia. Sat amongst the dilapidated remains of a once thriving industry, the miners seem utterly devoid of any revolutionary spirit. The location of the exhibition, which comes almost exactly 30 years after the miners’ strikes in the UK, only enhanced the melancholy.

The exhausted worker recurs in Wang Bing’s long-form documentary at Stephenson Works. Screened – with perceptible pertinence – in the building where the steam engine was invented, the 14-hour video Crude Oil (2008) follows a group of oil workers on a daily shift. My visit coincided with their break: slumped down in every available space of a cramped restroom, the workers attempt to grab whatever sleep they can. Upbeat pop music plays on a loop from a sound system and bunting is left over from a previous party. The disjunctive details bring our attention to the overworked body. Molska and Bing foreground the impact of economic precarity on community, as well as the narcotic dimension of our dependence on fossil fuel.

Thomas Sopwith, Sopwith Geological Models. Courtesy:AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

This year’s AV festival presented a number of distinct approaches to the natural environment and our place within it. While certain works expressed an ecological anxiety, others attempted to recalibrate a relationship between the body and nature. Expanded and diversified by a programme of screenings and events throughout March – including a week-end dedicated to post-colonial cinema and ‘Digging for Sound’, a series of newly commissioned sound works in response to the Northumberland landscape – the AV festival has cemented itself as an ambitious international platform on the festival circuit.

By Jörg Heiser

Martin Kippenberger in Venice 1996, photograph by Elfie Semotan

Ha, what a strange, and rewarding, experience to be in Venice in-between Biennales. No rush to that off-site pavilion I still need to see, no ‘what party tonight?’ small talk fatigue; just the usual ebb and flow of Europe-in-ten-days tourists and school trip kids. And, of course, that absurdly majestic outdoor museum of a city. I have to think of Elfie Semotan’s photographs of Martin Kippenberger from 1996, on their Venice honeymoon, also in-between Biennales: Martin with pigeons on San Marco, Martin proudly posing in front of the German Pavilion (the latter image he soon turned into a poster, tragically-ironically faking, a year before his death, the representational triumph that didn’t happen during his lifetime).

Not that between Biennales there was no modern and contemporary art on display, in fact I was here to see three newly opened exhibitions: an Irving Penn survey and the group show ‘Illusion of Light’ at Palazzo Grassi, and Wade Guyton at Punta della Dogana. Plus a Haris Epaminonda show that had already opened in March at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Sounded manageable, so I also intended to spend an extra day to follow up on a recent pet subject, if not slight obsession: the work of Lorenzo Lotto, the 16th century Venetian painter who, during his lifetime, was not remotely as successful as his contemporary Titian.

I’ll return to Lotto later, but first, the Grassi and Dogana shows. The Irving Penn retrospective, curated by Pierre Apraxine and Matthieu Humery, brings together 130 photographs taken between the 1940s and ‘80s. A typical case of you-thought-you-knew-it-but-you-don’t: it’s pretty hard not to have seen many of Penn’s iconic portraits in reproduction, whether it’s Truman Capote pressing his index finger against his temple thus sporting his precious cufflinks (1965) or Barnett Newman’s frivolous monocle and cigarette pose (1966); but these well-known images gain new quality, literally, with large print-size diapositives that are publically exhibited here for the first time, lit from behind light-box style in an otherwise unlit room.

Penn worked from these diapositives using the platinum-palladium print process, which produces the broadest possible tonal range in black and white photography. The peculiar thing about these huge ‘slides’ is that they are tonally neutral in this regard, with a rich palette of greys not yet pushed towards the starker contrasts Penn created in the darkroom to induce compositional drama and focus. In the print version of the famous portrait of Picasso with a hat (1957), for example, shown several rooms after the diapositives, the viewer’s attention is much more steered towards the left eye at the centre of the image. But that the diapositive version is lit from behind suddenly lends the image another, maybe even more striking quality: an uncanny ghostly presence, glowing and revealing every possible light angle and perspective at once, a kind of hologram effect without hologram: whether it’s the Californian hippie family with the dude holding the baby and the woman in the front looking straight at the camera; or cartoonist Saul Steinberg wearing a mask, a rectangular piece of cardboard with two dots for eyes covering everything but his nose.

These images of course were initially shot for reproduction in print magazines – mainly Vogue– and between art director Alexander Liberman and Penn, they were pushed gently towards marketable qualities of glamour and sophistication the magazine was highlighting in the post-war era (and that, by the way, still feel at home in a city where even the water taxis have a graceful 1960s design): whether hippie hair or monocle, both were modernist shorthand for fashionability. But in the exhibition it also becomes apparent how much Penn – unhappy with the cost-induced decline of print quality in the early 1960s – was using the medium as a vehicle to then produce prints the tonal brilliance of which would make them even more arresting. In the vintage Vogue copies on display, you see how one image might be used as a double page spread, while another would end up as a thumb-nail in a round-up. All the more Penn seemed to be keen to produce these high-quality prints as markers of his artistry, and therefore typically in limited edition; thus also the curious two straight, diagonal scratches he marked the diapositives with, to prevent more than twelve prints being made from them.

Strangely, put on display in this light-box way – which one might see as frivolous given that Penn, who died in 2009, probably never intended them to be used in this manner – these diapositives feel even more effective because of the two parallel scratches. At points they look as if string lines had been spanned across his studio. They become a signature, always placed in the lower third of the rectangular in a from-left-to-right-downward diagonal – like a compositional device to accentuate space and character, like the parapets used in Renaissance portraits. Sometimes they directly correspond to the composition, as in the case of a suit-wearing Marc Chagall reclining like a classical nude (1947), the lines doubling up his androgynous pose.

Maybe it’s against the background of these curious and smart effects of studio portrait photography that some of the more virtuoso kitsch elements of Penn’s work are thrown into relief; something the curators didn’t necessarily attempt to hide. His food still lives look yummy, and one doesn’t mind them being motivated by the requirements of a mid-20th-century highstreet magazine in the run-up to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Yet what makes them slightly pretentious is their appeals to art-historic aura courtesy of Dutch Golden Age. His 1950–51 portraits of a plumber, a motorcycle policeman or a news-vender have an air of egalitarian bonhomie to them, but invited to step in front of the grey studio backdrop otherwise reserved for the famous and beautiful, some of these ordinary blue-collar citizens strike a proud pose. The geared-up sewer cleaner, deep-sea diver and tree pruner look like warriors, and the train coach waiter flashes a winning smile – it’s as if they were all auditioning for a role. August Sander in a US, glamour shot casting mode. While these protagonists nevertheless radiate a spontaneous, come-on-step-in-and-show-off attitude, other work, both earlier and much later, treats protagonists as objects in a still life. In one room the constellation, purposefully hung that way, makes this almost achingly apparent: a 1992 ripe camembert colour photo; and across from it, a 1947 New York Ballet Theatre group arranged statically, next to a 1947 bucolic still life of tableware with grapes and eggs and ham leg, next to Three Rissani Women with Bread, a 1971 Morocco shot with the women’s faces hidden under layers of dark cloth. Whether you’re a cheese, or a bottle of wine, or a dancer, or in fact an ‘ethnic’ protagonist: for better or crypto-colonialist worse, Penn treated you ‘equally’ as objects to be arranged in the studio – unless, of course, you were Marlene Dietrich (1948) or Marcel Duchamp (1948) and insisted on your own expression and pose.

With a head brim-full of vibrant and problematic images like these, it’s hard to switch register to a show entitled ‘The Illusion of Light’ many of the works in which are austere exercises in minimalist or optical reduction. Doug Wheeler – a veteran of the Californian 1960s ‘light and space’ movement along with the likes of Larry Bell or Robert Irwin – dramatically transformed the square-shaped atrium of Palazzo Grassi: while two of the column-lined sides remained fully visible, the other two sides had been transformed, with carefully trimmed white boards and even more careful lighting technology, into a kind of horizonless whiteout zone, as if there was a gap in your vision, or as if you’re in a mute and calm snowstorm (D-N SF 12 PG VI, 2012).

Walking upstairs, one saw the backside of this vision machine, a simple modular system built to form a spherical structure. The Wheeler piece seemed like an almost too literal illustration of the show’s title, suggesting that one-type-fits-all-exhibitions are what a place like Venice demands, where outside the Biennale masses of tourists and a few locals are the only potential audience. But ultimately in a city where vistas of labyrinthic alleys, 15th century-design gondolas, and pink sunset skies reflected in murky waters are abound, it’s a bit of a non-starter to play on easy expectations raised by words like ‘illusion’ and ‘light’.

That said, much of what follows, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, could have just as well been in a show entitled ‘The Reality of Death’ rather than ‘The Illusion of Light’; as if she had consciously chosen to muffle the grim reaper with nice gift wrap. In other words, some of the best works in the show – and that’s probably not a bad thing in this case – seemed chosen with only the loosest connection to its supposed concern. Marcel Broodthaers conceived the installation Le Salon Noir in 1966, as an homage to his friend the late surrealist poet Marcel Lecomte who had died that year; a table and chair covered with black cloth, a coffin-shaped shelf leaning against the wall, lined with jars of white cotton and variations of black silhouettes of Lecomte’s face in profile. But amidst this Magrittean surrealist scenario (Lecomte and Magritte were close), Broodthaers added the decisive poetico-conceptual element: a white visiting card placed on the table, one of its corners dog-eared – a most gentle and understated way to promise to never forget the lost friend.

Amongst decent works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Troy Brauntuch, Latifah Echakch, or David Claerbout, each of whom had a room to themselves, Danh Vo’s Autoerotic Asphyxiation of 2010 (and first conceived for Artist Space in New York), was maybe the strongest: it transforms the Venetian parlour facing Canale Grande, replacing the museum wall panelling with a white ceiling-to-floor curtain embroidered with a flower pattern. That flower pattern is the cypher of a referential web connecting botanist and missionary Jean-André Soulié, who was killed in Tibet in 1905, with images and letters hung behind the curtains that, in short, circle around the idea of postcolonial trauma and death offset with glimpses of love and affection. The climax of this juxtaposition is the combination of a State of Delaware clinical instruction how to efficiently execute by hanging with an image of a gently smiling four-year old Danh Vo, put in a girl’s dress because nothing else was at hand when photographed as a member of his refugee family that had arrived in Denmark from Vietnam. Not much illusion here, and at least as much darkness as light.

In that sense there was a spiritual kinship here between Vo’s installation and an older work by General Idea, the series of paintings ‘White AIDS’ (1993) – white Robert-Indiana-style letters spelling out ‘AIDS’ three different combinations of green, blue and red hues so pale it’s almost white on white ground, hence charging the monastic Ad Reinhardt routine of the black monochrome-not-strictly-speaking-a-monochrome resulting in photographic irreproducibility with a white hint to the social irreplaceability of those who died of a big disease with a little name. And, I should mention that having dinner sitting with General Idea’s AA Bronson and his partner was surely one of the highlights of my trip; as good as a chat can get, which went from the wonders of Canadian wilderness to the banalities of Berlin life to the exchange of corresponding grim facts about my mother and grandma losing their home three times during theWWII bombings of Mainz, Germany, while AA’s father had been serving in the Canadian air force and bombed German cities. Finding common ground today despite still sometimes feels like a wonder, as is the fact that I learned that AA Bronson’s brother was in Canadian spandex rock veterans Loverboy– two major talents, if radically different, in one family!

Wade Guyton at Punta della Dogana now had to compete with all of these observations and ideas floating around my head, which is a little unfair given his consciously austere style. But then again playing a Don Judd version of Warhol in the 21st century is maybe the kind of approach that will always make you look unassailable and outside of your time but also a bit solipsistic and entrepreneurial precisely by way of that. In any case here in Venice it wasn’t the custom- made-to-wall-measure canvases that Guyton had installed at Petzel in New York and Capitain in Cologne, but the variation of a show Guyton had first done in 2011 at Vienna’s Secession entitled Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer (Drawings For A Small Room). The space is dominated by white-framed vitrines lined with red panels (which in size and format and the way they dominate the space owe a lot to Hanne Darboven’s vitrines of Rutherford / Nils Bohr Arbeit, from 1988–93), featuring forensic evidence of the visual vocabulary Guyton employs for his large scale works; pages from vintage catalogues and magazines overprinted with printer stripes.

This is not the place to go more thoroughly into the pros (for example, the parallels to electronic music in the way monotony and glitches are turned into virtues) and cons (the sheer calculatedness of that very monotony-glitch-scenario as an artist signature) of Guyton’s work, but let’s say it was a good contrast of pudicitia to the voluptas of going to Accademia the next day, to see Carpaccio’s St. Ursula Cycle (1490-95), and not least, Lorenzo Lotto’s Young Man In His Study (c. 1530); Caroline Bourgeois rightly pointed out in conversation that ultimately, the unflinching soberness of Giorgione’s Old Woman (1509) is stronger than Lotto’s romantic view of the man with rose pedals and a lizard in his studiolo. Nevertheless going on a tiny pilgrimage across Venice to visit three churches that house works by Lotto over the course of a long afternoon was worth it.

But before, on the way to my first Lotto church, I stopped by Haris Epaminonda’s show at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Her ‘Chapters IV’ (2014) may well be one of the most congenial responses so far to the late Carlo Scarpa’s dazzling architecture inserted into the historic palazzo in 1961–63. Scarpa combined a semipermeable late-modernist Zen aesthetics between salon and garden with the practical function of allowing water in rather than warding it off through an intricate system of small water channels. Epaminonda basically vamped up the already idiosyncratic angles and details that Scarpa had introduced by adding a minimalist black freestanding frame here, or a small metal bowl there, or an aquarium with two fish, thus creating a sort of Mondrianesque walk-in arrangement. My description may make it sound a bit too redundantly decorative, but that was not what it was, it rather had a sense of precious precision.

But back to Lorenzo Lotto. Some of Lotto’s most remarkable works are actually outside of Italy: Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum houses a number of his enigmatic, psychologically charged portraits, some of which are landscape format (quite unusual during their day), and there is a strange picture in London’s National Gallery, A Lady with a Drawing of Lucretia. That painting had puzzled me as it has been on three covers of books about Lotto alone; neither of these books offers a satisfying interpretation of its seemingly coded meaning. In any case the subject of Lucretia – the Roman lady who according to legend in 510 BC committed suicide after being raped by the Etruscan prince, an incident that sparked the overthrow of monarchy and the founding of the Roman republic – was normally taken as symbolic of a wife’s chastity. But the London portrait seems contradictory in this regard, and maybe the story is more complicated, if thinking of 16th century republican Venice as a place where a courtesan such as Veronica Franco became a celebrated poet meeting with royalties, and where since the 1520s the first clandestine Lutheran communities had formed before the Roman Inquisition struck back from 1542 on.

