The Museum of Everything closes on Sunday. This remarkable hoard of “outsider art” (for want of a better term) hidden away off a sidestreet in Primrose Hill has been the hotspot for jaded punters over the past few months. The exhibition is a crash course in the past century of artworks by autodidacts, the mentally ill, folk artists, backyard shamans and the otherwise obsessed.
This is the second ambitious attempt I’ve seen in London to find a way of accommodating this art into mainstream practice, the other being an exhibition at Whitechapel a few years ago which intermingled the “outsiders” and the, um, “insiders”. It’s reassuring to read that the Museum founder James Brett rejects the term “outsider”, preferring “self-taught”. The unusual presentation of the exhibition doesn’t try to normalise the art, but it is similar enough to typical underground art spaces to prevent the work being trivialised. Sensational aspects of the artists’ biographies are, for the most part, kept to the minimum necessary to contextualise their art. Strangely enough, the growth of the public’s prurient interest in other people’s private lives has met the outsiders halfway, so that scrutiny of their personal affairs is no less than for any other painter, politician or priest.
Despite the claims of outsider art’s champions, it’s not hard to spot discrepancies between it and the “normal” art world. This self-taught art is frighteningly earnest; it presents in starkest terms the case for art as (to adapt Ezra Pound’s saying) objects charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. Each item is saturated with significance, a desperate need to communicate a truth not otherwise evident in the material world. In this respect the exhibition is the clearest possible refutation of the modern lie (told by non-artists) that art is self-expression.
The wall texts, thankfully confined to artists and not individual works, are variable in quality and point to the greatest tensions underpinning the show. It was a nice idea to have each text written by a different person, each presumably with some insight or deeply felt response to that particular artist. At their best they present an interesting perspective on the artist’s work, as with the blurbs for Henry Darger and Alexandre P Lobanov. At their worst they manifest the worst traits in discussing outsider art: hyperbole (relativism + overcompensation = genius), misrepresentation (the self-expression canard again) and London’s Appeal to Authority, the celeb endorsement (Q: Does Nick Cave really think Louis Wain is “the greatest”? A: Who cares?). In any case the curators find it hard to discuss the artworks without making them seem like relics of a personality, surrogates for the real topic of interest – but this is a problem with most cultural criticism across the board, these days.
Like the art itself, the exhibition was overstuffed. Room after room crammed with paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, of the highest overall standard I’ve seen in a big show for a long time. I’ve been twice now and each time came away feeling overwhelmed, knowing that there was still plenty more I’d missed.
Filed under: Art by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Wednesday 10 February 2010
Clouds, “4 p.m.” (1991).
(2’32”, 4.67 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Doppelgänger Blues
Wednesday 10 February 2010
Thanks to another one of those wacky mixups that keep happening to me, I found out that some people have been listening to my music on Last.fm, presumably by accident. By “some” I mean “fourteen”.
Enticed by the prospect of doubling the size of my audience, I took responsibility for my artist page and have now started uploading stuff there too. At first, under the “Similar Artists” tag on my page they listed Max Neuhaus and I was chuffed. Then they changed it to People Like Us and I was sad. Now they list a bunch of guys I’ve never heard of so I’m OK with sharing with you again.
There are only a few tracks up right now, but I’d like to put up some pieces I don’t have room for on my website. Will give you a heads-up when new material appears.
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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I met Tony Buck with a flashing red bike light stuck in my mouth outside the old Brisbane Museum.
Monday 8 February 2010
I met Tony Buck with a flashing red bike light stuck in my mouth outside the old Brisbane Museum (download, 23’24”, 23.43 MB, mp3)
Having set a neat little process in operation, I repeatedly find myself in the dilemma of whether or not to then break it in some way. It’s not a question of worrying about being ‘composerly’ enough, and I still find that there’s a lot to be said for letting the process do its work without further human intervention. In fact, it’s this disinclination to interfere that makes me wonder if I ought to do something to disrupt it. The question becomes one of how sounds can be heard when they become alienated from the system that produced them.
In November 2003 I wrote some simple scripts in a MIDI editor to generate a sequence of the most common cadences in Western harmony, each one continuing from where the last left off. Eventually, the sequence went through the entire circle of fifths, with every note in the octave being used as the tonic for every cadence. Rather than have this cycle repeat itself as infinitum, I made a retrograde inversion of the entire sequence, sending the whole thing back to where it started (despite it having gotten there already), only upside down.
