Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #4

Part 4: The Oldest Piece of Art

While in Tübingen, Germany visiting Kayla, I had an opportunity to wander up to the town’s castle (every town in Germany has a resident castle, it seems) and see the outside of the archaeological museum up there, which houses the oldest piece of recovered human art, dated at 32,000 years old. I didn’t see the artifact itself, but saw a much larger rendition set up outside the museum entrance. The piece—a horse missing its legs—isn’t striking so much for its aesthetics or its design as the giant leap in thought it must have taken in order to make it in the first place.

Imagine: a world in which food and shelter are not entirely dependable and craftsmanship like metallurgy would probably have best been served to forging hunting weapons and other tools. But rather than spend time creating those precious commodities, a craftsperson sat down and created an essentially ‘useless’ object.

A larger representation of the earliest recovered piece of artwork; photo by Taylor Coe

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to read up on this artifact, but I like to imagine that the object itself was not of spiritual or religious importance. If made for the purpose of worship or ritual, then the object is shaded with something other than the title of ‘art.’ That’s not to say that ‘religious art’ is not properly art; I mean to object to the notion that the first piece of art was intrinsically tied to religious purpose. I like to think about the practice of ‘art’ as something engaged in by an individual for that individual. Unlike, making a tool, for instance, which an individual does for the broader community.

But it’s not simply the object that the individual is after; it’s something in the experience of the craft. For this particular craftsperson, I tried to imagine that feeling—that transitory sense of moving past the practical into the impractical, from necessity into art (which I, of course, would argue is also a necessity—though a necessity of a different order).

I tried to imagine their thoughts: “Today I will begin a fruitless and painstaking crafting process. I will make something that is not a tool. It is not useful. It barely begins to serve as a representation of a real horse. Its function is to satisfy something that we have not even named yet: a desire beyond the body, beyond the scope of the everyday world, beyond mere existence.”

Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #3

Part 3 – Cuvilliés Theater

Bear with me:

Squirreled away in the middle of the Residenz Palace complex in Munich, the Cuvilliés Theater was built by Elector of Bavaria Maximilian III Joseph after the former theater burned down. The theater is famous for its rococo style decorations, with golden frieze-work and carving jumping out against their red background. It’s a fabulous looking room and I imagine that watching plays must be sort of difficult with the impressive architecture looming in the near darkness.

View from the stage of the Cuvilliés Theater; via muenchenmusik.de 

Occupying my attention as much as the decoration, however, was what was happening on the stage. Onstage, a group of people was assembling the set for an upcoming play. I was enthralled: relaxed, absorbed, utterly conscious of the mini-dramas occurring onstage. Judging from the groups of people sitting down in seats watching the spectacle the same as Kayla, Adam, and myself, I think they felt the same way. Cameras and sightseeing were momentarily set aside and we watched them construct the stage.

Why this experience was so cleansing, it’s hard to say. It might have been the collective ache of our too-touristy feet; it might have been the plush velvet of the theater seats; it might have been the just-recently consumed liters of Hofbräuhaus beer—as I mentioned, it’s hard to say.

~

It goes without saying that theater can be pretty darn experimental. I’m thinking in particular of performance artists such as Jack Smith and Yvonne Rainer, among others, who took the motions and rhythms of everyday life and transferred them into dance and acting routines. Normal movements—walking across a room or fixing a lamp (I am hypothesizing—not referencing actual works)—become, paradoxically, frustratingly, the stuff of art.

It occurred to me while sitting in the Cuvilliés Theater that this random episode of stagehand-observation could, indeed, be a piece of post-modern performance art. It’s not too hard to imagine. Think about it: you enter the theater to an empty stage, take your reserved seat, and wait for the show to start. Some announcer goes through the traditional rigmarole of telling the audience to turn off their cell phones, etc., etc. and then the show begins. Stagehands crowd the area—setting up for a play that won’t happen. The walls of rooms go up and sinks are installed; a piano is dragged onto the stage; heavier objects are dangled from the rafters above the stage; the lighting designers flash lights on and off.

