A Singularity of Voice

Music for a While by Henry Purcell is one of this country’s musical gems. According to critic Tom Service writing in The Guardian last year (6 Dec ‘10) the second movement of Purcell’s Oedipus (1692) is equable with his song of five years earlier O solitude, my sweetest choice (1687). I do wonder what characteristics music should have to be amongst Service’s gems (would we find Robert Wyatt’s Sight of the Wind?). And yet I don’t disagree with his claim, but hasten to add two other Purcell jewels: the hymn Now that the sun hath veiled his light and the aria The Plaint from The Fairy-Queen. A wistful, melancholy lyricism – what Peter Ackroyd in his book Albion calls ‘plangent sadness’, with its mournful, wave-like sense – unites all of these pieces (perhaps plangent sadness is continuity that links Purcell and Wyatt?).

O solitude, my sweetest choice!

Places devoted to the night,

Remote from tumult and from noise,

How ye my restless thoughts delight!

The twelve-note ground underpinning O Solitude returns again and again for the duration of the performance with rhythmic inevitably. It is a cycle that captures the listener, conspiring with these lyrics that express desire for darkness, isolation and order.

Music for a while

Shall all your cares beguile.

Wond'ring how your pains were eas'd

And disdaining to be pleas'd

Till Alecto free the dead

From their eternal bands,

Till the snakes drop from her head,

And the whip from out her hands.

As in O Solitude, ground bass – this time ascending – is a continuous element around which Music for a while hangs. When heard accompanied by harpsichord the first cycle amplifies its ponderous momentum. Hearing this in my early twenties at the waning of a teen infatuation with post-punk I understood Music for a while to be a proscription of music, if only for a little bit. I was staggered that something so old could sound so modern – it was short at four minutes; it seemed to be about angst and alienation; and most staggeringly of all it was about music, it was ‘meta’. To this day I am impressed by literature, visual art and music that, however meekly, shows self-awareness of its own conditions. There was Brecht, but there was also Music for a while which had, four hundred years earlier, commented on the edifying, consolatory or ameliorative qualities of art. Today O solitude is usually heard on compilations of Purcell songs, tweezered from its original context as the second of four incidental pieces composed for John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus (1692). The contextual detail is instructive; it demonstrates that the affective quality of music was taken seriously earlier than even the Elizabethan era.

The Oedipus story comes from Greek mythology. Alecto referred to in the lyrics is, according to Virgil, one of three minor deities in Greek mythology known as the Erinyes. Meaning literally ‘the avengers’ the Erinyes’s role was to seek vengeance by punishing those that committed a crime. Of the three Erinyes described by Virgil, Alecto is given the role of persecuting those who kill a parent – such as Oedipus. The Erinyes are depicted as having wreathes of snakes for hair with blood that dripped from their eyes. Dryden would have understood the writhing, bleeding, hissing snakes as an image of violent insanity. Where Oedipus is considered to have been a reasonable ruler, free of emotion and prejudice, Alecto is quite the opposite with a mind torn apart by a multitude of voices. In the seventh book of his Politica Aristotle discusses the instructive or cathartic qualities of music. Music could have the effect of creating calm and clarity, building moral character, and introspective contemplation – a tool for restoring reason. If Alecto stands for irrational rage and violence when the snakes drop from her dead the ameliorative qualities of music restore her to order. Music here is a tool for restoring reason.

Music, too, interjects into time, effecting strange transformations of temporality. In the epilogue of his 1932 biography of Purcell, A.K. Holland laments the neglect of his subject, ‘the most professional composer in English musical history’. Misunderstood outside of his century, Purcell’s ‘harmonic licenses’ suffered from being treated as ‘faults of grammar, of the occasional aberrations of a man of genius which need correction.’ His compositions, Holland argues, simply fell prey to those with a ‘mania for making “arrangements”’; bass had been unscrupulously altered and the harmonies emasculated. Otherwise it was a matter of selection whereby the least interesting anthems and services were chosen. Combined with a style of singing that usually halves the intended pace, church choirs have managed to prove that Purcell is ‘one of the dullest composers of religious music that ever existed.’ Writing in the early thirties Holland tells us there is no department in which Purcell is performed as a matter of course; nor was there a society (at the time of his writing) devoted to studying and performing him:

The result is that Purcell… is totally unknown to professionals, except in a few songs and perhaps a keyboard piece or two, and is generally regarded by them as a composer of amateurs.

Yet Holland does not despair. He realises other composers too have been written off, treated merely as of historical interest, to later be revived and ritualistically worshipped – in particular Bach and Mozart. Indeed in my edition of 1948 Holland footnotes the passage above, conceding that: ‘The above passage (written in 1932) is perhaps a little rhetorical and exaggerated. It is, of course, less true since the advent of the B.B.C.’s Third Programme.’

It was Music for a while Alfred Deller sang for Michael Tippett, who had been encouraged to listen to the unlikely lay-clerk following a performance of the composer’s Plebs Angelica at Canterbury Cathedral in wartime 1944 (according to music critic Alan Blyth on the sleevenotes of the 1984 Decca Grandi Voci series on Deller it was 1943). In the choir practice room which appeared, as Tippett puts it, ‘not to have been dusted since Orlando Gibbons was there in the seventeenth century’, the centuries ‘rolled back’. Despite the poor arrangement that accompanied Deller Tippett recognised immediately that this was the very voice for which Purcell had written. 'When you sing for me,' Tippett told Deller, 'I shall give you the old English classical name for your voice, which is countertenor’. Until then Deller and those around him had understood the voice as alto. Deftly swift, Tippett situated the voice in a moment of recognition that, by all accounts, launched the career of the first modern countertenor.