I still need to read and learn more about all these things, but I have to admit to a fascination that with these kinds of enigmatic Renaissance works there is no press release or artist statement channelling me all the sophisticated references; I like that I have to do the legwork of sourcing and reading often obscure but relevant scholarly work before I can entertain my own speculations. What, for example, does the seeming smirk in the face of an alms-giving secretary of Saint Antonino mean, as his colleague accepts a request letter while warding off another, reaching across a richly ornate carpet, with fat bags of money behind him, in the painting housed at Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Alms of St Antoninus, c. 1540–42)? Were the Dominicans who had commissioned Lotto happy with this seeming subtext of criticizing the church’s out-of-touch approach to wealth, its complementary policies of trickle-down charity and moneyed letters of indulgence, or am I reading too much into it?

While at Santi Giovanni special lighting illuminated the painting at intervals, the Madonna with Child and Saints (1546) at San Giacomo dell’Orio was, badly lit, hidden at the backend of the rope-cordoned altar – which in itself was flabbergasting: that a Renaissance master’s work would be housed so negligently (or nonchalantly?) as if the city was just too full of old masters to really bother.

Finally, at Santa Maria dei Carmini, the positively gaudy piousness of Saint Nicolas in Glory, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Lucia (1527-29) was to be beheld after throwing a one-Euro coin into a little box that would start a lighting interval. Which led me to ask four people for the fitting change before I found someone. Will one day someone spend a bitcoin to illuminate a Guyton? Or will some artist be commissioned by an oligarch – like Lotto was by the Dominicans (though probably not thereafter) – to do work about that oligarch’s ethics of finance? Returning to Venice during Biennales for years to come, we will see.

By Jörg Heiser

Martin Kippenberger in Venice 1996, photograph by Elfie Semotan

Ha, what a strange, and rewarding, experience to be in Venice in-between Biennales. No rush to that off-site pavilion I still need to see, no ‘what party tonight?’ small talk fatigue; just the usual ebb and flow of Europe-in-ten-days tourists and school trip kids. And, of course, that absurdly majestic outdoor museum of a city. I have to think of Elfie Semotan’s photographs of Martin Kippenberger from 1996, on their Venice honeymoon, also in-between Biennales: Martin with pigeons on San Marco, Martin proudly posing in front of the German Pavilion (the latter image he soon turned into a poster, tragically-ironically faking, a year before his death, the representational triumph that didn’t happen during his lifetime).

Not that between Biennales there was no modern and contemporary art on display, in fact I was here to see three newly opened exhibitions: an Irving Penn survey and the group show ‘Illusion of Light’ at Palazzo Grassi, and Wade Guyton at Punta della Dogana. Plus a Haris Epaminonda show that had already opened in March at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Sounded manageable, so I also intended to spend an extra day to follow up on a recent pet subject, if not slight obsession: the work of Lorenzo Lotto, the 16th century Venetian painter who, during his lifetime, was not remotely as successful as his contemporary Titian.

I’ll return to Lotto later, but first, the Grassi and Dogana shows. The Irving Penn retrospective, curated by Pierre Apraxine and Matthieu Humery, brings together 130 photographs taken between the 1940s and ‘80s. A typical case of you-thought-you-knew-it-but-you-don’t: it’s pretty hard not to have seen many of Penn’s iconic portraits in reproduction, whether it’s Truman Capote pressing his index finger against his temple thus sporting his precious cufflinks (1965) or Barnett Newman’s frivolous monocle and cigarette pose (1966); but these well-known images gain new quality, literally, with large print-size diapositives that are publically exhibited here for the first time, lit from behind light-box style in an otherwise unlit room.

Penn worked from these diapositives using the platinum-palladium print process, which produces the broadest possible tonal range in black and white photography. The peculiar thing about these huge ‘slides’ is that they are tonally neutral in this regard, with a rich palette of greys not yet pushed towards the starker contrasts Penn created in the darkroom to induce compositional drama and focus. In the print version of the famous portrait of Picasso with a hat (1957), for example, shown several rooms after the diapositives, the viewer’s attention is much more steered towards the left eye at the centre of the image. But that the diapositive version is lit from behind suddenly lends the image another, maybe even more striking quality: an uncanny ghostly presence, glowing and revealing every possible light angle and perspective at once, a kind of hologram effect without hologram: whether it’s the Californian hippie family with the dude holding the baby and the woman in the front looking straight at the camera; or cartoonist Saul Steinberg wearing a mask, a rectangular piece of cardboard with two dots for eyes covering everything but his nose.

These images of course were initially shot for reproduction in print magazines – mainly Vogue– and between art director Alexander Liberman and Penn, they were pushed gently towards marketable qualities of glamour and sophistication the magazine was highlighting in the post-war era (and that, by the way, still feel at home in a city where even the water taxis have a graceful 1960s design): whether hippie hair or monocle, both were modernist shorthand for fashionability. But in the exhibition it also becomes apparent how much Penn – unhappy with the cost-induced decline of print quality in the early 1960s – was using the medium as a vehicle to then produce prints the tonal brilliance of which would make them even more arresting. In the vintage Vogue copies on display, you see how one image might be used as a double page spread, while another would end up as a thumb-nail in a round-up. All the more Penn seemed to be keen to produce these high-quality prints as markers of his artistry, and therefore typically in limited edition; thus also the curious two straight, diagonal scratches he marked the diapositives with, to prevent more than twelve prints being made from them.

Strangely, put on display in this light-box way – which one might see as frivolous given that Penn, who died in 2009, probably never intended them to be used in this manner – these diapositives feel even more effective because of the two parallel scratches. At points they look as if string lines had been spanned across his studio. They become a signature, always placed in the lower third of the rectangular in a from-left-to-right-downward diagonal – like a compositional device to accentuate space and character, like the parapets used in Renaissance portraits. Sometimes they directly correspond to the composition, as in the case of a suit-wearing Marc Chagall reclining like a classical nude (1947), the lines doubling up his androgynous pose.

Maybe it’s against the background of these curious and smart effects of studio portrait photography that some of the more virtuoso kitsch elements of Penn’s work are thrown into relief; something the curators didn’t necessarily attempt to hide. His food still lives look yummy, and one doesn’t mind them being motivated by the requirements of a mid-20th-century highstreet magazine in the run-up to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Yet what makes them slightly pretentious is their appeals to art-historic aura courtesy of Dutch Golden Age. His 1950–51 portraits of a plumber, a motorcycle policeman or a news-vender have an air of egalitarian bonhomie to them, but invited to step in front of the grey studio backdrop otherwise reserved for the famous and beautiful, some of these ordinary blue-collar citizens strike a proud pose. The geared-up sewer cleaner, deep-sea diver and tree pruner look like warriors, and the train coach waiter flashes a winning smile – it’s as if they were all auditioning for a role. August Sander in a US, glamour shot casting mode. While these protagonists nevertheless radiate a spontaneous, come-on-step-in-and-show-off attitude, other work, both earlier and much later, treats protagonists as objects in a still life. In one room the constellation, purposefully hung that way, makes this almost achingly apparent: a 1992 ripe camembert colour photo; and across from it, a 1947 New York Ballet Theatre group arranged statically, next to a 1947 bucolic still life of tableware with grapes and eggs and ham leg, next to Three Rissani Women with Bread, a 1971 Morocco shot with the women’s faces hidden under layers of dark cloth. Whether you’re a cheese, or a bottle of wine, or a dancer, or in fact an ‘ethnic’ protagonist: for better or crypto-colonialist worse, Penn treated you ‘equally’ as objects to be arranged in the studio – unless, of course, you were Marlene Dietrich (1948) or Marcel Duchamp (1948) and insisted on your own expression and pose.

With a head brim-full of vibrant and problematic images like these, it’s hard to switch register to a show entitled ‘The Illusion of Light’ many of the works in which are austere exercises in minimalist or optical reduction. Doug Wheeler – a veteran of the Californian 1960s ‘light and space’ movement along with the likes of Larry Bell or Robert Irwin – dramatically transformed the square-shaped atrium of Palazzo Grassi: while two of the column-lined sides remained fully visible, the other two sides had been transformed, with carefully trimmed white boards and even more careful lighting technology, into a kind of horizonless whiteout zone, as if there was a gap in your vision, or as if you’re in a mute and calm snowstorm (D-N SF 12 PG VI, 2012).

Walking upstairs, one saw the backside of this vision machine, a simple modular system built to form a spherical structure. The Wheeler piece seemed like an almost too literal illustration of the show’s title, suggesting that one-type-fits-all-exhibitions are what a place like Venice demands, where outside the Biennale masses of tourists and a few locals are the only potential audience. But ultimately in a city where vistas of labyrinthic alleys, 15th century-design gondolas, and pink sunset skies reflected in murky waters are abound, it’s a bit of a non-starter to play on easy expectations raised by words like ‘illusion’ and ‘light’.

That said, much of what follows, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, could have just as well been in a show entitled ‘The Reality of Death’ rather than ‘The Illusion of Light’; as if she had consciously chosen to muffle the grim reaper with nice gift wrap. In other words, some of the best works in the show – and that’s probably not a bad thing in this case – seemed chosen with only the loosest connection to its supposed concern. Marcel Broodthaers conceived the installation Le Salon Noir in 1966, as an homage to his friend the late surrealist poet Marcel Lecomte who had died that year; a table and chair covered with black cloth, a coffin-shaped shelf leaning against the wall, lined with jars of white cotton and variations of black silhouettes of Lecomte’s face in profile. But amidst this Magrittean surrealist scenario (Lecomte and Magritte were close), Broodthaers added the decisive poetico-conceptual element: a white visiting card placed on the table, one of its corners dog-eared – a most gentle and understated way to promise to never forget the lost friend.

Amongst decent works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Troy Brauntuch, Latifah Echakch, or David Claerbout, each of whom had a room to themselves, Danh Vo’s Autoerotic Asphyxiation of 2010 (and first conceived for Artist Space in New York), was maybe the strongest: it transforms the Venetian parlour facing Canale Grande, replacing the museum wall panelling with a white ceiling-to-floor curtain embroidered with a flower pattern. That flower pattern is the cypher of a referential web connecting botanist and missionary Jean-André Soulié, who was killed in Tibet in 1905, with images and letters hung behind the curtains that, in short, circle around the idea of postcolonial trauma and death offset with glimpses of love and affection. The climax of this juxtaposition is the combination of a State of Delaware clinical instruction how to efficiently execute by hanging with an image of a gently smiling four-year old Danh Vo, put in a girl’s dress because nothing else was at hand when photographed as a member of his refugee family that had arrived in Denmark from Vietnam. Not much illusion here, and at least as much darkness as light.

In that sense there was a spiritual kinship here between Vo’s installation and an older work by General Idea, the series of paintings ‘White AIDS’ (1993) – white Robert-Indiana-style letters spelling out ‘AIDS’ three different combinations of green, blue and red hues so pale it’s almost white on white ground, hence charging the monastic Ad Reinhardt routine of the black monochrome-not-strictly-speaking-a-monochrome resulting in photographic irreproducibility with a white hint to the social irreplaceability of those who died of a big disease with a little name. And, I should mention that having dinner sitting with General Idea’s AA Bronson and his partner was surely one of the highlights of my trip; as good as a chat can get, which went from the wonders of Canadian wilderness to the banalities of Berlin life to the exchange of corresponding grim facts about my mother and grandma losing their home three times during theWWII bombings of Mainz, Germany, while AA’s father had been serving in the Canadian air force and bombed German cities. Finding common ground today despite still sometimes feels like a wonder, as is the fact that I learned that AA Bronson’s brother was in Canadian spandex rock veterans Loverboy– two major talents, if radically different, in one family!

Wade Guyton at Punta della Dogana now had to compete with all of these observations and ideas floating around my head, which is a little unfair given his consciously austere style. But then again playing a Don Judd version of Warhol in the 21st century is maybe the kind of approach that will always make you look unassailable and outside of your time but also a bit solipsistic and entrepreneurial precisely by way of that. In any case here in Venice it wasn’t the custom- made-to-wall-measure canvases that Guyton had installed at Petzel in New York and Capitain in Cologne, but the variation of a show Guyton had first done in 2011 at Vienna’s Secession entitled Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer (Drawings For A Small Room). The space is dominated by white-framed vitrines lined with red panels (which in size and format and the way they dominate the space owe a lot to Hanne Darboven’s vitrines of Rutherford / Nils Bohr Arbeit, from 1988–93), featuring forensic evidence of the visual vocabulary Guyton employs for his large scale works; pages from vintage catalogues and magazines overprinted with printer stripes.

This is not the place to go more thoroughly into the pros (for example, the parallels to electronic music in the way monotony and glitches are turned into virtues) and cons (the sheer calculatedness of that very monotony-glitch-scenario as an artist signature) of Guyton’s work, but let’s say it was a good contrast of pudicitia to the voluptas of going to Accademia the next day, to see Carpaccio’s St. Ursula Cycle (1490-95), and not least, Lorenzo Lotto’s Young Man In His Study (c. 1530); Caroline Bourgeois rightly pointed out in conversation that ultimately, the unflinching soberness of Giorgione’s Old Woman (1509) is stronger than Lotto’s romantic view of the man with rose pedals and a lizard in his studiolo. Nevertheless going on a tiny pilgrimage across Venice to visit three churches that house works by Lotto over the course of a long afternoon was worth it.

But before, on the way to my first Lotto church, I stopped by Haris Epaminonda’s show at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Her ‘Chapters IV’ (2014) may well be one of the most congenial responses so far to the late Carlo Scarpa’s dazzling architecture inserted into the historic palazzo in 1961–63. Scarpa combined a semipermeable late-modernist Zen aesthetics between salon and garden with the practical function of allowing water in rather than warding it off through an intricate system of small water channels. Epaminonda basically vamped up the already idiosyncratic angles and details that Scarpa had introduced by adding a minimalist black freestanding frame here, or a small metal bowl there, or an aquarium with two fish, thus creating a sort of Mondrianesque walk-in arrangement. My description may make it sound a bit too redundantly decorative, but that was not what it was, it rather had a sense of precious precision.

But back to Lorenzo Lotto. Some of Lotto’s most remarkable works are actually outside of Italy: Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum houses a number of his enigmatic, psychologically charged portraits, some of which are landscape format (quite unusual during their day), and there is a strange picture in London’s National Gallery, A Lady with a Drawing of Lucretia. That painting had puzzled me as it has been on three covers of books about Lotto alone; neither of these books offers a satisfying interpretation of its seemingly coded meaning. In any case the subject of Lucretia – the Roman lady who according to legend in 510 BC committed suicide after being raped by the Etruscan prince, an incident that sparked the overthrow of monarchy and the founding of the Roman republic – was normally taken as symbolic of a wife’s chastity. But the London portrait seems contradictory in this regard, and maybe the story is more complicated, if thinking of 16th century republican Venice as a place where a courtesan such as Veronica Franco became a celebrated poet meeting with royalties, and where since the 1520s the first clandestine Lutheran communities had formed before the Roman Inquisition struck back from 1542 on.