As I voiced this thought, Kayla sagely opined that the audience would naturally hunt out drama on the stage no matter what was happening there. “If that heavy partition fell,” she said, pointing to one of the room’s walls being shifted into place, “then everyone would gasp.” I think she was right. If that partition had fallen, the entire room would have been startled beyond reason.

~

The entire experience in the theater reminded me of a film that I watched this past semester for my American Avant-Garde Film course; the following is a few thoughts about that film, Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide. The film consists of two still 45-minutes shots—one at sunrise and the other at sunset—of a muddy flat. In both shots, a woman walks past the camera and begins mucking for clams. For the 45 minutes of each shot, she wanders across the camera’s frame, collecting clams. I’ll dig deep into my film journal and provide an excerpt. Think about Jen Casad’s work in relation to the hypothetical stagework done in my imaginary theater piece:

“The central experience for most of the audience (I imagine) centers…on the process of Jen Casad digging for clams. The work being done by Casad effectively mirrors the work that the audience must do to engage with the film. However, upon further thought, the notion that those two forms of “work” are congruent with one another seems preposterous. Is it sensible to draw parallels between the backbreaking labor that Casad engages in and the comparably luxurious work of sitting that we, as the audience, are doing? Sure, they have an established parallel in terms of length, but certainly have no parallel in terms of either back pain or blisters.

A shot from Sharon Lockhart's film Double Tide; via wholo.blogspot.com

So is viewing a film like this “work”? In some sense, I’ve already addressed that question. Yes—of course it is…but it’s mental work. A comparison between Casad and the audience is, in that sense, futile (overlooking, that is, my use of the comparison as merely a starting point). The journey, as an audience, towards an exploration of and a meditation upon this film is simply not the equivalent of Casad’s consistent manual labor. They are different engagements.

Double Tide dives headlong into murky waters once the notion of Casad’s work as performance art emerges in the film. Once it becomes clear that Casad is keeping her clam digging confined to the frame of the camera, her work is casually reduced to an act. Taking cues from the early dance work of Yvonne Rainer dealing with everyday movements, Lockhart crafts a performance that is somewhat more than performance and somewhat less than actual labor. The close-up audio—replete with sucking noises and Casad’s coughing—reinforces the reality of the labor she is engaging in. Although Lockhart is mediating how Casad does her work, in terms of where she works and when she pauses, Lockhart doesn’t—or at least doesn’t fundamentally seem to—change the nature of the work itself.

Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #2

Part 2 – The Information Centre

Pressing onward through some of my reflections from the past weeks, I want to take a moment and remind you all that the following series of entries has its genesis from a journal of mine and that—for better or worse—you’ll have to accept them more as ramblings than as polished pieces of social and/or historical commentary. There will be contradictions and bad arguments and shifting perspectives. A friend emailed me this morning, concerned about my approach to collective memory with regard to the Holocaust; she seemed worried about my discussion of ‘understanding’ and the implications it has for those who did not directly experience the Holocaust (along with other important historical movements, etc.).

As someone interested in the arts (and, more narrowly, someone who [too infrequently] makes art of his own), the issue of experience is one I struggle with daily. Must we experience something in order to have an understanding of it? My friend wisely pointed out—and I will paraphrase and work off what she said—that memory is something crafted over time; we do forget and we craft narratives based that have been simplified and even altered. It is entirely possible to ‘understand’ those narratives; I can ‘understand’ the narrative of the Holocaust as it exists within film culture—from Life Is Beautiful to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to Au Revoir les Enfants—but can I understand the Holocaust in the same way as that woman in Ben and Adam’s tour group who lived through it.

The easy answer is, of course not. But there are some difficult problems lurking beneath the surface of that answer and, for now, I’ll leave them be. (I’m frightened that I will lose the thread of this entire post if I go snatching for fish that I’m sure are there, but not so sure that I can catch.)