In the year following the singer's death in 1979 Tippett recalled in his obituary for the journal Early Music that Deller's first performance as countertenor had been singing the "Esurientes" part of J.S. Bach's Magnificant. Morley College choir, where Tippett was then director of music, was not ready, he felt, to perform Purcell. Nor it seemed were the critics who were so put off by the use of recorders in the Bach that in a subsequent performance of Purcell's Ode for St.Cecilia's Day that section was hidden out of sight. It wasn't however until 1946 that Deller's voice reached a broader general public over the radio airwaves. For the inaugural broadcast of the Third Programme, BBC's national radio network for the arts, he sang Purcell's Come, ye Sons of Art. It's perfectly likely that Deller was one of those reforming voices Chesterton heard on the Third Programme that caused him to revoke his 'rhetorical and exaggerated' statement on the neglect of Purcell.

Demand for the countertenor following this performance was such that it enabled him to take up singing full-time. He left Canterbury cathedral choir to join St. Paul's in 1947 and three years later, in 1950, assembled the Deller Consort. For the following twenty-five years the Consort gave themselves, under the auspices of Deller, to performing and recording historically accurate works of, initially, English Renaissance music and then French, German and Italian music of the Renaissance and earlier. (In A Desert Island Discography of 1970 pianist Glenn Gould writes on Hermit's Choice, a Canadian spin-off radio show based on BBC's Desert Island Discs format. In spite of his 'peerless reputation as the country's most experienced hermit' Gould was never invited to give his selection. This he hopes to rectify by writing the article. Alongside Bruno Maderna's Schoenberg and Karajan's Berlin Philharmonic Sibelius is the Deller Consort's recording for the Archiv label of the hymns and anthem of Orlando Gibbons)... More shortly.

The East Anglians

Three years ago I interviewed the photographer Justin Partyka here for Caught By The River. The interview took place in a west Norfolk churchyard just days before Partyka's exhibition The East Anglians opened at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, University of East Anglia, in Norwich.

The American Monument Walks Out

I was at an academic conference trying to chat up the writer Geoff Dyer. He’d finished reading a short poetic essay on the nightscapes of Indian photographer Dayanita Singh and after a public conversation took questions. I couldn’t ask anything intelligent-sounding so waited until the end.

A month earlier in San Francisco there had been one of those perennial events where experts assemble to discuss whether photography as a discipline is in crisis. This time it was flatly called ‘Is Photography Over?’ Dyer spoke.

Judging by his writing Dyer has a sense of humour and a wry appreciation of dilettantism. ‘Dude,’ I said as he put away his papers, ‘is photography really over?’ ‘Ah you mean the conference?’ he quipped, peering up at me, ‘listen to this: on the second day the photographer Lee Friedlander stood up in the middle of some professor’s talk, huffed, threw his hands in the air and walked out… probably to go and take photos!’

Friedlander, who has spent a lifetime inquiring into the specific characteristics of the photograph by taking photographs, walks out on a professor speaking on the muddying of the specific characteristics of the photograph by contemporary art practice, visual culture and new technologies. An image fixed in my mind: old man Friedlander – a pioneer who lives the philosophy of photography – in his multipocket waistcoat walking out on the photography establishment. It was an allegory waiting for its proper application.

With Andrew Lacon at OUTPOST in Norwich

In conversation with photographer Andrew Lacon Saturday 19 November 2011 on the occasion of his solo exhibition A Magnitude in Albion at OUTPOST gallery, Norwich, 2 - 21 November 2011. For further information about Lacon's show at OUTPOST go here. Daniel Campbell Blight has reviewed it for This is Tomorrow here.

Retrofit My Eighties

I’ve been checking over my oeuvre – raiding the archive – for evidence of whether I paid attention to cultural events of the eighties (fig. 1 & 2).

Fig.1

I found some writing too from summer 1989: ‘today Suzie (the family cat) went to sleep in a plastic bag.’ It had been written first by my mum and then copied out by me, not as some kind of postmodern strategy to illustrate the uni-vocal nature of writing, but simply as an exercise to even get me to write. As you can see I wasn’t the great chronicler of the nineteen-eighties.

Fig. 2

I was born too late and by the time I’d developed the skill set and desire to document my surroundings it was 1989. As such there is no evidence in my early works of the influence of Brotherhood by New Order – missed that; Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense with David Byrne in the big suit – missed that; The Clothes Show – missed that; the weatherman delivering the forecast on a floating UK in the Mersey river – missed that; the Wall coming down – missed that; Roland Rat – missed that. Curiously, however, in a deep way these examples – and I can think of many more – are part of who I am. Not only do I experience those cultural events listed as homely, significantly, I feel a sense of ownership too… And just to be clear, there are no other eras before the eighties that I have this deep identification with, only an historical interest.

Over the week leading up to this evening I mentioned to a few friends and colleagues that I’d be talking in public about my memories of the eighties. ‘You spent your eighties in a nappy,’ one blurted; ‘were you even born then?’ another friend asked, winnowing like a horse, ‘you’re not fit to tell anyone about the eighties.’

Well, let me tell you this: my earliest memory is 1992.