I still need to read and learn more about all these things, but I have to admit to a fascination that with these kinds of enigmatic Renaissance works there is no press release or artist statement channelling me all the sophisticated references; I like that I have to do the legwork of sourcing and reading often obscure but relevant scholarly work before I can entertain my own speculations. What, for example, does the seeming smirk in the face of an alms-giving secretary of Saint Antonino mean, as his colleague accepts a request letter while warding off another, reaching across a richly ornate carpet, with fat bags of money behind him, in the painting housed at Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Alms of St Antoninus, c. 1540–42)? Were the Dominicans who had commissioned Lotto happy with this seeming subtext of criticizing the church’s out-of-touch approach to wealth, its complementary policies of trickle-down charity and moneyed letters of indulgence, or am I reading too much into it?

While at Santi Giovanni special lighting illuminated the painting at intervals, the Madonna with Child and Saints (1546) at San Giacomo dell’Orio was, badly lit, hidden at the backend of the rope-cordoned altar – which in itself was flabbergasting: that a Renaissance master’s work would be housed so negligently (or nonchalantly?) as if the city was just too full of old masters to really bother.

Finally, at Santa Maria dei Carmini, the positively gaudy piousness of Saint Nicolas in Glory, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Lucia (1527-29) was to be beheld after throwing a one-Euro coin into a little box that would start a lighting interval. Which led me to ask four people for the fitting change before I found someone. Will one day someone spend a bitcoin to illuminate a Guyton? Or will some artist be commissioned by an oligarch – like Lotto was by the Dominicans (though probably not thereafter) – to do work about that oligarch’s ethics of finance? Returning to Venice during Biennales for years to come, we will see.

By Philip Brophy

Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises (2013), film still (all images courtesy: StudioCanal)

The most embarrassing moment in Peter Carey’s memoir Wrong About Japan (2005) has to be when he naively queries a master sword maker about the ethics of conferring sublime artistry in the crafting of an instrument of death. Carey mangles it in great fashion, though I’m certain many readers would feel he struck a bold intervention into Japan’s supposed disregard of post-war ethics. I had forgotten about Wrong About Japan until the release of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013).

Much has been made of this film being septuagenarian Miyazaki’s swan song, but it’s more like a political phoenix arising from the ashes of 21st-century image-making – the very same epoch which has made such grand claims for how art, contemporaneity and politics are not only inseparable but also a requisite for engaging in critical discussion of their conjoined outcomes. The Wind Rises is superficially a poetic biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the famed aeronautical engineer of the Japanese ‘Zero’ air fighter. The Zero became an icon of the Japanese military during WWII and has remained so since. To those of us outside of Japan, it’s simply the Japanese equivalent of the German Messerschmitt, the American B-52 or the British Spitfire. But to those inside Japan, the Zero embodies the devastating transition the Japanese national psyche underwent as the once-valiant Zero was reassigned by the military to dive-bomb the US battle ships. The Zero effectively became an aerial suicide machine, a flying incendiary tomb, a vessel of self-destruction, guided by ‘divine wind’ (the transliteral meaning of kamikaze).

None of this is depicted or even mentioned in The Wind Rises. But that does not mean it isn’t there. Just as the master sword maker deftly fends Carey’s fumbling attempts to ‘truth-trip’ him into realising his role as oriental death master, Miyazaki’s nuanced telling of Jiro’s struggle to design the Zero coalesce into a quiet directive on how one must accept all that is entailed, implied and determined by pursuing visionary beauty with fatal consequences. Throughout the story, Jiro – an engineer, not an artist – unswervingly follows a very non-European line of aesthetic enquiry predicated on a stoic dislocation from all socio-political causality. He is thus a proxy for Miyazaki, who is widely regarded as an iconoclast in the modern history of Japanese animation and its role in voicing traditional precepts of image-making, storytelling and social critique (via the astounding films he has made for Studio Ghibli across nearly three decades).

There’s a gorgeously stifling moment in the film (out of many) which illustrates this. Jiro stands surveying the incinerated remains of an aircraft prototype following its crash during a test-run. The plane is laid out like an aerial-perspective version of those ‘exploded diagrams’ that accompany model airplane kits. I immediately thought of two things. The first was the Japanese illustrator Shigeru Komatsuzaki who painted those kits’ box covers in lurid hyperrealist watercolours. A cult figure for baby-boomer Japan (he was included in Murakami Takashi’s manifesto exhibition ‘Little Boy’ in 1995), Komatsuzaki created a psychic panorama of para-right wartime glory for Japanese baby-boomers who thrilled to the spectacle of war. Japanese cinema rarely, if at all, exploded its wartime exploits on the big screen, yet Komatsuzaki’s intense illustrations are uncannily similar to the nationalist ‘War Record’ paintings commissioned by the Japanese military during wartime (a collection of which only this century started to be publicly re-exhibited in small doses by the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). In stark contrast to this populist icon of imagineered military might, Miyazaki’s flattened panorama of actual plane parts deconstructs the thrill of piecing together model planes designed to eroticise the fatal allure of wartime glories – especially those involving the hi-octane death drive of the kamikaze bombers.

The second image that flashed in my mind is a work lionized by the European art world: ‘Melancholia’, the first of a series of wonky simulacra of WWII German aircraft in lead, produced by Anselm Keifer in the early ’90s. While this is not the place to interrogate the value of post-1980s German contemporary art predicated on stoic ‘re-politicizations’ for the post-war generation’s critique of the ethics of their war-fuelled parent generation, I’m at pains to forward_ The Wind Rises_’ superior complexity in exploring the same. I comparatively perceive ‘Melancholia’ and its post-Beuysian ilk to be metonyms of blunt material corollary. The palpable heaviness of the lead airplane (and much of the installed work and Keifer and Joseph Beuys are notably burdened by their own sculptural weight) mirrors the obviousness of the project’s conceptual bent. How could I not be confronted by the work’s forced rhetoric when standing in front of its passive-aggressive gauntlet, symbolically truth-tripping me like Peter Carey, and placing me on the stand at Nuremberg within the grandiose settings of contemporary art museums?

Unlike dominant tacit assumptions operating within the ethical and political Venn diagrams of contemporary art, _The Wind Rises_’ ideological voicing is not blared by its leaden construction, but rather muted by the film’s pictorial skein. Miyazaki’s ‘politics of aestheticism’ is articulated through an engineer’s sense of beauty in the Zero’s precision design, assigning the film’s message to be embedded in visuals that betray their very surface. To wit, the film looks, sounds and feels archaic, conservative, olde world: any card-carrying contemporary artist/critic would likely find this animation an execrable melodrama illustrated by particularly conservative modes of pastoralism. Yet, from its absence of standard tropes of politicization in the arts, the film’s significance is illuminated at a meta-poetic level. The Wind Rises shines light on the indelible problematics of segregating politics from aesthetics – which is the prime modus operandi of modern and contemporary art which, impelled to construct something of ‘beauty’, consequently feels it is ‘informed’ and ‘compelled to inform’ us about the world into which those constructs of beauty are directed.

What I’m addressing here is not ideological content, or an artist’s declaration of politics, but the mode of address by which an art literate audience accepts discursive reflections on art’s political impulses. Declaration is the province of T-shirts worn by radicals and titled monuments for politicians: their materiality becomes a vehicular form of construction, deliberately constrained by art-literate channels shaped and maintained by consensual linguistic procedure. Miyazaki’s ‘mode of address’ – like so much of post-war Japanese culture, art-literate or not – does not flow through these channels. The Wind Rises not once stands at a vantage to even imagine how politics and aesthetics could be anything but molecularly fused.

By Ellen Mara De Wachter

Kieren Reed, 'From the Ground Up, (A) Social Building', 2014. All photographs: Ellen Mara De Wachter

‘We haven’t rehearsed this. Not because we don’t care; because we care very much.’ On a sunny beach in Whitstable, Kent, Fiona James began a brief introduction to her work ‘The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable’ (2014) with these words. After telling us a bit about what would happen during the next 45 minutes, she handed the microphone over to an acolyte who explained that she had three minutes to locate as many casualties as possible. What followed was part performance, part sport and heavily fuelled by adrenaline. Five female ‘contestants’ were acting out a series of ‘incidents’, or lifesaving simulations. They took turns to lead a rescue mission, going through the bare bones of their scenario and then stripping down to swimsuits and shoes, while narrating the clues they could see and the dangers they concealed, and narrowly avoiding panic. ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby? Where’s the BABY??’ When James blew the whistle, the leader swapped with one of her team members who dealt with a wholly different scenario. Some incidents involved dogs, some floating plastic bags, and some purple smoke. In the performance of their imagined emergencies, they deployed silver foil and orange plastic sheeting whose colour popped against the blue sky. They used tent poles to improvise a range of sculptural signals and beacons, and disposable cameras to document their efforts. Each rescuer delivered a real-time monologue of her critical and analytical processes, describing and interpreting what she ‘saw’. The visually arresting shapes made by the performers and the excitement of their speech coalesced into a moment verging on absurdist theatre when one of the rescuers, now sheathed in dazzling silver foil and pillows inflated with smoke from a flare, walked slowly up the shore while belting out The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’. James’s work, with its foundation in the analytically rigorous sport of lifesaving offered a fitting metaphor to the esoteric sport of biennale visiting.

Fiona James, ‘The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable’, 2014

Scheduled over three consecutive weekends between May 31 and June 15 – with some video installations running on weekdays too – the biennale is concentrated along the Whitstable shore, with its temporary headquarters next to the Royal Native Oyster Stores, home of the town’s famous delicacy. The HQ is sited in Kieren Reed’s From the Ground Up, (A) Social Building, a 4-metre tall plywood A-frame building covered in Tyvek. A round window at the top of the sea-facing wall is placed so that red light streams into the structure at sunset. It operates as the information point for the biennale, and is home to a programme of talks and events organised by Collaborative Research Group, led by artist Toby Huddlestone. The biennale doesn’t have a permanent office in Whitstable but instead in nearby Canterbury – a testament to increasing property prices in the area and also to the close relationship between the two towns. In the 1980s, several local art colleges were amalgamated into the Kent Institute of Art and Design (now the University for the Creative Arts), and students unable to afford the high rents in Canterbury moved to Whitstable, setting up an artistic community in what was at the time a modest working-class seaside town. The biennale grew out of a local arts festival set up in the 1990s and has been under the directorship of Sue Jones, previously the director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, since 2006.

Laura Wilson, ‘Black Top’ 2014

Unsurprisingly, many artists use the seaside backdrop and industrial context as inspiration for new works, for example: Laura Wilson’s Black Top (2014), a video and month-long performance at the aggregates factory that still operates on the east side of Whitstable harbour. Wilson explained to me that her durational performance consists of ‘A shovel driver called Andy on a loading shovel adding to a pile of asphalt every day until the end of the biennale’. In her video, extravagant quantities of gravel used by the factory to make the asphalt cascade from the mechanical hand of a digger in a graceful gesture. The prosaic materials Wilson filmed seem almost alive. Her camera revels in the sensual waves of grit and sand, capturing their silky ripples and their watery hiss as they hit the ground. The video was installed in a shipping container on the harbourside, and the bodies populating this claustrophobic space suddenly brought to mind the more sobering aspects of shipping including the economically-motivated transportation of live bodies and goods across oceans.

Wilson’s work was not alone in lending lifelike qualities to inanimate substances. Across town at St Peter’s Church Hall, the ARKA Group’s Beginnings (2012) invited three people at a time to sit down with headphones, don a blackout hood and hold a fragment of meteorite while a voice led them through a narrative in which they became the meteorite coming into being. ‘You feel each finger that pointed at you as you tore across the sky’, says the stirring voice of Dr George Wake, a biodiesel expert and meteorite collector, although he may as well be a professional voiceover artist. The sound quality and headphones were excellent, the chair was comfortable, and the hood completely impermeable to light – these important details were notable for having been scrupulously attended to. The meteorite fragment, about the size of a tangerine, felt very heavy and warm in my hands. While the work did feel a little like a tribute to the currently trending Object Oriented Ontology, or more settled notions of Deleuzian ‘becoming’, it did offer me an experience that was entirely mine; a private moment of escapism a world away from the usual biennale bunfight.

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, ‘Das Hund & The Pilgrim Shells’, 2014

The opening weekend of the biennale featured several one-off performances, including The Sorrowful and Immaculate Fall of One Hundred Grazing Sheep (2014) an enigmatic work-for-one by Bronwen Buckeridge for which I was given secret instructions that took me to the private quarters of a Whitstable resident, through her bedroom and into her library with a view. There I listened to a 10-minute audio recording of an ambiguous conversation between a young woman and an elderly man, apparently discussing hidden architectures or archaeological finds. My search for a specific meaning in the work was unfruitful, but I felt vindicated when the man explained that, ‘What you can’t see or can’t find is the bit that interests me’. The best part of the work was the way in which the audio recording operated as a pretext to indulge in the voyeuristic frisson of observing how a stranger had composed her living space.

Saturday evening began with a gig by Das Hund & The Pilgrim Shells, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski’s band, which, for this performance, benefited from the addition of three professional guitarists. The duo had festooned the harbourmaster’s boatshed, a cavernous and odoriferous space, with an array of colourful plaster masks or ‘pilgrim shells’, large paintings on silver Cellotex boards and flickering video projections made during a residency in Whitstable preceding the biennale. Expanding on the maritime theme of their surroundings, the performers wore costumes made of beachcombed fragments of rubber tyres. Against the group’s idiosyncratic harmonies and layered guitars nostalgic of 1990s American garage bands, Levack’s declamatory style on vocals came close to spoken word at times. He intoned what felt like a cautionary tale, which culminated with an arresting falsetto warning about ‘New York gallery rooms’, summing up the unconventional tone of their gritty art-music crossover performance.

Louisa Fairclough, ‘Compositions for a Low Tide’, 2014

Along the coast to the east of the harbour, Louisa Fairclough’s Compositions for a Low Tide (2014) made use of The Street, a half-mile long shingle spit that extends into the sea at a right angle to the beach. At twilight, choirboys from Rochester Cathedral surrounded the compact group of people who had booked to take part in the performance, and led a procession to the end of The Street, singing phrases taken from a notebook belonging to the artist’s deceased sister. ‘Oh god’; ‘Can people see me swallowing’: the boys sang these simple phrases over and over again. At times, and given the knowledge of the words’ source, their repetition felt utterly sad. At others, the absurdity of an obsessive-compulsive rehashing of such a trivial concern snapped back with hilarity. This swinging of emotions was all the more affecting given the performance’s time – neither day nor night – and place on neither land nor sea.