~

Beneath the ground level of Peter Eisenman’s impressive memorial, there is an Information Center. In terms of both exhibit and architecture, it provides an apt contrast to the memorial above. Although I used the term ‘exhibits,’ there were really no ‘exhibits’ to speak of. The walk through the center—consisting of 5 or 6 rooms in total—was entirely text, photographs, lighting, and audio installations. I won’t bother with a rundown of the content; you all know the crude outline of the Holocaust [for a long refresher, here’s the Wikipedia page LINK] and I couldn’t do the exceptionally researched and perceptive rendition given of the Center justice by butchering it here. Like the ‘stelae’ above, Eisenman and the curators continued the aesthetic of veiled symbolism.

‘Stelae,’ for those who were confused by that term in the last entry, are monuments that have been popular amongst a wide array of cultures, from the Maya through the Ming Dynasty in China. They were used as funerary markers, but they also functioned as commemorative or didactic texts. The ‘stelae’ constructed by Eisenman could be either funerary, commemorative, or didactic above ground, but below ground—where their imprint is seen in the ceiling of the Information Center—they became clearly funerary once I entered the second room of the center.

In that room, panels of lights—the same shape and size as the ‘stelae’ above and lined up directly with their granite brethren above—gave individual accounts of the Holocaust. In almost all the cases, these scraps of writings, which came largely from diaries, journals, and letters, were found on the bodies of deceased Jews. Here’s an example from Herman Kruk, whose journals have been published as a book, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, available through Yale University Press:

What is my life even worth if I remain alive? Whom to return to in my old hometown of Warsaw? For what and for whom do I carry on this whole pursuit of life, enduring, holding out—for what?

~

The curious thing about this room of lit panels is that, despite their being made of similar material to the floor, no one walks on them—mirroring the walking patterns of those who are walking above through the ‘stelae’ field. The light is somehow sacred and other and I see only one woman trod on the corner of a panel during my 15 minutes in the room. The light affects us in all kinds of ways. If there’s one face-value criticism that I might offer of the center, it’s that the badly lit rooms make all the text they offer extremely difficult to read. On reflection, though, I began to think that the lighting was part of the point.

These stories are hard to read, but the lighting choices allow the Information Center to reinforce that quality. After nearly 45 minutes in the rooms of the center, my eyes were tired and exhausted and literally aching for some sunlight. They’re not making it easy for us and I respect that. 

Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #1

Hello, faithful readers… It’s nice to know that some of you haven’t given up one me! I’ve been away on a trip through Germany and Austria over the past two and a half weeks—something I hinted at in previous posts, but didn’t really have the heart to fully (and honestly) hit you over the head with. At one point a few weeks ago, I thought that I might get a few posts written ahead of time and then post them out on the road, but that plan quickly fell apart.

Given my recent travels and the sometime hankering for a more ‘study-abroad’ type of blog, I’ve made a decision to publish a series of posts from today through April 30 (next Monday) focusing on some of my thoughts—artistic and otherwise—that I had over my travels. Recorded in my ‘arts’ journal, these entries will (more often than not) focus on a particular cultural place or experience.

~

Part 1 – Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe

Retrospectively, it seems strange that in the course of my wanderings through art-based websites (and, more generally, through the odd world of the Internet itself) I have never stumbled upon any images or information about this memorial. While that might make me amusingly ignorant to some of you out there, it guaranteed me an experience that I suspect many you will not have had: I walked up the memorial having no idea what to expect.

If you have not seen this memorial and cannot so much as picture its basic layout, then I beg you to cease reading (I’m looking at you, Kayla). Think of this as a *spoiler alert*. Don’t read any further if you want an innocent experience of the memorial. I beg it of you.

