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Untitled photograph (nude 2) by Christos Stavrou © 2008
I wish I could send you a chocolate Jesus, maybe that abandoned one which they failed to exhibit last year in New York… But in the end, I guess you’ll be equally satisfied with few mint chocolates in a box and a photograph of an almost chocolate body… It is my easter present of course. Chocolates and one sudden thought, if my bath is running hot enough, make me realise that you are always around here.
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“How did beauty begin? Earth-cult, suppressing the eye, locks man in the belly of mothers. There is, I insist, nothing beautiful in nature. Nature is primal power, coarse and turbulent. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.” (from the book Sexual Personae by C. Paglia © 1990).
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Chocolate Jesus by Tom Waits:
Despite my unfortunate absence for few weeks, and now just by the last day of January, here is the first post of the month and the year… The most exciting thing recently meeting my senses, which is no less than an omen of those promising and welcoming things to come.. So…
Let the new year begin!
‘Dissemblance en série’. Montage vidéo de ma dernière production chorégraphique présentée en avril 2007 à l’Agora de la danse. (‘Serial Dissimilarity’. Contemporary dance choreography presented at Studio de l’Agora de la dance, Montreal, april 2007).
Interprètes: Julie Bessette, Cathy Bourgoin, Caroline Carreau, Caroline Charbonneau, Gabriel Doucet, Marie-Pière Durocher et Audrée Hotte.
Musique: Les 4 saisons - L’été - Presto • Antonio Vivaldi.
Choreography and vdeo by Pascal Desparois.
“It was a piece about feeling different and not fitting in, and realizing that everyone felt the same way. It also talked about our trueselves vs the projected image of our selves and the disfunction between the two (the reason for the mirror & the videos).” Pascal Desparois
The New Model Army keeps touring and recording constantly for over 26 years. I remember very well their first albums. I played them so often in my turntable, back in my old home when I was collecting vinyl records and used to work in record shops. And there was a track, Side A - track 3 from the Ghost of Cain LP, which people played too many times and then had to search for a new copy all the time…
NMA is a music band not easily classified. Punk, folk, indie, gothic, even acoustic or metal forms and influences surface in their music… As this article writes, they should be recognised as “a very versatile underground cult rock band with many different musical roots.” But what makes NMA more special is their poetic lyrics, often with political and humanitarian messages. This is Here comes the war (1993):
Today, as you listen to this song
Another 394,000 children were born into this world
They break like waves of hunger and desire upon these eroded shores
Carrying the curses of history and a history yet unwritten
The oil burns in thick black columns, the buzz saws echo through the forest floor
They shout give us our fair share, give us justice
Here comes the war [..] You screamed give us Liberty or give us Death
Now you’ve got both, what do you want next ?
Here comes the war - put out the lights on the Age of Reason.
The band was recently refused entry to US and had to cancel their arranged tour. “We have been informed that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has taken precisely 20 weeks (instead of the usual 8 or 9) to DENY our I-129 Non Immigrant Visa Applications,” NMA manager Tommy Tee said in a statement. “I can only apologize on behalf of the band, as I know how much work has gone into all these shows. For our part, having spent the past four years trying to rebuild the fan base and reputation of the band in North America after a long absence, we are bitterly disappointed. “
“We’re really puzzled by this refusal to issue visas,” frontman Justin Sullivan added. “Over the last few years, we’ve worked a lot in America, building up to this tour with a well-received album, good press and good ticket sales. And during this time we’ve encountered no problems with the authorities and have been received with courtesy and hospitality throughout the country.”
NMA has managed to sound contemporary all this time along. Take for example, the song Spirit of the Falklands from 1982. Back then, war became a useful card in the political game. Thatcher in Britain and Galtieri in Argentina send their countries to war and invested on patriotism shifting the focus from their deep internal social and economical problems. And the winner of course not only manipulated the social agenda but reversed their unpopularity…
It seems that NMA’s meaningful stance may bring to them occasional troubles, like those sudden visa problems. O tempora o mores! But it also ties together a strong and faithful audience beyond material national borders.
Yesterday, NMA played in Leeds Metropolitan University. I found a place in the front line to take photos. A brave decision!… I literally squeezed myself against the metal bars, was pushed and shoved in the rhythms of the dancing waves and the body frenzy behind me, struggled to capture some stable moments and protect my gear!
The interaction between the band and the people was very warm and alive. Justin Sullivan’s energy and body language was reflected back by almost messianic reactions of faith and joy by people in the crowd climbing on top of others to sing along.
Photo by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved (Click on image for full view)
The University of Leeds expands through the north of the city. But, what do we see? A major educational institution is perhaps the answer… but what else?… Can we see the layers of reality unfolding over, the same way as an amalgam of different buildings from separate epochs compete for space?
Do we see a leading force in teaching and research? Yes, but what are its aims? Knowledge of what and for what? Is it there for supplying skilled labour to local and international businesses? Is it imagined as a kind of garden for individuals to flourish, or a well thought and managed sausage-factory?