With six performances and nine installations, the first weekend of the biennale was small enough to see in one long day. Although most performances are one-offs, some works are ongoing, such as John Walter’s Turn My Oyster Up (2014), a beach hut to the west of the town centre, which will extend the hospitality of the artist for the duration of the festival. Walter performs the character Nanoneon, serving visitors gin and tonics, local gypsy tarts and a healthy dose of Polari, the gay slang popularised by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick in the 1960s BBC Radio 4 show ‘Round the Horne’. While Nanoneon prepares the drinks, his video sidekicks Bummy Pete and Goat Guy – names borrowed from pseudonyms Walter discovered in online gay chat rooms – exchange Polari jibes across the counter. The installation is a superabundance of bright wallpaper, neon light and chattering videos, all of which conjures up a hysterical nightclub or playroom atmosphere. Walter’s costume is adorned with such an array of brightly coloured lumps, bumps and soft protuberances that you have to see it to believe it. And many have: visitors queued up to be admitted a handful at a time for an intimate audience with their host.

John Walter, ‘Turn My Oyster Up’, 2014

The Whitstable Biennale has kept projects to a manageable size, enabling visitors to have a rare and valuable direct access to artists and performers. The proliferation of biennials through the 1990s and 2000s has given rise to an international exhibition circuit whose schedule and cost can be gruelling for those who faithfully attend openings in cities across the globe. It has become hard to avoid ‘biennial fatigue’. The success of a relatively small endeavour on the Kentish coast, in particular its ability to offer focused and personal encounters with art and artists, made it clear that there are increasingly sophisticated local art events to match the international ones.

By Laura McLean-Ferris

Paul Kneale, Rotherhithe / Chanel, 2014 stolen neon sign, perspex, chain, transformer. Courtesy: the artist and Evelyn Yard, London

Cashmere, silk, velvet. This is what luxury has traditionally felt like. Or so we are told by advertising. Billboards, magazine spreads and moving images everywhere tell us how it feels: such soft touches are implied even when seducing us to purchase skin creams, chocolate, or fabric conditioner. As a city, Paris is a historic home for luxury, with a rich tradition of interpretative writing on the moral and societal implications of ostentation and finery, from Jean Jacques Rousseau (‘luxury corrupts at the same time the rich person and the poor one, one by the possession the other by covetousness’) to Thomas Picketty (in periods of great inequality ‘the past tends to devour the future’). In our present moment, in which the luxury market is enjoying a crescendo, the city is the seat of power for many luxury brands, and these ‘houses’ ever-increasingly make their influence on art felt through patronage, collections, museums, institutions and so on.

A brief survey of some luxury brands with prominent art foundations and collections: LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) owners of these eponymous brands as well as Céline, Marc Jacobs and Givenchy, directed by the businessman and art collector Bernard Arnault, is on the brink of opening a grand new museum in the Bois de Boulogne. The flamboyant, Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis-Vuitton pour la création (The Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation) resembles a vast glass flower unfurling its petals and will, after eight years of construction, finally open to the public later this year. Kering, the company that owns Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney and others, is, in turn, owned by Francois Pinault and his family, who also own Christie’s auction house. Pinault’s vast contemporary art collection, as is well known, is held in Venice after Parisian development laws stumped his plans to build a foundation on Ile de Seguin. The Fondation Cartier begins a yearlong celebration this month, in honor of its 30th anniversary. Chanel paid for exhibition space at Palais de Tokyo last year, in order to stage a cream-plush-carpeted exhibition based around its star fragrance Chanel No. 5, whilst Pernod-Ricard’s Fondation d’Enterpirse Ricard, which is close to the Tuilleries, has been operating for more than a decade, administering a significant prize to a young artists each year.

At a moment in which young artists seem more interested than ever in using branding and marketing strategies as a material in their work, in Paris it is palpable that luxury brands prop up artists, public institutions and galleries. This spring I spent some time thinking about current conceptions of luxury at the home of another new foundation in Paris’s Marais – the Fondation Galleries Lafayette – which was established last year by Guillaume Houzé, the young directeur de l’image et du mécénat (director of the brand and sponsorship) of the Galeries Lafayette group, the famed high-end French department stores. The site for this new art foundation is a block of old offices that were once occupied by administrators for BHV, another department store owned by the group a couple of doors down, which is to be refurbished by Rem Koolhas, and will open to the public in 2016. Even a refurbishment of a historic building is a tricky feat in the face of Paris’s protective planning restrictions, though one always has to concede that natural light is a great luxury for a capital city, which Parisians are granted by same laws that prevent a proliferation of skyscrapers that would block it out.

But before that refurbishment, Fondation Galleries Lafayette has been running a pre-emptive programme, Lafayette Anticipation, which was conceived by in-house curator Francois Quintin. The raw building and abandoned offices are currently being used as residency studios for artists. Several of the office studios are meanly carpeted rooms resembling the box rooms of a private detective agency, whilst shared space, including a kitchen and long lime-green table, had something of a youth club feel to it. And yet, all this began to seem, especially in a city notorious for its tiny spaces and high rents, like a great form of luxury, as groups of artists were granted studios, time, budgets and assistance without the necessary pressure of shows. Artists-in-residence throughout the spring included Will Benedict, Mimosa Echard, Eloide Seguin and Cally Spooner, many of which have emphasized production and performance rather than exhibition.

In February Simon Fujiwara gave a performance in the largest studio at Fondation Galleries Lafayette, where he had been producing a monumental sculpture for his nearby exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. The sculpture is a copy of an architectural fragment of the iconic nearby museum, inspired by a rumor that the Pompidou’s original director Pontus Hulten made plans for an exact replica of the building to be fabricated. Fujiwara’s sculpture, however, like a layercake, was fabricated with materials such as the swampy earth and weeds of the Marais area and long-stem roses like those adorning the tables of Le Georges, the restaurant on the roof of the museum. Fujiwara’s performance was a series of spoken footnotes which explicated his choice of materials, and much pomp was in play when roads were closed and traffic was stopped as musicians led a solemn procession of the sculptures from Fujiwara’s studio to the Pompidou a few metres away. Yet the relationship between the producing and performing foundation and the exhibiting museum was conspicuous.

However, though many of the ‘Anticipation projects’ appeared to have ample budgets and support, most privileged a ‘lab’ form for experimentation in which workshopping and performance has been emphasised. The choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, for example, was able to invite a group of collaborators for her project Emanticipation un laboratoire including the young dancer Volmir Cordeiro and artist Richard John Jones to workshop questions around the nature of labour with dancers and philosophers. In April the fashion historian and magazine editor Anja Cronberg Aronowsky held a salon inviting designers to explore the narrative elements to their work through storytelling. As Quintin describes it, because the institution is still in a period of ‘thinking more precisely about what the foundation will be, and what the philosophy of it will be, we can invite groups of artists to work here and that will help to define our ideas about production and participation.’

Inviting an artist-run space to inhabit a nascent institution is one way to define an organization around artist practice. In February, Quintin invited artists Paul Kneale and Raphael Hefti to create a project based around Library +, a space that they ran with Megan Rooney in disused library in Rotherhithe, London until they were evicted. This now homeless organization and a selection of members from its wider network were invited to come and spend time in Paris workshopping Hefti and Kneale’s chosen topic ‘Pleasure Principles’, an investigation of modern pleasure, which they returned to showcase with a public progamme in over a weekend in March, together with an even larger network of invited writers, artists and poets.

It was striking how expensive and even luxurious it seemed to first gather such a loose network from Europe and America with a barely defined purpose. It became clear that for many of the artists, a group residency in which artists can choose the participants is a somewhat rare event, a luxury in itself, though the resultant programme had most of the raw scrappiness that one associates with artist-run spaces. For an evening of poetry readings, given by Harry Burke, Quinn Latimer and Rooney, among others, each sat at a plain desk with a bunch of red roses and read aloud. The artists made meals for one another in the space and served fresh fruit and oysters, in celebration of their short time together. Bonny Poon delivered a deliberately shambolic electronic musical performance, during which she and a fellow performer appeared to collapse on the dusty floors of the main studio-cum-exhibition space, which strewn with pasta, as the giggled into microphones or looped spoken phrases of romantic banality such as ‘I made a beautiful PDF’. In the studio exhibition curated by the artists much of the work was self-consciously lo-fi – sound recordings, stolen materials, bits of paper and cheap materials such as clay and drawings.

What was interesting about the relationship between the Fondation Galleries Lafayette, however, and the visiting artists, was the way in which several of the artists self-consciously responded to their invitations by considering their own co-option by the Parisian luxury market, rather than ignoring the fact. Rooney’s contribution to the project was to make a poetry sound piece for the Galleries Lafayette flagship store on Boulevard Haussmann that was handed to visitors on tiny iPods, which encouraged a certain ruminative distance from the shoppers and the goods on sale, and allowed a certain kind of isolating, illogical daydreaming that voiced her exclusion or distance from what was being offered. Her voice delivered thoughts as though she was making a list: ‘Big blooms smelling ripe after days of silence / Natural angels swooping and groping, tied up in legacy, agitated by leader / Souls on the outskirts, flickering European lights.’ Kneale’s sculpture Rotherhithe Chanel (2014), in the studio show, is part of a series the artist has made with the neon letters used to spell ‘Rotherhithe Civic Centre, Library and Assembly Halls’, which he stole from the closed-down library space when the collective was being evicted from that space. Rearranging the letters of a sign historically used to designate a educative, public space to spell the name of luxury brands, in this case Chanel, known for monochrome, boucle jackets and the 2.55 quilted bag, Kneale demonstrates awareness of the circular traffic between not-for-profits, private corporations and public institutions, as well the as his own various brandings as an artist. The provenance of the neon letters here might acknowledge the transference of responsibility for art from public institutions from states to brands, miming the movement of a neon meant to designate a building as a public space to its arrival as an art object within a privately owned institution.

Latimer’s video made with Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Some City (2014), is a silent text with video backdrops which appear to follow a reader’s eye across various publications and magazines, which speaks about privacy as a form of luxury, imagining a city made of the fabric of privacy itself. The speaker imagines the solitude of thought as a form of pleasure: ‘At readings or lectures I stare into the monitor of air / and wish the speaker’s words were on paper, that I might read her / in my own voice, or the voice I have crafted for her: / half her, half me. Pleasure of that meeting. Its dark water / Also: that privacy. Its pleasure; a voice.’ An intellectual pleasure in the meetings of minds is called forth here. However any modern discussion of privacy also calls forth the nature of state surveillance, which suggests that privacy itself is becoming a luxury that may become the privilege of the wealthy few.

Discussing the current vogue for poetry, Latimer recently wrote about the ‘art world’s place as graceful economic host and beneficiary for so many other creative worlds in crisis’. Historically in Europe, the term ‘luxury’ was associated with vice, and was something to be avoided, though it lost its pejorative taint in the 17th century, in the birth of consumer societies Paris and London. It is always, however, related to the question of economic inequality. Though the Pickettys of this world are designating the effects of such inequalities on a world stage, this low-key set of events raised some subtler questions for art. What will be constituted by luxury in an age in which luxury brands have ascended to become the most powerful patrons and commissioners, to the extent that art institutions are built on their successes, and in which art is the luxury good par excellence. How is luxury is evolving to encompass elements of life that were previously not considered luxuriant activity, such as privacy, time, higher education and reverie. For now, in Paris, the luxury brands are setting up shops for artists on an exclusive street paved in opulence. But in the best cases the traffic still occasionally manages to go both ways.

By Alexander García Düttmann and Jean-Luc Nancy

Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London

All these rounded buildings, all these buildings that curl upwards and form spirals, all these buildings that seem to be on the verge of taking off into a livid sky like telescope waiting to be extended, all these swollen and bloated buildings, all these buildings with golden and silvery reflections, photographed as if they had already been erected, or as if they had already changed the city’s three-dimensional skyline, all these buildings that assimilate themselves to the dome of a neighbouring cathedral, that appropriate it, and that belong as much to the future as to the past, all these buildings that photography has already stored away by carrying them through the arch of a depot, a large arch made of bricks that surrounds itself with spikes, or that doubles its low curvature as if in search of protection – well, these buildings do not exist, as they say, not all of them. And that’s precisely what Rut Blees Luxemburg’s images show. Rather than appearing as buildings one could enter so as to circulate within their enclosed spaces, or rather than appearing as buildings one could climb so as to throw oneself into a new depression from the top, they appear as urban construction sites. Here, the city comes into sight as a place where something happens, or as something that takes place right now. Clearly it can exist only in and as photography. The city is a deceptive poster, a post card where the image hovers between the real and the imaginary, given facts and virtual projections, vulgarity and luxury, the modern and the old, the private and the public. That the city exists only in and as photography must be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, the finished city, recognisable as such because nothing proves out of place, the city as a museum of the past and the future, is the city of digital photography, of photography that knows how to put things right. Yet on the other hand, the city that is in the process of turning into what it will once have been, the city that is being built, the city that keeps growing, the city that falls into ruins and undoes itself, the city that eliminates, excludes and evicts, the city that is being abandoned, that abandons itself and flees, that escapes towards another city or something other than a city, the dusty city and the rotten city, the city that has become too expensive, is also the city of photography, for it must still be staged. What must be staged is the city’s own staging, its construction site full of scaffoldings and yellow and green plastic sails, teeming with rubbish, with bags made of synthetics, with stuffed bags that form a dam, with bags that become humps of wet blackness, with white and empty bags that display the name of a supermarket chain. On both sides, it is always the misery of the city that is at stake. Photography exhibits the heart of the city as its misery, its petrification, its transformation into cardboard, and as its passion, its line of flight, its winter journey. One must show the work of architects, limpid and proper, sustained by huge Doric or Corinthian columns, and one must try to glimpse the undoing, or the unworking, that the work must call for if it is to come into its own, if it requires labour in order to be produced. Since the architect’s project can only be realised if there is a site, a construction site, and a garbage container, there is no city that could renounce photography, that could do without a more or less accurate representation of what it will resemble one day, and that could bypass the unexpected presentation of what resists the project, of what is at work in the city and deconstructs it at the very moment it is being built. The coming city takes leave, and it is here, in this interruption of the project, that art finds its place, or that photography reveals the event of taking-place as a drifting, as a horizontal movement that constantly renews itself, that provides itself a new thrust by allying itself with a voice and encountering a few strangers. Photography reveals the event of taking-place as a tracking shot that wrests its force from the frozen image of a Greek vertical line and that passes along wooden fences, iron grids, and camps improvised in an open space.

Translated from French by Jared Stark and Alexander García Düttmann

Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist living in London, UK. Her work is included in the Liverpool Biennale, UK, which opens on 5 July. Her exhibition ‘London Dust’ was shown at Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris, France, in 2013, and chandelier projects, London, earlier this year. A monograph on her work, Commonsensual, is published by Black Dog.