Growing up, if the television was off the radio was on; between them an omniscient benign calming presence. Calming because as many parents know, the quickest way to a cooing pacified child is to put them in front of a television or, increasingly, an ipad. The earliest I recall paying attention to music and television was in the early nineties. Then the fabric of my daily life folded imperceptible into the different media – television programmes, radio music – that engaged and affected my emotions. Before I became conscious that music had a history to be explored, my relationship with music and television was one of pure immanence: I knew the new and the new were the nineties. Except I wonder why as a sixteen year-old listener of The King of Rock N’ Roll by Scottish pop group Prefab Sprout the words just came to me, as if inscribed in my mind? Or here is another scenario; try to imagine this: Peterborough five years ago, being transfixed by a fifty-something year old man in tracksuit bottoms with a Morrisons bag. Behind the transfixion was a glimmer of recognition like realising the face of a long-lost family member. This barely-tangible feeling lingered for a few days before leaving my mind. It was then seven months ago I discovered this long lost relative whilst scanning google images. He wasn’t family at all, but none other than Jeff Banks, the fashion designer and former presenter of the BBC Clothes Show.

Why, I’m curious to know, is it that a decade given to the images and sounds of androgyny, detachment and hollow emotion, feels so familiar, so homely? Perhaps the answer is this straightforward: I was hailed by the most beguiling images of the world from within the domestic setting by the radio and that most infamous debunker of the hearth the television. It’s both familiar and homely precisely because as an unengaged child I was hailed in the home.

Later it was rooting through charity shops, the nation’s great secular unsanitised living museums of the immediate past that I really gained a sense of the ‘structure of feeling’ of the eighties. There is no better way to colour in the everyday details of an era, its fabrics, cuts, smells and food stains… In addition to garments they were (and often still are) also stocked with all kinds of media: walkmans and their tapes; turntables and their vinyl; VCRs and their cassettes. This ‘residual media’ as it has come to be known by the academy – the obsolete, neglected and leftover technologies from earlier eras, were available in profusion. Bronski Beat vinyl for 10p, Howard Jones 70p, Pet Shop Boys 38p (why 38p?) the Immaculate Collection on double LP for one pound! All these pop records, sometimes a box with three Annie Lennox records, were easy to obtain and listen to.

Between VH1’s I Love the Eighties and the BBC’s I Love the Eighties (tagline: ‘the decade that redefined big hair’) there is no remainder. The content of each blur into one, their voices univocal in the same pop narrative. Furthermore, between VH1’s I Love the Eighties, which seemed to rerun from the late nineties through into the new millennium, and the BBC’s I Love the Eighties, occupying a prime time slot, the audience was big. And why is it so often comedians that are employed as talking heads for such programs, as if the eighties is simply whimsy to be ridiculed by a man from the West country in a blazer with long hair and a beard who presents like an overgrown student? Such programs cohere an idea of the era, of ‘then’. It isn’t just the eighties and before that get this treatment. The nineties got it and still gets it just as the noughties did and does – each decade contained, misleadingly discretely, as though there is no overspill. ‘Then’ denotes a ten-year duration; leveling it out. It was as the noughties proceeded, Simon Reynolds writes in his recent book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its own Past, that the interval between something happening and its being revisited seemed to shrink ‘insidiously’. He takes the BBC’s I Love The New Millennium as case in point, a programme that aired in 2008 before the decade was even finished proving, ironically, its hate for the millennium by insisting upon its obsolescence.

Don’t be under any illusions, this effect of offering up the recent past as the latest thing, either as heritage, vintage or retro, happened in the 1980s. Early novels of Jonathan Raban bemoan the ‘merrying of England’; cultural historians Patrick Wright and Raphael Samuel, in their different ways, made brilliant diagnostics inside the decade in question. As heir to this position Reynolds observes the accelerated way in which pop culture of the noughties narrativises and recycles its own immediate past. Our society is obsessed by nostalgia, so-called retromania and vintage – of consuming yesterday’s past. If there are any of you who watch The Only Way is Essex you’ll know that Lydia, by way of Lady Gaga, is obsessed by 'vintage'. On the occasion of the launch of her new cake shop those not in vintage were not allowed in. The party was a funky mélange of clichés. ‘What exactly is vintage?’ asks one of the characters. ‘If it looks old and smells, it’s vintage’.

Perhaps the question is this: to what extent can we separate the integrated circuit of film, television, publishing, advertising and music industries that trade upon the past from historical memory? We might call this collective memory – popular public acceptances or recollections of history. The collective memory is where historical events and people help create and maintain societal institutions and traditions as well as personal identities as members of a particular culture. In this respect there are two main positions on the influence of media on the contemporary subject: a pessimist might contest the television is the principal means in the postmodern world for scrambling historical time, preventing the postmodern subject from reaching the past. Whilst others of the more optimistic bent see it as the means by which the contemporary world, in all its aspects including its historical determinations, can be ‘worked through’ and known.

To retrofit, the dictionary informs, is to take something old – a computer, a plane, a property, and improve or update it with parts not available at the time of its manufacture. As an expression retrofit gained currency in the UK in the late eighties, the result of a boom in period property purchasing. Raphael Samuel describes this fashion very well but, significantly, observed that rather than simply modernising the period property, the retrofitter used ‘brand new period effects’, in other words brand new things made to look like old things. And this for me is why the image of the retrofit is so prescient. The retrofit takes its cue from the period but retroactively develops that historical picture; The retrofitted house is in principle never ‘then’ and never truly ‘now’.

At sixteen there were already relays, resonances and returns between being of the eighties and unaware of popular culture, paying attention to new popular culture, and later, at sixteen, discovering the history of pop culture for myself. As sure as the nineties had narratives for the eighties, so too did the noughties for eighties, but one thing is for sure: I was there man!

Talk given at V&A Late, London 28.10.11 as part of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990.