Consider coldly, and rather impartially, who takes the decisions and who influences its strategies and plans? What is its role in the society; is it part of a process serving social needs -and who defines those of course, or elitist aspirations and stakeholders’ interests? Is it part of a wider movement toward the democratisation of education and well-being, or reproduces the existing structures of social power and control? Maybe we should start from the simple question, who has access to this institution, and who hasn’t…
Photo by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved (Click on image for full view)
In 1896, the first female student began a course here, who, according to Wikipedia, studied Modern Literature and Education - itself quite a feminised subject as we may comment now. So, have things changed? Considering of course that we want social change and inclusion, rather than just rhetoric. Is social class, and gender and ethnicity and dis-ability and all the other social barriers finally entities of the past, or are they still reproduced? What about young people with a history of mental health difficulties or with a criminal record, do have they access?… What about the millions of international students whose parents can not afford the £25,000 approximate fee (without counting other costs) for a three years degree?…
Maybe it is not a question of ‘either/or‘, maybe it’s a question of ‘both/and‘. And it remains for the viewer to make sense of some form of reality through the pragmatic and modernised new rhetoric. So, can we see through?
‘The Eternal Children‘ is a documentary directed by David Kleijwegt (2006). Shown in 6 parts below, it’s about a group of musicians, including Devendra Banhart, Anthony & The Johnsons, CocoRosie and others, who share a common spirituality and lyrical understanding of the world.
Young and colourful musicians, ‘with their eyes wde-open’, but not naive, but with hope; a young generation that shifts away from the rage and depression of early 90s, as Anthony Hegarty remarks.
This is a photograph (above) of staff members of WBAI (an anti-war, non-commercial New York radio station of the 60s) including Bob Fass, Larry Josephson and Steve Post. It is a photograph made by Richard Avedon in 1969.
And this is a photograph (below) by Brian Griffith from a massive corporate photography project he has just completed for his client London and Continental Railways. He has produced a wide and impressive range of portraits of the people who built the Channel Tunnel’s high speed rail link.
The final work, a collaboration with art director Greg Thorton called Teamphoto, is exhibited right now at the German Gymnasium, 26 St Pancras Road, London until 19 November. You can view more of these photos here.
In a recent interview in BJP (3 October 2007, p.28) Griffin points out his influences, which were Avedon’s classic ‘In the American West’, Russian constructivism, Edward Hopper, David Lynch, 17th century painting and 1960s fashion photography.
Griffin, as seen in the photo above, depicts the men in suits in a rather humorous way, emphasising something of the egocentricity or conceitedness of the management. It is in fact a contrasting approach compared with the glorifying images of workers and labourers as seen in his other work.
Avedon’s influence nevertheless is stark: Both, in the formal arrangements (use of frame lines to crop figures and faces, merged bodies, lack of three dimensional space by removing foreground and background elements), and in the emotional impact of the photo, capturing something of isolation and egocentrism, nonetheless creating a sense of rather irritating but interesting, intense context.
Through a bizzare series of mental associations and following the viewing of these ‘workplace’ photos, I went seeking in my room for an old jazz record by John Coltrane, The Africa/Brass sessions. I played the second track, ‘The Song of Underground Railroad’ based on folk tunes from the past of African people in America. The songs of the underground railroad refer to the slavery period and had coded meanings to bring the slaves to freedom.
How am I to think what is photography, nonetheless good photography? I’m shown images every day, I turn my eyes to pictures everywhere, even if I close my eyes images do not disappear.
If I was to use a camera like an automatic machine producing blasts of pictures, indiscriminately capturing unique and single moments of light, time and viewpoints, would that be photography? If I combine these images and create new ones, (alas, they never remain static and fixed), would this qualify as photography?
Jon Austin polaroids © 2007 (www.jonstanleyaustin.com)
Is it about its formal characteristics, its representational qualities, its communicative capacities, that makes a photograph as such; it must be. But then is every image also a photograph… and if not, why?
“There is no such thing as silence!” shouts John Cage under a veil of constant sound, in the end of a short film called ‘Sound’ that I saw recently online. In this film, John Cage’s endless enigmatic questions about sound are juxtaposed with Raashan Roland Kirk’s musical jazz experiments in a shared exploration for music’s boundaries. And it strikes me how the same questions could be asked about photography within a symmetric and parallel framework challenging photography’s boundaries…
“Silence is not a question [...] There’s no such thing as no sound. It’s simply a question of what sounds we intend and what sounds we do not intend” says John Cage. And later on he asks again: “But is this music?”
And as long as darkness is also not a question, why isn’t every image a photograph? What more does it need? And in more pragmatic contemporary terms, why the vast majority of circulated images conform to a very restricted sense of what is a photograph, firmly tied to commercial norms and mainstream cultural ideals of beauty?
When Cage asks, why is it so difficult for so many people to listen, we could add: and to view as well. Is it possible that under the ubiquitous production of a certain kind of images we become less able to view?
Is it possible that we prefer and call ‘photography’ the images that look beautiful? And if we drop beauty, what are we left with, truth? But then again, would that be photography?…
Click at the video-picture above and you will be transfered to Ubu website to view that wonderful little gem video from 1966. Enjoy!
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