~

Now that we’ve disposed of the uninitiated (hopefully…), we can get down to business. Which, it turns out, might not be all that much. As it turns out, architect Peter Eisenman’s masterful, ‘deconstructivist’ work has been analyzed, poked, prodded, and deconstructed itself in so many ways since its opening in 2004 that anything I say might as well be recognized as redundant. That admission out of the way, I can’t help but want to discuss this memorial; it’s easily the most enigmatic architectural reflection on history, hatred, and human society I’ve ever experienced.

What helped my experience was the story that my friends Ben and Adam had related to me the day before visiting the memorial. Having arrived in Berlin a day earlier than me, they joined a walking tour of the city that brought them past the memorial. Stopping for a brief chat, the group and the tour guide were shocked to discover that a Holocaust survivor was among them. This older woman—I got no further description from Ben and Adam of her—became an authoritative presence; she ended up on the receiving end of questions about the experience of being at the memorial. One of the questions that someone in the walking tour directed at her was how it made her feel to see little children running across the tops of the ‘stelae’ of the memorial—jumping the small gaps between the sometimes 15-foot high granite blocks. The woman shrugged at the question and said that it may have been disrespectful, but they were too young to understand.

~

Indeed, as we move further and further away in time from the Holocaust, that’s the key issue: understanding. As the collective memory of the Holocaust disappears and the remaining participants in that era die off (someone born at the tail end of May 1945 would be 66 years old today), the Holocaust becomes a tragedy more and more in line with the legacy of slavery in the United States. As awful as the era of slavery in the South was in the U.S., there’s no one around today to serve as witness to it. That’s not to say that slavery does not have a huge legacy in the U.S. today; it does!—but only that the horrors have faded and our understanding of the slavery world is slipping.

The same might be said of the Holocaust. Whether or not you, reader, agree, I personally feel divorced from the events of the Holocaust. So much of the rhetoric surrounding the Holocaust involves words like ‘unimaginable’ and ‘impossible’ and ‘beyond imagination’ and ‘inhuman.’ These things—by definition—are beyond us. No matter how many gag-inducing photographs we see, no matter how many heart-wrenching accounts we read, no matter how many personal narratives are pored over, we can never capture that experience—I, at least, feel that I can never properly understand. You all know that I’m one for imagination; I believe in the ability of a male writer to assume a female voice and vice versa. I believe in the ability of a black person to assume the voice of an Asian man. I believe in all these swaps and understandings across gender, culture, etc. But one of the exchanges I can never quite come to terms with is the attempt to encapsulate the voice of a Jew during the Holocaust if one is not already such. I would offer that Anne Frank’s diary stands as enduring testament to that notion.

A view of the memorial from the middle; photo by Taylor Coe

But all this is moving quite beyond the scope of the memorial…back to that old woman and her resigned acceptance of the children’s innocence. I focus on this brief anecdote because it attempts to divide everyone evenly into two camps: the innocent and the experienced. As innocent as I am not, I am not experienced either—at least, not experienced in the same way as this old woman.

This is all a prelude to my odd admission that, as weird and uncomfortable as it may have felt in the middle of the memorial—where the ‘stelae’ are 12-15 feet high and extend weirdly in half a city block in every direction and you see no one else in any direction and the brick ground below you pulses like a sine curve—it was also sort of thrilling and fun.

~

That thought looks even worse in writing than it sounded in my head. Ouch. Perhaps I will be misunderstood—that would be a travesty. In admitting that my time at the ‘Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe’ was ‘thrilling and fun’ at moments, I don’t mean to undermine the power and meaning of the memorial or disrespect the memory of the people for whom it was built. My initial reaction to these fleeting feelings of excitement was repression; how could I feel anything so ‘joyful’ and ‘inappropriate’ as fun in this place?