Timeful Dancing

Exposition, development, recapitulation: presented, elaborated, resolved. Morton Feldman, the American composer and student of John Cage, said of his teacher that his work granted all kinds of ‘permissions’ to a younger generation. For this generation presentation might begin with a conceptual statement:

‘I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now…’

These permissions might be elaborated, but not resolved. They might not even reach elaboration, being undone in the very moment of utterance:

‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it.’

Cage ‘gave permissions’ for Feldman to consider silence, although never just silence, and duration, an element evident in his earliest works that got played out to an absurd degree towards the end of his life. Meditations on duration, silence and the autonomy of sound are the composer’s greatest contribution to modern music. Over the course of his career Feldman scored precisely notated music, as well as experimenting with improvisation and indeterminacy. An example of the latter, his Durations of 1960-61, allows the performers to decide the lengths of the pieces. The third piece in the series for violin, tuba and piano begins with a sound played by each instrument simultaneously. There is no tempo and no time signature. Each sound is chosen by the performer and all beats are slow. The sounds are played with a minimum of attack. According to Feldman’s instructions, the dynamics in this piece should be ‘very low’. Two years before in 1959 Feldman gave instructions to the performer of Last Pieces: ‘Durations are free… hold for as long as you can.’ Musical instruments are activated by human bodies. In the third piece of Durations, to play the tuba requires periodic pauses for breath; and would therefore suggest phrases of no longer than ten seconds. It is in this sense that the music is formed around a human scale. To further illustrate the key of human scale in composition the historian of music Paul Griffiths points to how pulse in paired beats at around one per second corresponds to the left-right swing of walking; a faster pulse of two beats per second to running.

Music is of time. It is a system for measuring and quantifying. It can also travel through time: to hear twelfth-century chant performed is to experience structuring of temporality nine hundred years old. If a piece of music lacks precise notation, organisation of time will exist only in duration of performance. How and when to begin and end a piece of music is to consider sound’s relation to silence: the musician must decide where to pause, how best to reach the end of the music, to bring it to extinction. As Don Ihde puts it, ‘sound dances timefully within experience. Sound embodies the sense of time’. Listen to the environment for a short duration and one will notice a succession of sound-events occur. Concentrate and listen closely: one sound follows another, or sounds occur simultaneously, they exist for a moment and pass away. Perhaps more than any of the other senses hearing is temporal and the world of sound is one of flux and flow. In other words, sound and hearing have a positive relation to time. There is a philosophical tradition that takes this for granted: ‘Language has time as its element,’ wrote Soren Kierkegaard in Either/Or, ‘all other media have space as their element. Music is the only other one that takes place in time.’

But music takes place in space too, in an auditory field. Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971), for soprano, alto, mixed choir and instruments, was written as a eulogy to his friend the painter Mark Rothko, in whose work he apprehended a ‘sound world more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore.’ Like Matisse who, some years earlier, had designed and built a chapel in the French Riviera towards the end of his life, Rothko received a commission in 1964 to design and furnish with his own paintings a non-denominational chapel at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. For a sense of scale Rothko painted inside a full-scale model of a segment of the chapel in his studio. He was notoriously obsessed by details, falling out with the architect – who finally resigned – over lighting. His studio assistant reported how he had worked an entire month on half an inch area of canvas. Rothko did not live to realise the project; in 1971, a year before its completion, he took his own life.

Still today fourteen large canvases hang around the walls, elevating the near octagonal structure beyond mere building, and the painting beyond mere painting. To enter Rothko’s darkroom is to take a journey into the psychological interior. It is a peculiarly liminal space. ‘It is a place oriented towards God,’ its patron Dominique de Menil writes, ‘named or unnamed.’ In rehearsals, it is said, Feldman would assist his performers by describing the sounds as ‘sourceless’. His piece was performed in 1971 at the painter’s memorial service inside the chapel. In addition to its emotional and existential quality it is an exposition of an ideal space for the experience of listening. Where the painter did not live to experience that space, Feldman’s composition sounded in an art-architectural design for immersive contemplation. It is thrilling to imagine the immanence and transience of Rothko Chapel inside the permanence – the immutability – of Rothko Chapel.

Feldman’s later compositions realise a structure in which sounds are liberated to be sounds precisely by diminishing that structure to such a degree whilst allowing it to retain its identity as music. His String Quartet (II) (1983) and For Phillip Guston (1984) clock in at six and five hours long respectively. Clearly music of this duration tests the resilience of the audience – who anyway are under no contract to stay; but consider too the performers. If we take for granted that the structure of music expresses, in however attenuated way, the biology of the body, a musician is therefore a person with competencies, competencies and effective knowledge of how to control the body. The virtuoso Feldman performer requires extra-normal competencies. Skill, concentration and attention become a physiological matter. Whether one listens attentively or not – or indeed is even conscious of listening or not, dwelling in the time-space of these long duration performances is to enter into a new consciousness. Music, we are made aware, is a corporeal art that is physically involving for performer and listener alike. What the audience might hear is the emergence of order, the artwork organising itself into existence where perception and creation is conceived as the same act. Feldman does not lead the perceiver through time but allows her to find her own way through it. And yet after four hours of music without discernible structure how can one remember what came earlier? It has been said of Feldman that he intended to induce erasure of aural memory with his compositions. To erase the listener’s apprehension of what came before is to root the listening to the present, to a kind of immanence in space. Alex Ross, music critic at the New Yorker, says that Feldman was in the business of creating ‘places of spiritual otherness’. Extreme length, he believes, allowed the composer to approach his ultimate goal of making music a life-changing force, a transcendent force that, in the latter’s words ‘wipes everything out’ and ‘cleans everything away.’

ecotone

For further information go here.