By Alexander García Düttmann and Jean-Luc Nancy

Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London

All these rounded buildings, all these buildings that curl upwards and form spirals, all these buildings that seem to be on the verge of taking off into a livid sky like a telescope waiting to be extended, all these swollen and bloated buildings, all these buildings with golden and silvery reflections, photographed as if they had already been erected, or as if they had already changed the city’s three-dimensional skyline, all these buildings that assimilate themselves to the dome of a neighbouring cathedral, that appropriate it, and that belong as much to the future as to the past, all these buildings that photography has already stored away by carrying them through the arch of a depot, a large arch made of bricks that surrounds itself with spikes, or that doubles its low curvature as if in search of protection – well, these buildings do not exist, as they say, not all of them. And that’s precisely what Rut Blees Luxemburg’s images show. Rather than appearing as buildings one could enter so as to circulate within their enclosed spaces, or rather than appearing as buildings one could climb so as to throw oneself into a new depression from the top, they appear as urban construction sites. Here, the city comes into sight as a place where something happens, or as something that takes place right now. Clearly it can exist only in and as photography. The city is a deceptive poster, a post card where the image hovers between the real and the imaginary, given facts and virtual projections, vulgarity and luxury, the modern and the old, the private and the public. That the city exists only in and as photography must be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, the finished city, recognisable as such because nothing proves out of place, the city as a museum of the past and the future, is the city of digital photography, of photography that knows how to put things right. Yet on the other hand, the city that is in the process of turning into what it will once have been, the city that is being built, the city that keeps growing, the city that falls into ruins and undoes itself, the city that eliminates, excludes and evicts, the city that is being abandoned, that abandons itself and flees, that escapes towards another city or something other than a city, the dusty city and the rotten city, the city that has become too expensive, is also the city of photography, for it must still be staged. What must be staged is the city’s own staging, its construction site full of scaffoldings and yellow and green plastic sails, teeming with rubbish, with bags made of synthetics, with stuffed bags that form a dam, with bags that become humps of wet blackness, with white and empty bags that display the name of a supermarket chain. On both sides, it is always the misery of the city that is at stake. Photography exhibits the heart of the city as its misery, its petrification, its transformation into cardboard, and as its passion, its line of flight, its winter journey. One must show the work of architects, limpid and proper, sustained by huge Doric or Corinthian columns, and one must try to glimpse the undoing, or the unworking, that the work must call for if it is to come into its own, if it requires labour in order to be produced. Since the architect’s project can only be realised if there is a site, a construction site, and a garbage container, there is no city that could renounce photography, that could do without a more or less accurate representation of what it will resemble one day, and that could bypass the unexpected presentation of what resists the project, of what is at work in the city and deconstructs it at the very moment it is being built. The coming city takes leave, and it is here, in this interruption of the project, that art finds its place, or that photography reveals the event of taking-place as a drifting, as a horizontal movement that constantly renews itself, that provides itself a new thrust by allying itself with a voice and encountering a few strangers. Photography reveals the event of taking-place as a tracking shot that wrests its force from the frozen image of a Greek vertical line and that passes along wooden fences, iron grids, and camps improvised in an open space.

The tracking shot wrests itself from the frozen image of a Greek colonnade. It travels, it journeys across the city in winter along with Schubert’s bittersweet melody, in which the voyager sings that he came and will also leave a stranger. The journey goes nowhere. Having wrested itself from the photographed Greek colonnade, from a ludicrous advertising poster with a troop of recycling containers lined up in front of it, the journey ends after several stops or stations, several meditative or puzzled halts. It has reached a miserable and grey, hostile and futureless obstruction. The world is so ‘trüb’, the voyager sings, so grey, so drab, so murky, so disenchanted. The world is ‘a much bigger mess’, a mess much bigger than the mess of the camp, he may read as he comes across the tents set up by outraged protesters. And only a few steps further it says ‘love is the answer’, an echo of words sung by the voyager, ‘das Mädchen sprach von Liebe’. The young girl has been glimpsed as she went by with her friend right in front of the recycling containers, while the poster of the Greek temple moved away into the background. Later the fluted and massive columns of the city’s monuments will parade at the speed of a walk quickened by restlessness, just before we are led to dirty walls, nocturnal passers-by who are intrigued by the camera, and then on to the big shambles, a plastic bag next to a neo-Roman gate, a group of people waiting for a bus, and once again the lower parts of supposedly Doric or Ionic columns, shown repeatedly as if the repetition were the beat of the ambition to create a polis. The whole city becomes its own temple, lifted up by other and mimetic columns into the cathedral sky, by a spiral or a heavy cone or shell, by signs that gesture towards a sky overloaded with dusty steam and yellowish or blueish pollution. Only one image cuts through it all with its straightforward colours. It is the image of a blue arch with a frieze made of bricks. All that can be seen through its wide gape is an intense blackness into which the beige floor disappears as it turns greenish. Why should I stay on if I am going to be expelled, the voyager asks, and he begins to look elsewhere, in darker places. The high fronts of buildings and the glimmering partition-walls of the construction sites are shot through with lights that shimmer excessively, as if they were trying to emit a radiance that no longer does any good since all that may be left inside is emptiness. Perhaps the polis and its temples no longer have an inside, just like the ruins of the Greek temple on the poster, and all we can do on the construction site is walk from ruin to ruin, while a tired worker wearing a boiler suit as orange as the surrounding lights leans on something. What is he thinking of? He may see the passing voyager, or he may not. Love loves to gallivant, the voyager sings, turn itself into a ballad, it loves to go from one to another. It passes in front of wire fences, in front of 140 LONDONWALL written in big antique-style letters, and then continues to heavy concrete blocks that are not topped by columns. Good night, my gentle darling, the voyager says before he vanishes. He does not wish to disturb her, he simply wants to let her know that he has thought of her in the night of the city, in the vicinity of the columns and the shambles, the Greek skyscrapers, the colourless dome, and the torn sails displayed along the construction sites, tinted the colour of mimosas or periwinkles. The photo captures all these nuances, these streams of dirty beige, of grey, of rancid butter, of greyish-brown and bistre, of bitumen and cobalt, of steel, silver and putty, it captures all the vestiges and pulverescences, all the flakes on a hat, all the fluorescent flashes on a protective net, and also the dense chocolate of the river that features a gliding boat, a boat that is not used by voyagers but by tourists who are in town and want to gaze at the Greek ruins, tomorrow or way back, before or after the big city. Writing of lights, photography, rain of bright photons that emanate from the sullied marble and from the lemony attire of a black night watchman whose cigarette is lit up suddenly with a magenta sparkle. There is misery, abandonment, and yet there is also the voyager’s song, the pausing of the camera, a patient waiting for each image to lay itself down, a note or a touch placed like tender mist.

Translated from French by Jared Stark and Alexander García Düttmann

Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist living in London, UK. Her work is included in the Liverpool Biennale, UK, which opens on 5 July. Her exhibition ‘London Dust’ was shown at Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris, France, in 2013, and chandelier projects, London, earlier this year. A monograph on her work, Commonsensual, is published by Black Dog.

By Alexander García Düttmann and Jean-Luc Nancy

Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London

All these rounded buildings, all these buildings that curl upwards and form spirals, all these buildings that seem to be on the verge of taking off into a livid sky like a telescope waiting to be extended, all these swollen and bloated buildings, all these buildings with golden and silvery reflections, photographed as if they had already been erected, or as if they had already changed the city’s three-dimensional skyline, all these buildings that assimilate themselves to the dome of a neighbouring cathedral, that appropriate it, and that belong as much to the future as to the past, all these buildings that photography has already stored away by carrying them through the arch of a depot, a large arch made of bricks that surrounds itself with spikes, or that doubles its low curvature as if in search of protection – well, these buildings do not exist, as they say, not all of them. And that’s precisely what Rut Blees Luxemburg’s images show. Rather than appearing as buildings one could enter so as to circulate within their enclosed spaces, or rather than appearing as buildings one could climb so as to throw oneself into a new depression from the top, they appear as urban construction sites. Here, the city comes into sight as a place where something happens, or as something that takes place right now. Clearly it can exist only in and as photography. The city is a deceptive poster, a post card whose image hovers between the real and the imaginary, given facts and virtual projections, vulgarity and luxury, the modern and the old, the private and the public. That the city exists only in and as photography must be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, the finished city, recognisable as such because nothing proves out of place, the city as a museum of the past and the future, is the city of digital photography, of photography that knows how to put things right. Yet on the other hand, the city that is in the process of turning into what it will once have been, the city that is being built, the city that keeps growing, the city that falls into ruins and undoes itself, the city that eliminates, excludes and evicts, the city that is being abandoned, that abandons itself and flees, that escapes towards another city or something other than a city, the dusty city and the rotten city, the city that has become too expensive, is also the city of photography, for it must still be staged. What must be staged is the city’s own staging, its construction site full of scaffoldings and yellow and green plastic sails, teeming with rubbish, with bags made of synthetics, with stuffed bags that form a dam, with bags that become humps of wet blackness, with white and empty bags that display the name of a supermarket chain. On both sides, it is always the misery of the city that is at stake. Photography exhibits the heart of the city as its misery, its petrification, its transformation into cardboard, and as its passion, its line of flight, its winter journey. One must show the work of architects, limpid and proper, sustained by huge Doric or Corinthian columns, and one must try to glimpse the undoing, or the unworking, that the work must call for if it is to come into its own, if it requires labour in order to be produced. Since the architect’s project can only be realised if there is a site, a construction site, and a garbage container, there is no city that could renounce photography, that could do without a more or less accurate representation of what it will resemble one day, and that could bypass the unexpected presentation of what resists the project, of what is at work in the city and deconstructs it at the very moment it is being built. The coming city takes leave, and it is here, in this interruption of the project, that art finds its place, or that photography reveals the event of taking-place as a drifting, as a horizontal movement that constantly renews itself, that provides itself a new thrust by allying itself with a voice and encountering a few strangers. Photography reveals the event of taking-place as a tracking shot that wrests its force from the frozen image of a Greek vertical line and that passes along wooden fences, iron grids, and camps improvised in an open space.

The tracking shot wrests itself from the frozen image of a Greek colonnade. It travels, it journeys across the city in winter along with Schubert’s bittersweet melody, in which the voyager sings that he came and will also leave a stranger. The journey goes nowhere. Having wrested itself from the photographed Greek colonnade, from a ludicrous advertising poster with a troop of recycling containers lined up in front of it, the journey ends after several stops or stations, several meditative or puzzled halts. It has reached a miserable and grey, hostile and futureless obstruction. The world is so ‘trüb’, the voyager sings, so grey, so drab, so murky, so disenchanted. The world is ‘a much bigger mess’, a mess much bigger than the mess of the camp, he may read as he comes across the tents set up by outraged protesters. And only a few steps further it says ‘love is the answer’, an echo of words sung by the voyager, ‘das Mädchen sprach von Liebe’. The young girl has been glimpsed as she went by with her friend right in front of the recycling containers, while the poster of the Greek temple moved away into the background. Later the fluted and massive columns of the city’s monuments will parade at the speed of a walk quickened by restlessness, just before we are led to dirty walls, nocturnal passers-by who are intrigued by the camera, and then on to the big shambles, a plastic bag next to a neo-Roman gate, a group of people waiting for a bus, and once again the lower parts of supposedly Doric or Ionic columns, shown repeatedly as if the repetition were the beat of the ambition to create a polis. The whole city becomes its own temple, lifted up by other and mimetic columns into the cathedral sky, by a spiral or a heavy cone or shell, by signs that gesture towards a sky overloaded with dusty steam and yellowish or blueish pollution. Only one image cuts through it all with its straightforward colours. It is the image of a blue arch with a frieze made of bricks. All that can be seen through its wide gape is an intense blackness into which the beige floor disappears as it turns greenish. Why should I stay on if I am going to be expelled, the voyager asks, and he begins to look elsewhere, in darker places. The high fronts of buildings and the glimmering partition-walls of the construction sites are shot through with lights that shimmer excessively, as if they were trying to emit a radiance that no longer does any good since all that may be left inside is emptiness. Perhaps the polis and its temples no longer have an inside, just like the ruins of the Greek temple on the poster, and all we can do on the construction site is walk from ruin to ruin, while a tired worker wearing a boiler suit as orange as the surrounding lights leans on something. What is he thinking of? He may see the passing voyager, or he may not. Love loves to gallivant, the voyager sings, to turn itself into a ballad, it loves to go from one to another. It passes in front of wire fences, in front of 140 LONDONWALL written in big antique-style letters, and then continues to heavy concrete blocks that are not topped by columns. Good night, my gentle darling, the voyager says before he vanishes. He does not wish to disturb her, he simply wants to let her know that he has thought of her in the night of the city, in the vicinity of the columns and the shambles, the Greek skyscrapers, the colourless dome, and the torn sails displayed along the construction sites, tinted the colour of mimosas or periwinkles. The photo captures all these nuances, these streams of dirty beige, of grey, of rancid butter, of greyish-brown and bistre, of bitumen and cobalt, of steel, silver and putty, it captures all the vestiges and pulverescences, all the flakes on a hat, all the fluorescent flashes on a protective net, and also the dense chocolate of the river that features a gliding boat, a boat that is not used by voyagers but by tourists who are in town and want to gaze at the Greek ruins, tomorrow or way back, before or after the big city. Writing of lights, photography, rain of bright photons that emanate from the sullied marble and from the lemony attire of a black night watchman whose cigarette lights up suddenly with a magenta sparkle. There is misery, abandonment, and yet there is also the voyager’s song, the pausing of the camera, a patient waiting for each image to lay itself down, a note or a touch placed like tender mist.

Translated from French by Jared Stark and Alexander García Düttmann

Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist living in London, UK. Her work is included in the Liverpool Biennale, UK, which opens on 5 July. Her exhibition ‘London Dust’ was shown at Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris, France, in 2013, and chandelier projects, London, earlier this year. A monograph on her work, Commonsensual, is published by Black Dog.

By Chris Fite-Wassilak

Victoria Bewick and Philip Arditti in Catch 22. Photograph: Topher McGrillis

If you love a book, you’ll want to make an adaptation; a comic book, a film, a play, maybe even a musical. But if you make an adaptation, it means you don’t really love the book: you’re relying on source material that you inevitably have to betray, you have to sacrifice those very things that define the book. Perhaps it’s too neat that such a contradictory fate be dealt to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. By now a ‘classic anti-war’ novel, his 1961 absurdist comedy of WW2 manners put a new term into the English language. In the book, ‘Catch 22’ is a law that is constantly evoked, but never precisely defined or even proved to actually exist; it has become a phrase we all know to describe any lose-lose situation. It is generally the case that the book will be better than the adaptation (a notable exception would be Roderick Thorpe’s Nothing Lasts Forever [1979], which was transformed into Die Hard), but when you read the words ‘musical’ and ‘dance’ alongside ‘from an original script by Joseph Heller’, for a stage production of Catch-22 currently touring the UK, you have to wonder.