A stranger ducks through the memorial's 'stelae'; photo by Taylor Coe

But it’s hard not to smile when Ben and Adam crisscross past me in the gridwork of ‘stelae,’ grinning broadly at me as they flash between granite blocks. And we’re not the only ones. I see smiles on other passersby, who blink past me among the stony stacks. There is even some muted laughter. And what’s so wrong with that? The more I considered these reactions, the clearer it became. These reactions were not ones of disrespect or distaste; they were evidence of the staying power of the human spirit, the will to move on. The motto ‘forgive but never forget’ has been a tagline of the Holocaust, but more appropriate might be the Proustian ‘forget without forgetting.’ Memory, as Proust has so glibly reminded me in the past four months, is not so simple as ‘remember’ and ‘forget.’ There is a type of forgetting where the knowledge sinks to the back of our minds and rests there—not forgotten and entirely disappeared—but dormant and present.  

So, ducking in and out of the memorial—thinking, reflecting, laughing a bit—I could not stop thinking of Proust and how our collective memory remembers, forgives, and forgets. Part 2 will return briefly to the memorial before heading below to the museum.

The memorial had rules posted on plaques on the outskirts; of particular interest is the regulation that "1. Throughout the year, entry to the Field of Stelae is at the risk of the individual." ; photo by Taylor Coe

Nothing [Including Family?] Is Gonna Change

What makes Justin Townes Earle such a fascinating artist to follow is not just how he lives in the immense shadows cast by both his father Steve Earle and his namesake Townes Van Zandt, but how he seamlessly incorporates personal material into his work. And it’s not the kind of “personal” that most singer-songwriters pursue; it’s not just ‘life-out-on-the-road’ or another relationship that ended up in the crapper. It’s the kind of personal material that asks for explication; you need a little biographical background to wrap your head around what Earle is struggling with in his fourth full-length record Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now.

The opener and closer most closely address the familial issues that are closest to home in Earle’s best work. His best song was (and remains, even in light of this great new album) “Mama’s Eyes” off his second album Midnight Movies, which is as much an ode to his father as it is to his mother. Although his father has long occupied a troubled place in his life (leaving his mother and taking him on tour with a still-severe drug habit), he has still clearly gifted him some minimal admission into the world of music and some part of his large musical talent. That said, as Earle has mentioned in many interviews, his mother remains the dominating parental influence on his life. The lyrics of “Mama’s Eyes” reflect that influence, as Earle claims “I’ve got my mama's eyes, / her long thin frame and her smile / and I still see wrong from right / ‘cause I’ve got my mama’s eyes.”

But familial issues do not fade with time; they are markers of personality. Earle acknowledges this from the opening line of “Am I That Lonely Tonight?,” the first track on the album: “I hear my father on the radio / singing ‘take me home again.’” His father is a continuous presence in his life and he cannot disregard his father’s presence, given that they both occupy the same folk/rock/country circuit. Both his father and his mother appear on the final track “Movin’ On,” which is by far the most powerful track on the album.

A slow country shuffle that picks up speed as it delves further and further in Earle’s life, it explores the caustic relationship between himself, his mother, and his father. I don’t know that there has been better lyric written about divorce from the perspective of the child: “And then she asks me how my father’s been / and we both pretend we don’t know why.” But the song doesn’t stop there; Earle can’t help himself from digging deeper. He imagines journeying back in time and being, first, at the moment that his parents met and, second, at the moment when “[his] father broke [his] mother’s heart in half.” The chorus of the song sways to the definitely half-hearted assertion from Earle that he’s “trying to move on.” While I don’t doubt that he’s trying, it’s hard to say whether or not he’s making any progress.

There’s a self-reflexive question involved there: as much as he tries to get away from his familiar troubles, should he really want to? As troublesome as the issues are (and as callous as I feel in suggesting this), there is a certain impetus that might sway a singer-songwriter like Earle to dwell a little further on these problems in his past, given the fertile lyrical and melodic territory they have provided. Of course, you can accuse me of being callous, but I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine. I’ve heard enough small-time singer-songwriters wallow in self-pity, tapping that vein to indulge their songwriting…is it so hard to believe that big-league (i.e. ‘better’) songwriter like Earle wouldn’t do something of the same?