After Nature

In the mid-1970s the Welsh critic and novelist Raymond Williams published ‘Keywords’, an A-Z of short, pithy, essays on keywords for an understanding of culture and society. It included entries such as ‘democracy’, ‘leisure’, ‘sensibility’. It was not to be a dictionary or specialist glossary, instead Williams’ aim was to investigate how the meanings of particular words formed, altered, influenced, were redefined, modified, confused, or reinforced throughout history. Under ‘N’ for Nature, he begins: ‘Nature is perhaps the most complex word in [English] language’, there is, he continues, an ‘extraordinary amount of human history’ embedded in the term.

I expect we all have some notion of what this complex word, that embodies an extraordinary amount of human history, means to us – like many words we habitually use, it’s as if we have some natural access to an understanding of it. Largely though, the complexity of the word nature is hidden by the ease and regularity with which we use it in a wide variety of everyday situations. Just think for a moment how you use the word.

Nature can be a spiritual or material experience; it is a given fact or it is made; it is pure and undefiled; it is pastoral, the countryside or the unspoiled places; it is both sublime and secular; it is not artificial; ‘organic’ is readily taken as a surrogate for ‘natural’; it is dominated or it is victorious; it is nature ‘herself’ – the goddess; nature the minister; nature the teacher; a primitive condition before society; it is that found in a nature reserve or the nature encroaching on ones allotment; we might say that nature is orderly (with its discoverable laws) but at the same time it’s disorderly; we might speak of the nature of ‘rocks’ or rocks as part of nature.

Its meaning has a complex ecology of its own. To quote Raymond Williams again: ‘Since nature is a word which carries, over a very long period, many of the major variations of human thought, it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty.’ So you get some idea of the gravitas of what we’re dealing with here; not to frighten you away but we are dealing with one of the major variations of human thought… human civilization.

Historically, ideas about nature have changed dramatically. This list I’ve given should be seen as notes or a sketch of the myriad ways nature has been, and continues to be, thought about. Many of these competing meanings were incompatible or contradictory, some more relevant or active than others. Yesterday’s truths about nature can seem absurd and misguided today, particularly in a time when some people argue that it is no longer possible to talk of such a thing as ‘nature’, that instead we live in a ‘post-natural’ world or an ‘after-natural’ world. There are different reasons for this that we’ll come to shortly.

When has nature not been on the

agenda in some form or another? Something indicative was expressed in the outcry over the coalition government’s plans to sell-off Britain’s forests. In literature, East Anglia has been the setting for the so-called ‘New Nature Writing’ sustaining the likes of Richard Mabey, Robert MacFarlane, Mark Cocker. According to one commentator the new nature writing acknowledges ‘broken nature’ – environmental degradation, and seeks to reanimate human relations with it.

So what’s in a title? I decided to call this talk ‘After Nature’. To me it seems worth dwelling on this a little so as to signpost the places we’ll go in the rest of this talk. But whilst I’m talking I want you to keep in mind these extraordinary artworks by Hubert Duprat on your sheet. This hopefully is what I’m trying to activate, to provide some frames of reference by which to understand the work.

Hubert Duprat, Caddis fly larvae

After Nature hints at a state literally coming after this thing called nature has ceased to exist. What, then, has replaced it? I wrote this talk that reflects on ideas about nature and you’ve attended, so together we going after nature, in search of something about it. Likewise, to do something After Nature – write, paint or compose music, might be to mimic natural forms, to use nature as ones model.

There are a couple of literary allusions too. After Nature, and this is the real coo, is also the name of a posthumously published series of long poems by the late UEA professor W.G. Sebald. Sebald really can be credited with placing East Anglia on the international literary map. So there is a local connection. Sebald’s book After Nature, like his other work, is an extended meditation on ways of seeing nature. He describes with dark vividness the apocalyptic visions of 16^th century painter Matthias Grunewald where nature is obliterated. Elsewhere he writes of the endeavours of man to subjugate nature, as in the story of Chamisso the 18^th century explorer who considers harnessing whales for towing ships and directing them with sticks.

There is also a short French novel I had in mind, written in the 19^th century, that touches on similar themes of nature in the service of man, but this example of nature in the service of man is for purely aesthetic reasons. Á Rebors, usually translated as Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysman tells the controversial story of an affluent dandy who removes himself from society to a country house in order to indulge in opulence and extravagance. In one of the book’s most famous scenes our dandy protagonist buys a giant tortoise. Saddened by its dull sullen exterior he studs the shell in the most resplendent jewels and precious stones. Supposing the tortoise is just plain lazy and stubborn he has his servant carry it around the house, but little does he realise the tortoise is in fact dead, and probably has been for quite some time. Huysman writes:

It did not budge at all and he tapped it. The animal was dead. Doubtless accustomed to a sedentary existence, to a humble life spent underneath its poor shell, it had been unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it, the rutilant cope with which it had been covered, the jewels with which its back had been paved, like a pyx.

In this extraordinary story nature is deemed ugly and is man-altered to an aesthetic end that finally kills the creature.

In its earliest use, dating back to the thirteenth century, nature referred to an inherent or essential quality or character of something. It’s from this early use, with its sense of fixity and immutability, that we get the meaning of something ‘natural’ having inherent, fundamental, universal and necessary, qualities. We live with this 800 year old legacy today. It might be the most general and persistent sense of what we mean by the term. If something is ‘natural’ it’s most ‘appropriate’ or ‘fitting’ and is contrasted with what is considered artificial, contrived or inappropriate. This essentialist idea of nature encompasses ideas about genetic traits of ethnicities of people or the blood ties between parent and child. To say ‘it’s in their nature’ is to say that a person has certain physiological or psychological qualities that make them the kind of person they are. Likewise, to naturalise a community of people is to give sweeping accounts of their behaviour and social life.