Heller’s book was released to mixed reviews, some claiming it lacked structure, but the self-fulfilling nightmares, rational paranoia and frustrating circuitousness that his cast of characters are put through eventually struck a chord with both post-war veterans and the emerging counterculture of a younger generation. Catch 22 managed to translate Franz Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein into the more easily digestible acerbic quips of a born New Yorker, as the protagonist Yossarian tries earnestly to figure out why both sides in the war keep trying to get him killed. There are two incessantly repeated questions in both the novel and the script adaptation: ‘Are you crazy?’ and ‘What difference does it make?’ The pair form a kind of kōan, or Zen riddle, each a response to the other.

Mike Nichols, in between The Graduate (1967) and Carnal Knowledge (1971), attempted to adapt Heller’s novel for the big screen, using the mountains of Sonora, Mexico, to play the role of the Italian countryside in which the fictional U.S. Air Force base is set. With a multi-million dollar budget and the use of actual B-25s for its flight scenes, Alan Arkin, with a thick rug of dark hair at the time, starred alongside Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, and Art Garfunkel. Bob Newhart and Orson Welles also made brief appearances; all acted with stiff, unmoving faces as if watching themselves from a distance. The film had little impact (except maybe for stirring a wallowing Paul Simon enough to write ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ while Garfunkel was away filming), but Heller approved and was impressed enough to pen his own stage adaptation, with an eye towards Broadway. His 1971 script, which similarly relied on non-stop dialogue to force itself through a chronological version of events, began with a two-week run in his adopted hometown resort of East Hampton. And stopped there. Heller released a sequel to the novel, Closing Time, in 1994, reprising what characters he could as aging veterans in New York City, as they recounted past decades spent on on Coney Island, where Heller himself was raised, and large chunks of Catch-22 itself. Heller died in 1999 from a heart attack; his last novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, published posthumously a year later, depicted an aged writer who was struggling to write something that could match the strength and success of his first novel.

In 2007, a British director based in New York reprised the Catch-22 script for a short tour across parts of the U.S.; as with Closing Time, reviews commented on the bravery and impossibility of attempting to take on Catch-22. I first read the book as a teenager, when it was easily flattened to an ‘individual against society’ sort of parable; on re-reading, Heller’s novel is more a dense weave of doubt and conflicting attempts to define the world around us. Each event, described randomly in increments from various perspectives, becomes an integral part of a self-replicating pattern, perhaps depicting a kaleidoscopic spiral. Heller’s stage script, and the current production on now forty-three years later, is necessarily more episodic, linear. Catch-22 was always high parody, so on one level the book’s rapid dialogues are almost made for the stage, complete with nods and winks to the audience. It’s overplayed with breezy fun, one ridiculous situation folding incessantly into the next as the nine cast members swap between dozens of characters and attempt to vary their cartoonish American accents. Musical interludes and a few dance routines are inserted – more for a break from the constant talking than anything else. (There’s no Yossarian singing, ‘I’m going to live forever or die trying,’ thank goodness.) Here, Catch-22 is a physical sitcom, a slapstick purgatory that takes the script’s comedy at face value, leaving it feeling more focused on laughs than the troubled introspection that prevents each of the characters from communicating with each other. Like the novel, it’s fast-paced and entertaining, but in its selection of scenes it renders each moment too precious, too examined, too didactically moral, and a pale shadow of the relentless spiral Heller envisioned. If you love something, bind it in an elaborate oxymoron and let it be.

Catch-22 began its run at the Derby Theatre 17 – 21 June, and continues at the Richmond Theatre 24 – 29 June

By Agnieszka Gratza

Rabih Mroué, Riding on a Cloud, 2014; all images courtesy Berlin Documentary Forum / Haus der Kulturen der Welt

A report from the 3rd edition of the Berlin Documentary Forum held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Spread over four days, the programme of parallel screenings, performances, live broadcasts, seminars and talks presented in two adjoining spaces at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, besides two audiovisual installations displayed elsewhere in the building throughout the Berlin Documentary Forum (BDF) and beyond, made this visitor long for the ability to be in two (or more) places at once.

Basma Alsharif, Doppelgänger, 2014; photograph © Basma Alsharif

Bilocation, and the cognate theme of the double in film history, is something Basma Alsharif explores in Doppelgänger (2014), partly as a way of making sense of her own split identity as a Palestinian leading a nomadic existence. A highlight of this lecture-performance, followed by a screening of Super-8 footage filmed in Gaza, Malta and Athens, some of it under autohypnosis, came in the shape of a collective state of hypnosis or altered consciousness induced by means of binaural beats that accompanied a bright pulsating image projected onto the screen in front of which the artist stood.

Michael Baers, An Oral History of Picasso in Palestine, 2014; © Michael Bears

The Middle East was a geopolitical focus of this edition of the BDF biennial, founded in 2010 by Berlin-based Israeli curator and filmmaker Hila Peleg. The biennial opened with Rabih Mroué play Riding on a Cloud (2014), starring his younger brother Yasser, who relates how he was treated for aphasia and partial memory impairment, having been shot in the head, aged 17, during the Lebanese Civil War. In the deeply moving final scene, prepared for by a screen-projected dialogue between the two brothers, Yasser is joined on stage by his double, Rabih himself. The evening of the well-attended opening also featured a reading of Michael Baers’ online graphic novel An Oral History of Picasso in Palestine (2014). Baers’ hyper-detailed account of the bureaucratic hurdles that stood in the way of bringing Picasso’s Buste de femme (1943) over for a show at Ramallah’s International Academy of Art in 2011, obliquely exposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

Recording situation, Smadar Dreyfus 2010; photograph courtesy of the artist

The context provided by some of these works brought out the latent ideological and political implications of Smadar Dreyfus’ immersive sound installation School (2009–11), first presented at the Folkestone Triennial in 2011. Made with audio material recorded over the course of two years at various secondary schools in the artist’s native Tel Aviv, School schematically renders the spatial layout of a school with its different classrooms, where different lessons are being taught – History, Bible Studies, Arabic, Literature, Geography, Citizenship, Biology – connected by a central corridor that comes to life during breaks. Each room is sculpted, as it were, through surround-sound, registering tenuous sounds and the voices of teachers and pupils alike. The latter are visually mapped out in white letters, which translate into English the original Hebrew, on a screen whose placement and shape evokes a blackboard.

Harun Farocki, PARALLEL IV, 2014; photograph © Harun Farocki

In Harun Farocki’s PARALLEL I-IV (2012-14), sound columns positioned in front of single- and two-channel video installations divided up the main auditorium at the HKW into as many sonic zones that visitors, equipped with headphones, would tune in and out of as they moved across the space. Taking the depiction of trees, clouds, wind, and other such motifs as its starting point, the four-part installation charts the history and stylistic developments of video games, which have been around for 35 years, in an attempt to open this field up for theoretical reflection. For Farocki, video games are a mirror of reality or a parallel reality; hence names such as ‘Second Life’ reflected in the work’s title.

Narrative and how it shapes reality – the chosen theme for the third edition of the BDF– takes its cue from philosopher Jacques Rancière’s paradoxical claim that ‘the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought’, which runs counter to the idea of a documentary presenting facts objectively without fictionalizing. What Peleg set out to debunk is the myth of a documentary’s greater objectivity and hold on reality.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Al Jazeera Replay (Feb 1-4, 2011);
photograph © Alexander Sehmer, Creative Commons

Non-fiction, from journalism to (auto-)biographical and historical accounts, relies on narrative and storytelling just as fiction does. The narrative propensity of news reports was illustrated in the Al Jazeera Replay panel discussion – centred on the network’s coverage of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 – with talk of a ‘perfect narrative arc’ of 18 days culminating in Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in the ‘picture perfect’ setting of Tahrir Square.

Melding fact and fiction, the 17 projects included in this year’s BDF show the personal and subjective face of documentary making. Drawn from literary criticism, the term ‘unreliable narrators’ appears in the title of CAMP’s Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran presentation of three media forms – leaks, stings and citizen vigilante videos – all of which employ dubious methods of investigation. And yet, rather than simply indicting them, Anand and Sukumaran strive for an impartial overview of the broader surveillance landscape and its effects on Indian society.

Photograph © Maya Goded

Part of a wider ‘narco-culture’, songs celebrating the exploits of drug lords or traffickers known as narcocorridos, are analyzed by an ethnomusicologist, who offers possible readings of this disturbing phenomenon as a counter-narrative and a cathartic outlet for violent fantasies, in a series of filmed interviews projected in the second of the three-part ‘Narco-Capitalism’ sessions, teasing out the connections between neo-liberalism and the spread of violence in northern Mexico’s lawless border cities. The discussion panel included writer Sergio González Rodríguez, who inspired Roberto Bolaño’s character of the avenging reporter in 2666, published posthumously, and is himself the author of Bones in the Desert (Huesos en el desierto, 2002) dealing with the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. If his essay and Bolaño’s novel offered two parallel ways of investigating the lurid reality of the unsolved crimes that have plagued the city for over two decades, González Rodríguez acknowledges that literature has nothing to envy journalism or political science when it comes to narrating facts.

By Jennifer Higgie

Marina Rosenfeld, Free Exercise, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen

Flying into Bergen is not like flying into London. As the plane loses altitude the colourful wooden houses perched on the shores of Norway’s wild, rocky coast come into focus and the surprise is, they’re real, not the figment of some long-dead children’s writer’s imagination. It’s hard to believe that such a quaint harbour town is so deeply immersed in, and welcoming of, the wildly unpredictable vagaries of experimental music. (But then that’s Norway: apparently the country hosts almost one music festival a day.) For once a year for the past ten years, Bergen has been transformed into a place that the Borealis Festival, whose tenth birthday it is this year, describes as: ‘a meeting place, laboratory and development space for adventurous music and ideas’. I had never been to the festival before, and sadly I could only spare a few days but by the end of my stay I had only two regrets: 1) that I hadn’t seen and heard the entire, fascinating programme (I was especially sad to miss Free Exercise, a new work by Marina Rosenfeld, and a ‘guided listening session’ on the history of magic and the occult in music by Rob Young) and 2) that I had forgotten to bring an umbrella. For Bergen’s other claim to fame – apart from music – is that it is the rainiest city in Europe, which sort of means the world. Try and buy an umbrella, though, as I did, and you are doomed, because everyone in Bergen wears Goretex, a material that is a stranger to my skin. A friend of mine once had an exhibition in Bergen and he said, quite seriously, that you couldn’t hear the speeches because of the rustling of Goretex-clad members in the audience. (This is getting off the point, but what was really weird was the amount of hairdressers in Bergen. They were everywhere! This was pointed out to me by the reviews editor of Gramophone magazine, Andrew Meller, and he was right. His great blog on Borealis can be found here: http://www.moosereport.net/borealis/)

But back to the Borealis Festival. This year, it was once again programmed by composer and performer Alwynne Pritchard, who has been its dynamic artistic director of the past six years; her replacement, Peter Meanwell, was formerly a producer at BBC radio 3, and I can vouch for the fact that he knows a terrifying amount about the different ways human beings can express themselves via that loose category we call ‘music’. Along with Meanwell, there’s recently been something of a migration of British talent to Bergen: Martin Clark, formerly Artistic Director of Tate St Ives, became the Director of the Bergen Kunsthalle (replacing Solveig Øvstebø, who relocated to Chicago to become Director of the Renaissance Society) and Ed Gardner is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic.

The festival’s theme this year was ‘Alchemy’, which was justified in the press bumpf thus: ‘In its quest to transform base metals into gold, alchemy evolved a wealth of scientific and spiritual theories, beliefs, practices and rituals from which this year’s programme has evolved. Transformation in its broadest manifestation has always been relevant to artists, but the specifics of alchemy have provided even more localized and remarkable starting points for the musicians we have worked closely with this year. These specially commissioned pieces explore not only the core subject of alchemy, but also ritual, magic and the supernatural … the Festival will be covering subjects ranging from the ancient Leyden papyrus (an instruction manual for extracting precious metals from everyday materials), the transformation of sound through matter, and the art of recording voices from beyond the grave.’ I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of thing that sets my pulse going.

Venues for the Festival were scattered all over Bergen. The first night of my visit we walked through the charming, rainy streets to an old tuna-canning factory on the edge of the bay that has been turned into an arts centre, the USF, to see and hear François Sarhan’s new work The Last Lighthouse Keepers. We all sat on red cushions in the middle of floor, surrounded by large photocopies and mobiles roughly taped to the walls and hanging from the ceiling: a huge hand pouring liquid, pianos, ladders and clocks (yes, Surrealism 101). Four performers – Céline Bernard (foley artist), Mark Knoop (on piano), Adam Rosenblatt (percussion) and Sarhan himself – then proceeded to create an moody narrative about dislocation and creativity that swiftly moved between absurdity, farce, and suddenly touching moments of vulnerability. Sarhan – in a standard classical music black suit but with bare feet (everyone had bare feet I assume to better signify dream state/openness/unconventionality), stood in front of the piano. To the accompaniment of a piece for solo piano that evoked, in turn, a Satie-esque lyricism, minimalism and echoes of Gershwin, Sarhan intoned lines including ‘It has always been a source of amazement’; ‘there’s not a real moment when I decided … to become a musician’; ‘I think I was formatted totally formless’, etc. Eventually, after an inspired marimba performance, and an increasingly frenzied dance of performers around the room tearing everything down, peace reigned. I thought it a curious work: inventive, compelling, even, at times, moving, but also a little corny (clocks and ladders?). In an interview afterwards, Sarhan (who has collaborated with William Kentridge) explained his thought processes, declaring that ‘the real artists are the lighthouse keepers’ and, warming, to his metaphor, explaining that ‘as lighthouses are becoming redundant with GPS, nobody needs what we do’. Describing a paradox that became familiar at Borealis, Sarhan spoke of how, in his opinion, we need stories in order both to explain reality and to escape it. His role as ‘the actor’ in The Last Lighthouse Keepers embodies an-all-too familiar strategy in the art world of being unable to express something with words, and so employing images to do the job. Here, however, the music was more interesting than the images – but then I guess it was a music festival.