This links with an even broader conception of nature as the inherent force ordering both humans and non-humans. Historically there has been a theological basis for this. Nature was thought to exist in perfect balance. It was a belief in the perfection of God’s design, and further his overarching and guiding agency. We hear appeals to this inherent natural force today when critics of biotechnology argue that it goes ‘against nature’ to create things like cloned foals.

In a third most common use, ‘nature’ is taken as referring to everything which is not human and is distinguished from the work of humanity. This category of the non-human might include caddis fly larvae, rocks, gut bacteria, trees, the wind. Nature, or the nonhuman, is what humanity has had no hand in creating, although if he made it long enough ago – like a hedgerow, it will usually be included as natural. So, historically opposed to nature, or the nonhuman is culture, history, society, convention, what is laboured or worked on, or most simply, everything that is human. In belonging to a separate order to the human, nature has been treated as a kind of otherness, as something ‘over there’ separate from human existence. ‘Human civilization,’ the historian Keith Thomas has written, ‘was virtually synonymous with the conquest of nature.’ So nature has been used in the service of mankind – meat, vegetable, foods etc. – for quite some time. This attitude of nature in the service of man (just think of Sebald’s character attempting to lasso a whale!) really took hold in eighteenth century Enlightenment Europe and was characterised by a sense of hard-won dominance of wild beasts, hunting and domestication of animals.

It is this third definition of nature as the nonhuman that interests me. The boundary between it and society has a long history of being policed. It seems commonsense. But to what extent can we say they are clearly differentiated realms?

In the fabric of everyday life do we really stop to wonder whether nature or society is given more prominence in our experiences? There are those, geographers in particular, who have an After Nature perspective that challenge this schism between nature and society. To them it is a false divide – the world is seamless. They don’t even want to talk about the nonhuman world because it supposes a human world. After Nature geographers do not argue that technoscience has put an end to the nature-society divide. Instead they would argue that things such as transgenic pigs or microchip implants in humans are only the latest examples of a long history of society-nature crossovers or entanglements.

The degree to which it’s possible to dissolve the human-society divide is debatable for we remain, afterall, human. We have a so-called anthropocentric view of the world where we are disposed to interpret what is other to ourselves in terms of human or personal characteristics. There is no way of conceiving our relations to nature other than through the mediation of ideas about ourselves, our bodies.

Artists have been after nature for many thousands of years, looking at and copying it. It’s this looking that necessitates a certain distance or spectatorship from it. It wasn’t until the 1970s when there began to be an expansion of what art might be, to incorporate performance, to bridge distinctions between art and life, that artists started getting closer to nature, intervening in it, questioning and complicating our relationship with it. The German artist Joseph Beuys seems important here as a precedent. In 1974 Beuys spent three days locked in a room with a coyote. Beuys regularly performed the same series of actions with his eyes continuously fixed on the coyote. The coyote’s behaviour shifted throughout the three days, becoming cautious, detached, aggressive and sometimes companionable.

Joseph Beuys, I Love America and America Loves Me, 1974

In recent memory, at least for me, is the work of a Dutch artist Tue Greenfort. Last year at the Barbican exhibition ‘Radical Nature’ Greenfort showed a series of self-portraits of foxes. In an industrial wasteland on the edge of town, a camera is rigged with a trip wire attached to a sausage. Unsuspecting foxes, lured to the site by the smell, snag the bait and trigger the camera. The foxes look a little surprised in the pictures, but by the end of a week they had learned to take the sausage without being caught on film.

Tue Greenfort, Daimlerstrasse 38, 2001

In a slightly different way the Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns’ work Hail Seizure investigates nonhuman agency. Hiorns pumped 70-80,000 litres of copper sulphate solution into a sealed reinforced domestic flat. Weeks went by, until the temperature of the solution dropped, and the crystals began to precipitate until the walls and ceilings were covered in blue copper sulphate crystals. In Greenfort’s playful work, the conditions are created for the fox to interact with. What really captivates the imagination is the intelligence of the fox, of just how little time it took for it to work out how not to have its picture taken.

Roger Hiorns, Hail Seizure, 2009

Hiorns’ work does not rely upon an animate being in the same way as Greenforts, however there is clearly an agency separate to human culture that forms over time. One critic observed how the rhomboid facets of the crystals glinted, spangled, winked and beckoned as if having some vitality or life of its own, which an After Nature perspective might argue.

Duprat’s work shares something of each of these examples.

In a gloss of his work, Duprat tells us he has observed the caddis fly larvae at work, observed them rejecting opal for turquoise, as if they exercise judgment and intention. He has also talked of how discarded caddis fly cases have been ‘repurposed’, ‘appropriated’ by others. These are classic categories for understanding artworks: judgement, intention, appropriation. Rather than couch it in art speak though, I want to acknowledge the caddis fly larvae’s strange intelligence as one amongst a sheer number of intelligences, other than human, that inhabit the world. The caddis fly larvae’s world is radically different to our own: its metabolic rate, its reaction times, forms of foresight, lifespan and memories (if it has memories) means it lives in a different sense of time. In other words the caddis fly larvae exist in spaces and times which mean the relation that they have to the things in an environment is radically different from ours and each others. There is no single world in which all living beings are situated.

In their natural habitat the caddis fly larvae make no distinction at all between things that might be called natural and things that might be called artificial when constructing their case. As such artifice is fully a part of nature. In controlled conditions Duprat further complicates this artifice. He introduces metals and minerals that, although naturally formed by geological processes, are not of the caddis fly’s watery ecosystem. Other materials too have been introduced that have readily been incorporated into the case. These so-called ‘precious’ metals and minerals are, in themselves, entirely entangled in a human economy of value determined by scarcity, beauty and exchange.

This After Nature perspective is not some denial of the environment around us. Instead its purpose is to complicate a naïve view of nature as passive, as being Edenic or over there, cut off from human endeavour. Nature, and we could expand this on a wider scale to the nonhuman world, certainly is not passive. Think of those extraordinary timelapse films that speed up the opening of a flower. With the help of a camera, a product of culture, we can see that nature and matter is propulsive. Duprat’s work does something similar, to a similarly extraordinary end. Between Duprat and the caddis fly larvae we see the creative production of a form that is greater than the sum of their parts. The unusual collaboration rubs up against boundaries of nature and culture, expressing the irreducible otherness of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human, and vice versa.

Talk given at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, June 2011 as part of an exhibition of work by the French artist Hubert Duprat.

Mockery of the Fitness of Things

A response to Raid the Icebox, an exhibition selected by Andy Warhol at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970.

Laden down by a tape recorder, camera and movie magazines, Andy Warhol staggered into the director’s office of the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design. ‘We’re going to have a lot of fun today,’ the director Daniel Robbins told Warhol, ‘What are you doing?’ Andy Warhol wasn’t sure.

In place of the institution’s curator Warhol had been invited by the Museum of Art to enter the storerooms and make a selection of artefacts for exhibition. The exhibition would be called Raid the Icebox, a pun referring to the museum’s storage facilities, kept on ice for its preservative qualities. Retrospectively it seems a rather disingenuous name at odds with Warhol’s performance of identity: his disinterested, detached, style imputes little of the vigour of the raid, with its masculine connotations of irruptive foray.

The exhibition was conceived as a means to open up the museum’s collection. In the exhibition catalogue essays by Dominique de Menil, director of the Institute for the Arts at Rice University, Daniel Robbins, director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and critic David Bourdon tell a fantastically quixotic tale of enthusiastic advocacy and equal measures of befuddlement. At the brink of the institution’s understanding of its growing obsolescence and irrelevance, Raid the Icebox was conceived at a decisive moment. Engage with contemporary art – let the debunkers in, or roll over into catalepsis.

In her cosmic-allegorical foreword de Menil likens Warhol to an oracle or priest. Whilst critics, curators and scholars can open many doors to help the general public see the aesthetic value of artefacts, they can become blind. ‘Only prophets and seers open the royal gates,’ she writes. Whole realms have been unsealed by the likes of Duchamp and Breton, or Picasso who ‘saw’ the ritual sculptures of Africa and Oceania for the first time. Dusty pieces of ethnography were suddenly turned into miraculous art. What has been accomplished by the Pop artists, reckons de Menil, is even greater. They ‘saw’ supermarket wares, highway signs, bathtubs and Coca-Cola bottles and elevated them above their ordinary significance. ‘What is beautiful to the artist, becomes beautiful. What is poetical to the poet, becomes poetical,’ she writes, ‘So let’s visit museums with poets and artists.’

Robbins’ essay Confessions of a Museum Director bristles with nervous neurotic energy. Like a pathological character from a Gogol story, he is harassed by stuff. Racks of paintings hung floor to ceiling and stacked against walls impose themselves in the ‘appalling, stuffed storage’ of the museum. Sand bags to stop the paintings slipping obstruct the walkways. A dark cubicle at the end of the room houses twelve to fifteen thousand prints by Rembrandt, Daumier, Canaletto. There’s not been a curator of prints for twenty years. No one gets to see any of the stuff! There is nowhere to turn without endangering a precious object:

We have so much that is exciting, beautiful, informative, problematic, teasing to our knowledge, and because no one can get at it, no one excepting a very small and overworked staff, sentiments in storage range from wild exhileration to black despair. Furthermore, as the collections grow and storage becomes fuller, the danger of accident increases sharply.

His text is peppered by elipses, commas, brackets, exclamations and question marks. ‘Is it a total waste?’ he asks in existential disarray. Art students at Rhodes Island School of Design have no time for the museum. Inviting a contemporary artist to select from the reserve could be a liberating, if potentially risky venture. He needs Warhol to see his way around things but struggles to shake his anxiety. If the artist who selected the material were strong enough, would he impose his personality on the objects? If he were famous enough, would it not oblige the curious to look? Might his attitude not do violence to the true nature of the objects?

In the exhibition catalogue the Orientalist mystic, the paranoid terrorised by artefacts and the storyteller furnish the narrative field against which Warhol works. It takes an individual liberated from the burden of objects, with a scrupulous non-hierarchical procedure of segmentation and ordering, to ‘see’ the museum.

In the company of Robbins Warhol went underground in Providence, down into the stores. Robbins’ hope was that the artist might bring out some unfamiliar and unsuspected moldering treasures, inaccessible to the public, yet rather than going into the dark places people hadn’t been for years, Warhol began in the first room he came to – the costume collection. Upon discovering racks upon racks of shoes he decides to include the entire lot in the exhibition. Instead of displaying the finest Windsor chairs he selects those kept as salvage for spare parts. Instead of the museum’s richest ecclesiastic vestments, Coptic cloths and African weaves, he plumps for Native American blankets. Faced with a Cézanne still-life he asks ‘Is that a real Cézanne or a fake one? If that’s real, we won’t take it.’ In his essay Robbins lists the ‘fine examples’ Warhol missed and there was considerable surprise at what he didn’t select. There were exasperating moments, Robbins admits, when staff felt Warhol was exhibiting storage rather than works of art. At last he arrives at the realisation that what is being exhibited is Andy Warhol.