Next on the agenda, back at the packed Landmark venue (next to the Kunsthalle) was Felix Kubin’s amusing and rather wonderful lecture/performance Paralektronoia, an updated version of his 2004 radio play about electricity, ghosts and paranoia, based on interviews with various characters – from scientists to artists and other people whose jobs I wasn’t entirely clear about, but who regularly heard disembodied voices (one woman explained that she was ‘actually like an antenna’). As Kubin declared a tad defensively at the beginning of the piece: ‘I am an artist, not a scientist and an artist can do whatever they want to do’. I loved Paralektronoia, not least for its sympathy for the dead and for its sonic surprises. As one of his contacts declared: ‘I think ghosts have a difficult time these days. It is difficult for them to be left alone.’

The next day, I walked through the rain to the Bergen Public Library to hear/see Biblioludium, a collaboration between pianist Simon Phillips and Norwegian poet Kurt Johannessen that was held in a small crowded room that steamed slightly with the damp from everyone’s clothes. The piece apparently developed from two simple questions: Could a sentence become a score? What happens if a poem drowns in the sound of a piano? What transpired was an exercise in distilled minimalism, if that’s not a tautology. (It somehow seemed more minimal than minimal.) Here’s what happened: Johannessen, in a black tshirt, a jacket, and a sweet, faintly bewildered smile, tapped the microphone, as if testing its sound. This went on for a while; Philips then took up the rhythm on the wood of the piano. Johannessen then slowly gave out pieces of paper to every member of the audience, and smiled warmly at them. I, too, was smiled at and given a slip of paper, which had one sentence on it, but it was in Norwegian, which I don’t speak. (I gave it later to a local person I met, who promised to translate it for me and email me, but they never did. Sad.) Apparently they were poems. Johannessen drank water if the exertion got too much. Seemingly random notes were played at unexpected intervals on the piano. At one point, Johannessen lit a torch and asked a member of the audience to get under it with him. I’m not sure what happened under there but they emerged eventually. Then, Johannessen worked his way back through the audience again, handing out more paper. One man said ‘no’ to the note, and shook his head, as if bored or disgusted by the performance. I don’t know what he was so mad about; he could have left. Despite my incomprehension, there was something rather great about it all; the way everything slowed right down and clarity, for once, wasn’t privileged over a kind of enigmatic delicacy.

From there, we walked back to USF to see a screening of the 2002 film A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn by Claudia Heuermann. I had three problems with it: a) I was totally drenched from the rain, which had turned into snow, and so a little preoccupied with trying to get dry, and b) the film was shot by someone whose hands shook the whole time, and so I got travel sick in about ten minutes c) John Zorn came across as possibly the most arrogant man alive. So I left, went back to my hotel, had a hot shower and dried off. By the way, I should mention the incredible hospitality, and the helpful army of volunteers: the festival put on a free vegetarian kitchen for visitors to the Festival, and the soup was delicious.

A while later I returned to the USF for possibly the most talked-about and anticipated performance of the Festival: the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals, performed by the BIT20 Ensemble, which comprised 11 amplified instruments conducted by Baldur Brönnimann. The soprano was Christina Daletska, who had something of the Viking about her. Romitelli died of cancer at 41 ten years ago; An Index of Metals was the last work he composed (Kenka Lèkovich’s wrote the libretto) and it is full of foreboding, anger and a terrible sense of inevitability. It opened beautifully, with repeated, anguished phrases, like a heartbeat gone wrong; projections of abstract patterns that evoked mutating cells drifted in and out of focus. Daletska’s voice was like sunlight in clouds that gradually developed into an operatic howl. As it developed, however, I had problems with its melodrama; it was pitched so relentlessly at an acute level of emotional anguish that despite its power, it grew wearisome at times, and at moments, veered too close to rock opera. Also, I thought the mix was bad; the levels were all over the place, but nonetheless, I’m glad I heard it. It was brilliant, moving, flawed. Terrible to think of this young composer’s potential, stopped, so tragically, mid-flow.

We then all trooped back over to the Kulturhuset for Bass Drum, a 90-minute performance by Morten J. Olsen, a rather wonderful percussionist who lives in Stavanger, further down the coast in Norway. He was positioned in the middle of an empty gallery, with (you guessed it) an enormous bass drum. We sat around the edge, watching, listening, as he did all manner of things to it with a huge variety of objects, from domestic items to what looked like hand-made sculptures (I could be wrong). I found it hypnotic, soothing even after the anguish of An Index of Metals.

At midnight next door, in Landmark, was the most joyous 90 minutes or so of the festival: the magnificent US band Deerhoof, whose sheer inventive brilliance is matched by drummer’s Greg Saunier’s repartee (he is eerily like Jim Carrey) and Satomi Matsuzaki’s manic dancing (on two occasions she bought the stack of amps down, but no-one seemed to mind). It was immense fun. They seemed like nice people, too. They had such an early morning flight they decided to stay up all night. Rumour had it that Saunier, accompanied by a mug of Earl Grey tea, was seen vacuuming the venue in the wee hours.

The next day was my last day, and I was lucky I got to see/hear Øyvind Torvund’s commission for Borealis, Constructing Jungle Books, a sonic collage of music inspired by the composer’s research into jungle field recordings from the Berlin Natural History Museum. It was performed by the 24 or so members of Berlin’s Splitter Orchester in an atmospheric, crumbling old warehouse on the edge of town, overlooking the water. As the rain fell steadily outside, the music evoked time travel as much as travel into a jungle: a harpsichord, a cellist, a double bass, a guitarist and a flautist shared the stage with a man playing a spoon and turntable. The composition comprised samples of other music – both from centuries ago and last week – other animals, other places, the howls of wild animals, the faint intimation of crickets and birdsong and a trombone’s lament. It stayed with me as I flew back to London, later that day. When I landed, I thought: next year, I want to return.

By Ela Bittencourt

Jan Matuszyński, Deep Love, 2013

A report from the 54th Kraków Film Festival

Kraków in Southern Poland, is at first glance a picturesque Eastern European city. The former seat of Polish kings, home to the Jagiellonian University (one of the oldest in Europe), the town was spared during the Second World War and has resisted the call to modernize. While other Polish cities, such as Warsaw, were rebuilt practically from the ground up, Kraków still boasts Gothic and Renaissance architecture, a vastly restored but nevertheless imposing Wawel Castle, and hints of a once bristling Jewish quarter in the Kazimierz neighbourhood. More importantly, Kraków is the perfect place to be reminded not only of Poland’s history, or the painful legacy of the Holocaust, embodied by nearby Auschwitz, but also of the city’s vibrant cultural life that has endured throughout centuries. What better place to stumble on an exhibition like The Drawer of Wisława Szymborska, devoted to the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, or to hide away in the legendary Pod Baranami, a cinema and art space that has plazed host to avant-garde films, jazz, political cabarets, and world-renown theatre directors such as Tadeusz Kantor? Kraków is a city of timeless bards – another Noble Prize winner, the writer Czesław Miłosz, is buried at the 13th century St. Mary’s Church – but occasionally, away from the constant hullabaloo of tourists crowding the main square, it reveals a more contemporary side. Such was the case during the 54th Kraków Film Festival (KFF), the oldest film festival in the country, devoted to documentaries, animation and short films. KFF’s events spread across the Cinema Pod Baranami to a re-purposed factory prosaically called Fabryka, and Forum, a post-socialist hotel-cum-event space. Forum is the kind of mélange you would hope to find in contemporary Poland: an austere concrete structure, enlivened by bright strobe lights and a young crowd, a sign that Poles are ready to reinvent their past.

Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski, Domino Effect, 2014

Having previously featured major film talents such as Kazimierz Karabasz, Marcel Łoziński and Krzysztof Kieślowski, KFF itself is poised between a traditional and more global approach. Among the Polish filmmakers who garnered prizes this year, a good number sought stories beyond the country’s borders. Domino Effect (2014) by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski depicts the tiny Georgian separatist republic of Abkhazia on the Black Sea. A former freedom fighter, Rafael, toils fecklessly as a Sports Minister with dwindling hopes that a local Domino championship may bring attention to his people’s plight. Abkhazia needs industry and jobs, and there is no sight more poignant than that of two old Abkhazian men following the championship parade avidly from their newspaper stand while tourists take photos. We follow Rafael and his Russian wife, who feels rejected by the proudly nationalist community. But more satisfying than glimpses at local politics, which at times get lost in intimate retelling, is Rosołwoski’s sumptuous camera work. His lingering on the crumbling post-Soviet architecture creates an aura of timelessness, while other shots capture the Abkhazians’ reverence for their land. A story of a people on the Empire’s fringes,Domino Effect resists cliché by showing that a private passion need not necessarily overcome profound nationalist allegiances. History instead remains an incurable wound, which the film captures in all its festering glory.

Dan Wasserman, Do You Believe in Love?, 2013

Domino Effect, which in addition to prizes for best national and international documentary also won best cinematography, screened in a strong international documentary competition in which the Silver Horns went to Talar Derki’s Return to Homs (2014) and to Dan Wasserman’s Do You Believe in Love? (2013). The latter is a cameral story of love against all odds: A hard-nosed Israeli matchmaker with ALS disease, assisted by a devoted, albeit cantankerous, husband whose own mental frailty grows with each frame, devotes her life to pairing up singles, particularly those with disabilities. As Wasserman focuses an unstinting eye on the challenges of dating for the handicapped, the motto, ‘there is no love in the world. It’s all compromise’, reverberates through this occasionally heartbreaking, keenly observed documentary. Return to Homs, which opened the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is Derki’s anguished sonnet to the ruined city. It is nearly impossible to compare the stoic beauty of Domino Effect, or the cheeky, bracing objectivity of Do You Believe In Love? with the relentless brand of embedded journalism of Return to Homs. Sharing in the daily terrors of resistance fighting, Derki creates reportage in the tradition of Frank Capra. Fearless, maddeningly claustrophobic, Return to Homs is a rare document of our time, and I would like to think that it spoke to the Polish audiences with the same eloquent desperation as the consecrated WWII epics, such as Andrzej Wajda’s Canal (1957) about doomed Polish resistance fighters.

Talar Derki, Return to Homs, 2014

In Deep Love (2013), the debut by Polish filmmaker Jan Matuszyński which won the Silver Hobby Horse in the national documentary competition, an accomplished diver suffers a stroke that partly paralyzes him and reduces his speech to inarticulate gibberish. Oscillating between utter helplessness and obstinate endurance, in spite of his fragile health, Janusz resumes deep sea diving. Matuszyński’s film is reminiscent of another, nerve-wrecking sports-survivor documentary by Lucy Walker, The Crash Reel (2013). Like Walker, Matuszyński focuses on the impact that a sportsperson’s injury has on their loved ones: Janusz’s partner, Asia, fears that diving strains his heart to the point of killing him. With National Geographic-esque moments distilled to the painterly scene of Janusz’s final descent, and emotions kept taut as Asia veers between affection to revolt at her partner’s selfishness, Matuszyński steadily ratchets ups the pressure in a film that demonstrates how nature checks human will.

Jan Matuszyński, Deep Love, 2013

At the heart of this year’s festival was a retrospective of films by Bogdan Dziworski, who won prizes at KFF in 1973 for Cross and Axe, in 1977 for Hockey and in 1979 for The Olympics. All three films were shown, along with fifteen of his shorts. Dziworski, whose first love was photography, is known for bringing a playful, image-driven approach to the documentary form. Eschewing dialogue and, for the most part, voiceover, and using sound effects to bring out the rhythmic qualities of his films, Dziworski has often focused his camera on sports. Hockey, horse riding, skiing and diving are just a few of the disciplines that in his treatment become symphonic meditations on motion. Dziworski’s other love is the circus, and two films, the black and white Arena of Life (1979) and the colour Szapito (1984), show Dziworski peering behind the magic of stunts to capture performers as larger-than-life figures, while simultaneously focusing on the arduousness of their trade. The human body is often both glorified and exposed as vulnerable in Dziworski’s work, as beautifully captured in A Few Stories About a Man (1983) where in its most gripping scene an armless man plunges from a bridge into a river as a steamship chugs idly by. Dziworski’s absurdist, zany sensibility was a relief at KFF, which mostly leaned towards respectability and tried-out forms rather than experimentation.

KFF’s music documentary and short film categories paled somewhat by comparison. Amanda Sans and Miquel Galofré’s Songs of Redemption (2013), which took the prize for best music documentary, presented the redemption of Jamaican inmates through popular music and religious reawakening. Along with a few affecting confessions involving murder, most of the documentary is taken up with positive messages of social relief interspersed with rousing prison songs. Similarly, the Silver Dragon winner for short film, Juliette Touin’s The Big House (2013), is a straightforward observational documentary, though as it follows young mothers at an institution for pregnant women in Cuba it builds a sense of uncanny melancholy. While the short film category did feature a few quietly haunting films – from Matias (2014), Brazilian filmmakers Felipe Tomazelli and Ricardo Martensen’s film about a farmer who lives alone in the protected forest area of the São Paulo state, Łukasz Konopa’s desolate portrayal of American urbanity, Vegas (2014), to the stark black and white allegorical tale _Lux Aeterna _(2013) by Carlos Tribiño Mamby – most other selections lacked the daring of the main slate.

THEOBVIOUSCHILD (Trailer) from small time inc. on Vimeo.

Where KFF excelled was animation. Among the films I saw, Danny Madden’s Confusion through Sand (2013), Jerzy Kucia’s Fugue for Cello, Trumpet and Landscape (2014), and Stephen Irwin’s The Obvious Child (2014), were clear standouts. Madden’s undulating hand-drawn pencil strokes on rough recycled paper simulate a desert, in which soldiers lose their bearing. Kucia’s Fugue, for which he won the director of the best film in the international short film competition, is composed of loosely strung impressions: from swampy areas and lines metamorphosing into a flock of birds to vast canvases of intense colour, the film quivers constantly between figuration and abstraction. Finally Obvious Child, a bold, post-modern tale of patricide from the British animator and graduate of St. Martins College of Art and Design, is the real highlight of the festival. Irwin’s nightmarish pop art aesthetic, with a kitschy, colour-saturated palette, is like a Jeff Koons sculpture sprung to life in a dystopian landscape. It is one in a handful of films this year that show KFF’s appetite for more challenging fare, a trend that hopefully will continue.

By Hannah Gregory

James Turell, Varese Portal Room, 1973

Set in the cedar-dotted hills of Lombardia, above the town of Varese, the Villa Panza is the former home of the prominent collector Guiseppe Panza di Buimo. Varese is one of those Milanese second home kind of places, where on a Sunday afternoon several generations eat gelati together in the alleys of the old town, dressed with sprezzatura. The villa’s outlook is pastoral, its gardens rolling but carefully cultivated in a pseudo-English style: pruned foliage along a gravel path, mowed grass that curves down to a sheltered pond, besides which the season’s first drooping cherry blossom.