Objects in the exhibition are listed in the catalogue beneath two simple categories, singles and series. Drawings and watercolours, paintings and sculpture ranked under the category of single objects, whilst bandboxes and hatboxes, baskets, ceramics, chairs, costume accessories such as footwear, parasols and umbrellas, paintings, sculptures, textiles and wallpaper were categorised in series. Warhol’s indiscrimination, what Arthur C. Danto has called his ‘deep egalitarianism’, amounted to the view that everything was equal: ‘It was fun to see the Museum of Modern Art people,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘next to the teeny-boppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors.’ Warhol expressed the zeitgeist of the emerging consumer society, translating its technology into technique in his art practice. The film camera, multiple reproduction of imagery, the cassette tape recorder – techniques of mass reproduction – shared something in kind with production lines of factories that appealed to him. They afforded consistency, a kind of machinic democracy:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

It’s no coincidence that the democratic approach seems resolutely American. Father of modern poetry and champion of democracy Walt Whitman attempted to echo his personal-political ideology in his work, writing rapturously and indiscriminately about everything. Some years later, asked what he had been taking pictures of, the American photographer William Eggleston replies, ‘I’ve been photographing democratically… I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.’

Warhol’s attention to the surfaces and artifices of mass-media and everyday culture disintegrated distinctions between rules of high and low culture, aesthetic categories of European civilization. It’s the same sensibility that ranges across all aspects of his practice at the time: in Raid the Icebox it’s writ large. Pop sensibility as curatorial strategy is brought to bear on those artefacts. With the exception of a few photographs (high-modernist art photography), none of the objects from storage are products of the age of mechanical reproduction. Their value comes from their handicraft and even when presented in a series each artefact exhibits singular qualities. Warhol treats artefacts of an older historical order to his machinic democratic sensibility. Interestingly they succumb with little resistance. Abstracted from their function or utility, in profusion, the artefacts exist as objects without identity. Liberation from the icebox restores identity, transforming it under the aegis of Warhol.

In his films Warhol gives minimal direction, his outward appearance and expression in writing exhibits a kind of performative indecision. It’s a radical indecision but it’s never, nor could it be, absolute. Raiding the icebox Warhol engages in making decisions of value, albeit perverse ones: broken chairs over good ones, Native American smocks over Chinese Emperors’. Whilst it digs behind the institution’s foundations, this gesture isn’t simply destructive. His indecision shares something of the negative capability of irony. In its most common rhetorical use irony is a mode of speech of which the meaning is contrary to the words. A more expansive definition offered by the dictionary is yet more revealing:

Expression of one’s meaning by language of opposite or different tendency, esp. Simulated adoption of another’s point of view or laudatory tone for purpose of ridicule; ill-timed or perverse arrival of event or circumstances in itself desirable, as if in the mockery of the fitness of things; use of language that has an inner meaning for a privileged audience and an outer meaning for the persons addressed or concerned. Simulated ignorance.

For the critic and poet Friedrich Schlegel writing at the eve of the eighteenth century, irony was the only weapon there was against death, against ossification, against any form of stabilisation and freezing of the life stream. If one reads a poem composed according to formal rules or experiences an institution that protects the lives and property of others, laugh at it, mock at it, be ironical, blow it up, point out that the opposite is equally true. ‘Corresponding to any proposition that anyone may utter,’ Isiah Berlin explains in his study The Roots of Romanticism, ‘there must be at least three other propositions, each of which is contrary to it, and each of which is equally true, all of which must be believed.’ It’s a strategy for escaping the logical straitjacket of physical causality, or of state-created laws, or aesthetic rules about perspective, or historical painting. In short it’s a negation of the idea of a stable structure of anything.

In practice though there are a couple of problems the individual taken to irony will face. When the ironist ceases to be ironic, their sincerity becomes thinly veiled. ‘True it is that once you gain a reputation for the habit,’ writes D.J. Enright in his study of irony, ‘you will barely be able to enter your local baker’s and ask for a loaf without getting a stonily suspicious glare.’ Further, the artist who uses irony is in a fair way to being disliked for setting himself up as being smarter than other people, whereas in reality not only are his intentions inoffensive but, by virtue of their earnestness, more often than not they defer him from being clever at all. Both of these consequences play out in Warhol’s exchanges with the director of the Museum of Art at Rhodes Island School of Design.

In his 1993 collection of essays Raiding the Icebox – a title that acknowledges the Rhodes Island exhibition and modifies it to infer cultural inquiry as process in continuation after its manifestation in writing – cultural critic Peter Wollen observes how strikingly close Warhol’s sensibility coincides with Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as sketched out in Notes on ‘Camp’. ‘Reading Sontag’s essay today,’ Wollen writes, ‘is like reading through a litany of Warhol’s tastes, allusions and affinities.’ Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, bad movies, idolization of Garbo, corny flamboyant femaleness, dresses made of millions of feathers. Like irony, but much younger, camp has an equally potent capacity to usurp. Camp was an attempt at redemption from the banality of life, the unpredictable mixing of sheer frivolity with passionate commitment, the taste for extravagance, ‘dandyism in the age of mass culture’ as Sontag put it. Wollen reminds us though, that camp involved a rejection of the late-modernist aesthetic as espoused by Clememt Greenberg, the New York critic who saw himself as defending the gates against the barbarians of kitsch. Camp taste, with its hyperbolic aestheticization, its playful connoisseurship of kitsch, played a decisive part in the demise of Modernism. It also helped alter the self-image of a museum of modern art in Rhode Island.