An eighteenth century Italian villa is not the most usual context for American conceptual art, but the location hosts an exhibition of works by James Turrell and Robert Irwin, ‘Aisthesis, At the origins of sensations’, the pair of artists that Count Panza di Buimo, early championer of the Light and Space movement in Italy, also commissioned to make site-specific interventions into the residence during the 1970s. The exhibition brings together the correspondence of the Milanese collector and the Californian artists – the postcards that passed from Northern Italy to Los Angeles, “Greetings from the Lavender Pit Copper Mine” – and extends the dialogue beyond Panza’s death, by displaying other works loaned from US collections.

After meeting Robert Irwin at New York’s Pace Gallery, Panza di Biumo soon became enamoured with the Light and Space movement, and its experiments with sensory effects and psychological phenomena. Introduced by Irwin to James Turrell, the exchange would last several decades, culminating in permanent installations to his own abode. What emerges from the narrative of their correspondence, set in the villa’s context, is how Panza was taken in at first by the artists’ radical treatment of art beyond the object, with site-conditioned ideas that had yet to gain prevalence in Italy in the 1960s; then by the mystique of phenomenology that surrounds much of their work; and further, by the romantic notion of ragged American canyons, the landscape that lies beyond Los Angeles’ sprawl.

It was the search for a sublime kind of connection, as well as a declared interest in the sciences behind it, that called Panza to Los Angeles, home to LACMA’s Art & Technology programme, where Turrell and Irwin were running their Ganzfeld experiments into the phenomena of perception. We see the bifurcating paths the pair took after these early trials in two new installations in the villa’s external buildings. The stables host Sight Unseen (2013), a Ganzfeld by Turrell, whose saturated yellow envelops like a buttercup’s glow; its trippy, boundless warmth a contrast to the prim borders of the lawns. Irwin’s Varese Scrim (2013) is installed in the orangery, where long cut-out slots in the walls allow natural light in and provide lines of sight onto the garden, while a series of fine gauze screens make for a geometry of translucent whiteness, according to visitors’ progression through these rhythmic spatial divisions. The ideas of both artists on the relationship between exterior stimuli and interior effects made a deep impression on Panza in the ‘70s: ‘This was a new world that could only be understood by experiencing it and having an encounter that was not simply mental but [to do] with a reality outside oneself’, he remembered. Beyond LACMA, Panza would visit Turrell’s legendary Santa Monica studio at the Mendota Hotel, fly over the Arizonan desert to observe the ever-in-progress Roden Crater project, and host the artist back in Varese, ‘when the nights are long and the silence is profound through the empty villa’ (Panza). Here Turrell even claimed to have witnessed the ghost of the previous owner, the Marquis Menafoglio, ‘in his sumptuous eighteenth century clothes’.

Given the focus of Arte Ambiente – a term that Panza coined to bring an awareness of this art to Italy – on precise spatial context, the historical backdrop of the villa at first feels at odds with the conceptual effect of the works. Turrell’s hologrammic triangles glow in a corridor furnished with red velvet and gold chairs, and an Irwin Dot Painting (1963-5), a canvas of almost imperceptible tiny red and green dots into which the spectator is absorbed, hangs beneath an ornately plastered ceiling. A video interview is installed in what seems to be a repurposed grey marble bathroom. We are at home with the collector, reminded of the old wealth invested in new, contemporary art. Elsewhere, one of Irwin’s slender transparent acrylic columns refracts the light from French windows onto a panelled parquet floor (2011). Through the column through the windows, you can perceive the shades of green of the garden, and beyond that, the hills: the column reaches towards an equilibrium of art, architecture and nature that the collector supported.

Panza wanted to live in a place where the exterior environment complemented the interior space completely, and when his plans for creating a large-scale Conceptual art museum in Italy were rejected, he was compelled to commission Irwin and Turrell for the villa. Expressing an haute-bourgeois wish to be surrounded whenever possible by aesthetic pleasures, he sought ‘[…] a situation in which the discrepancy between the beauty I desired and reality was abolished.’ But more than just the classical acquisition of material objects, this was a desire to possess something all-encompassing, a total situation derived from space and architecture, that could nevertheless be one’s own. Of course now, the villa is public, and to give him his due, the Count’s horizons for exhibiting had once stretched to the renovation of Milan’s Palazzo Reale. He also had visions for many other unrealized museums in Europe, including the Environmental Art Museum, something like the Dia:Beacon in scale. Neatly inked capitals on grid paper list Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, Agnes Martin and Bruce Nauman among those he wanted to import: it was perhaps only when he couldn’t persuade the Italian traditionalists that so much space should be dedicated to Americans that he turned seriously to the space of his own home.

After passing through the once lived-in rooms in which the temporary exhibition is displayed, you arrive at the true transfiguration of palazzo to art space: a long corridor whose light shifts in sunset shades – the passage dedicated to an extensive collection of Dan Flavin (not strictly part of this show) – followed by the six permanent structural interventions by Irwin and Turrell. Notes and plans for the design of these works reveal Panza’s fine-tuning of the environment of each.

‘Think of the Egyptian Tombs carved into the heart of the mountains, where sculpture, reliefs, paintings, architecture, are all coordinated to the same end and where, only twice a year, at the time of the equinoxes, a sunbeam entered an almost invisible opening to illuminate the Pharaoh’s countenance.’

This is what Panza imagined, in an article on the Environmental Art Museum, and it is this sensitivity to quasi-sacred spatial conditions that can be felt in the villa’s final chambers. Turrell’s Lunette (1976) filters crepuscular light through a crescent-shaped window at the end of a vaulted corridor, while Irwin’s original Varese Scrim (1973) creates a passage with a semi-transparent partition wall leading to a rectangular opening, as the viewer approaches, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel. The square cut-out of one of Turrell’s ‘Skyspaces’ (1974–ongoing) – the first I’ve visited – brings a twenty-two degree sky into a squinty square room, where, in the absence of excess visual stimulation, the sounds of airplanes and restless birds reverberate with soaring thoughts.

But perhaps the quietest, most reflective piece to work at the border between architecture and its surroundings is Robert Irwin’s Varese Portal Room (1973). A deep window, without pane, provides a point of observation onto the scenery outside, and reminds us how our understanding of landscape depends on framing – particularly that of landscape painting. Still our viewing experience, thanks to our perceptual and physical presence in the chamber, remains three-dimensional. Light and air stream into the whitewashed, skewed room, to make a space for contemplation, an ideal lookout, a privileged border between inside and outside. It functions on a plane with Stéphane Mallarmé’s description of the window as the ‘crystallization of reality into art’; but there’s a reciprocity, always, between the two: real and represented, what we sense within us, and what we see outside.1 Here we are not so much in the villa, as in the work of art; but without the villa’s walls or its countryside environs, the work of art would not exist.

The sequence of passages, windows, portals and openings that constitute this final wing invites visitors to cross the threshold from reality to artwork, from residential design cues to emptied artistic space. It’s an architecture of both liminal and luminescent effects. I think of Emily Dickinson’s lines: ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one not need be a house; the brain has corridors, surpassing material place.’

1Robert G. Cohn, ‘Mallarme’s Windows’ in Yale French Studies, no. 54 (1977), pp. 23–31, cited in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, Vol. 9, (Summer 1979), p.59.

By Hannah Gregory

James Turrell, Varese Portal Room, 1973

Set in the cedar-dotted hills of Lombardia, above the town of Varese, the Villa Panza is the former home of the prominent collector Guiseppe Panza di Buimo. Varese is one of those Milanese second home kind of places, where on a Sunday afternoon several generations eat gelati together in the alleys of the old town, dressed with sprezzatura. The villa’s outlook is pastoral, its gardens rolling but carefully cultivated in a pseudo-English style: pruned foliage along a gravel path, mowed grass that curves down to a sheltered pond, besides which the season’s first drooping cherry blossom.

An eighteenth century Italian villa is not the most usual context for American conceptual art, but the location hosts an exhibition of works by James Turrell and Robert Irwin, ‘Aisthesis, At the origins of sensations’, the pair of artists that Count Panza di Buimo, early championer of the Light and Space movement in Italy, also commissioned to make site-specific interventions into the residence during the 1970s. The exhibition brings together the correspondence of the Milanese collector and the Californian artists – the postcards that passed from Northern Italy to Los Angeles, “Greetings from the Lavender Pit Copper Mine” – and extends the dialogue beyond Panza’s death, by displaying other works loaned from US collections.

After meeting Robert Irwin at New York’s Pace Gallery, Panza di Biumo soon became enamoured with the Light and Space movement, and its experiments with sensory effects and psychological phenomena. Introduced by Irwin to James Turrell, the exchange would last several decades, culminating in permanent installations to his own abode. What emerges from the narrative of their correspondence, set in the villa’s context, is how Panza was taken in at first by the artists’ radical treatment of art beyond the object, with site-conditioned ideas that had yet to gain prevalence in Italy in the 1960s; then by the mystique of phenomenology that surrounds much of their work; and further, by the romantic notion of ragged American canyons, the landscape that lies beyond Los Angeles’ sprawl.

It was the search for a sublime kind of connection, as well as a declared interest in the sciences behind it, that called Panza to Los Angeles, home to LACMA’s Art & Technology programme, where Turrell and Irwin were running their Ganzfeld experiments into the phenomena of perception. We see the bifurcating paths the pair took after these early trials in two new installations in the villa’s external buildings. The stables host Sight Unseen (2013), a Ganzfeld by Turrell, whose saturated yellow envelops like a buttercup’s glow; its trippy, boundless warmth a contrast to the prim borders of the lawns. Irwin’s Varese Scrim (2013) is installed in the orangery, where long cut-out slots in the walls allow natural light in and provide lines of sight onto the garden, while a series of fine gauze screens make for a geometry of translucent whiteness, according to visitors’ progression through these rhythmic spatial divisions. The ideas of both artists on the relationship between exterior stimuli and interior effects made a deep impression on Panza in the ‘70s: ‘This was a new world that could only be understood by experiencing it and having an encounter that was not simply mental but [to do] with a reality outside oneself’, he remembered. Beyond LACMA, Panza would visit Turrell’s legendary Santa Monica studio at the Mendota Hotel, fly over the Arizonan desert to observe the ever-in-progress Roden Crater project, and host the artist back in Varese, ‘when the nights are long and the silence is profound through the empty villa’ (Panza). Here Turrell even claimed to have witnessed the ghost of the previous owner, the Marquis Menafoglio, ‘in his sumptuous eighteenth century clothes’.

Given the focus of Arte Ambiente – a term that Panza coined to bring an awareness of this art to Italy – on precise spatial context, the historical backdrop of the villa at first feels at odds with the conceptual effect of the works. Turrell’s hologrammic triangles glow in a corridor furnished with red velvet and gold chairs, and an Irwin Dot Painting (1963-5), a canvas of almost imperceptible tiny red and green dots into which the spectator is absorbed, hangs beneath an ornately plastered ceiling. A video interview is installed in what seems to be a repurposed grey marble bathroom. We are at home with the collector, reminded of the old wealth invested in new, contemporary art. Elsewhere, one of Irwin’s slender transparent acrylic columns refracts the light from French windows onto a panelled parquet floor (2011). Through the column through the windows, you can perceive the shades of green of the garden, and beyond that, the hills: the column reaches towards an equilibrium of art, architecture and nature that the collector supported.

Panza wanted to live in a place where the exterior environment complemented the interior space completely, and when his plans for creating a large-scale Conceptual art museum in Italy were rejected, he was compelled to commission Irwin and Turrell for the villa. Expressing an haute-bourgeois wish to be surrounded whenever possible by aesthetic pleasures, he sought ‘[…] a situation in which the discrepancy between the beauty I desired and reality was abolished.’ But more than just the classical acquisition of material objects, this was a desire to possess something all-encompassing, a total situation derived from space and architecture, that could nevertheless be one’s own. Of course now, the villa is public, and to give him his due, the Count’s horizons for exhibiting had once stretched to the renovation of Milan’s Palazzo Reale. He also had visions for many other unrealized museums in Europe, including the Environmental Art Museum, something like the Dia:Beacon in scale. Neatly inked capitals on grid paper list Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, Agnes Martin and Bruce Nauman among those he wanted to import: it was perhaps only when he couldn’t persuade the Italian traditionalists that so much space should be dedicated to Americans that he turned seriously to the space of his own home.

After passing through the once lived-in rooms in which the temporary exhibition is displayed, you arrive at the true transfiguration of palazzo to art space: a long corridor whose light shifts in sunset shades – the passage dedicated to an extensive collection of Dan Flavin (not strictly part of this show) – followed by the six permanent structural interventions by Irwin and Turrell. Notes and plans for the design of these works reveal Panza’s fine-tuning of the environment of each.

‘Think of the Egyptian Tombs carved into the heart of the mountains, where sculpture, reliefs, paintings, architecture, are all coordinated to the same end and where, only twice a year, at the time of the equinoxes, a sunbeam entered an almost invisible opening to illuminate the Pharaoh’s countenance.’

This is what Panza imagined, in an article on the Environmental Art Museum, and it is this sensitivity to quasi-sacred spatial conditions that can be felt in the villa’s final chambers. Turrell’s Lunette (1976) filters crepuscular light through a crescent-shaped window at the end of a vaulted corridor, while Irwin’s original Varese Scrim (1973) creates a passage with a semi-transparent partition wall leading to a rectangular opening, as the viewer approaches, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel. The square cut-out of one of Turrell’s ‘Skyspaces’ (1974–ongoing) – the first I’ve visited – brings a twenty-two degree sky into a squinty square room, where, in the absence of excess visual stimulation, the sounds of airplanes and restless birds reverberate with soaring thoughts.

But perhaps the quietest, most reflective piece to work at the border between architecture and its surroundings is Robert Irwin’s Varese Portal Room (1973). A deep window, without pane, provides a point of observation onto the scenery outside, and reminds us how our understanding of landscape depends on framing – particularly that of landscape painting. Still our viewing experience, thanks to our perceptual and physical presence in the chamber, remains three-dimensional. Light and air stream into the whitewashed, skewed room, to make a space for contemplation, an ideal lookout, a privileged border between inside and outside. It functions on a plane with Stéphane Mallarmé’s description of the window as the ‘crystallization of reality into art’; but there’s a reciprocity, always, between the two: real and represented, what we sense within us, and what we see outside.1 Here we are not so much in the villa, as in the work of art; but without the villa’s walls or its countryside environs, the work of art would not exist.

The sequence of passages, windows, portals and openings that constitute this final wing invites visitors to cross the threshold from reality to artwork, from residential design cues to emptied artistic space. It’s an architecture of both liminal and luminescent effects. I think of Emily Dickinson’s lines: ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one not need be a house; the brain has corridors, surpassing material place.’

1Robert G. Cohn, ‘Mallarme’s Windows’ in Yale French Studies, no. 54 (1977), pp. 23–31, cited in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, Vol. 9, (Summer 1979), p.59.