I met Tony Buck with a flashing red bike light stuck in my mouth outside the old Brisbane Museum is performed on an organ which is very slowly going out of tune, with the higher notes gradually sliding down a semitone during the course of the piece, while the lower notes gradually slide up a semitone. To complement the sense of entropy, I patched in the cheap, nasty soundcard built into my computer and amplified the line noise (continued.)
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy LXXVII: The Turner Prize and the Super Bowl
Thursday 4 February 2010
I care even less about gridiron than I do about any other type of football, and I would have happily ignored that Super Bowl match the Americans are having on Sunday until this popped up at Modern Art Notes. Museum directors in the home towns of the two rival teams are betting their art on the result, and the stakes keep getting higher.
On Monday, Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson proposed wagering an IMA loan of an Ingrid Calame painting to the New Orleans Museum of Art, should the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts.
That was a nice choice… but apparently Anderson wasn’t too worried about having to pay off the bet: “We’re already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang,” he tweeted.
Over the past few days, the two directors have been locked in a cycle of calling and raising their bets, with plenty of trash talk about each other’s teams, cities, and taste in art. The full coverage is here.
Filed under: Art, Filler By Proxy by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Tuesday 2 February 2010
Harry Partch, “The Dreamer That Remains” (1971). Harry Partch, Mark Hoffman, Danlee Mitchell, Jon Szanto, ensemble and chorus conducted by Jack Logan.
(10’17”, 18.97 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Back in the rut. Lessons learned etc.
Tuesday 2 February 2010
Hopefully there’ll soon be some photos or videos to show from the gig last week. It was a fine evening, all round. Here’s a few things I learned from the experience, in roughly chronological order:
- On Windows XP: System Properties, Hardware, Device Manager, Disable Wireless Network Adapter. Nothing else seems to kill the bugger.
- How to make and edit a video on my laptop, sort of. (“Do you have a video to go with your piece?” Sure!)
- Always check that you haven’t been unplugged from the PA before you start playing.
- Switch off your phone before playing with audio technology.
- Even if the phone miraculously refrains from interfering with the audio signal, nothing can prevent you from unexpectedly receiving a text from Australia halfway through playing your piece.
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Gig tomorrow + World Class Anxiety (Slight Return)
Wednesday 27 January 2010
No updates the last few days ’cause I’ve been busy preparing for tomorrow night’s gig. Also, I’ve been gradually upgrading all of the main website to the new design, in the hope that it, too, may soon be a World Class Facility like this bucket in Melbourne:
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion, Stupidity by Ben.H
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UK première: String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta)
Saturday 23 January 2010
I finally get off my bum and play some music in London. After wowing audiences in Melbourne, Paris, and Hobart, String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) finally gets a live performance locally.
It’s part of Music Orbit’s Vibe Bar series, this Thursday, 28 January*, 7.30pm at the Vibe Bar in The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. £7 on the door. The rest of the night includes performances by other string instruments, both real and imaginary, films, and more, probably. If you want to catch my act you better get there early.
* Yeah, I know it’s short notice. I just found out myself.
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy LXXVI: Poème Electronique
Tuesday 19 January 2010
Jodru at ANABlog went to see the virtual recreation of the Philips Pavilion from the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and has posted a fascinating summary of little-known aspects of the project.
The design of the pavilion, which housed a presentation of Edgar Varèse’s tape composition Poème Electronique, was attributed to Le Corbusier at the time. The title was in fact Le Corbusier’s idea: “I shall not create a pavilion, but a poème électronique. Everything will happen inside: sound, light, color, rhythm…” He then got Iannis Xenakis, his assistant, to design it for him.
At ANABlog you can see a photograph of the World Fair site, showing the size of the Philips Pavilion, compared to those of the USA and the USSR, along with surprising photographs of the pavilion other than the iconic image on the left. There are also more details about how Varèse tried to exploit the acoustic properties of the pavilion’s interior to the fullest, creating an immersive, spatialised sonic experience (and nixed Le Corbusier’s plans to lecture the audience over the top of his music.)
Plenty more goodies at the Virtual Electronic Poem site, including a Dutch documentary made at the time of the pavilion’s construction, and photographs of the other pavilions at the fair. There’s a lot of retro-futuristic architecture, but there are also the names: Atomium, the USSR, the Tobacco Pavilion, Kodak, Pan Am. Watch the film, and see the world in which the pavilion was built, and the fact that this all happened over a half a century ago really hits home. This temple to modernity was planned by hat-wearing men, built by workmen driving creaky lorries and spraying asbestos like it was whipped cream. It’s a future that never happened, but it’s amazing that it got as far as it did.
Filed under: Art, Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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A Slow Start
Wednesday 13 January 2010
I’m still more interested in redeigning the website than in posting any new content at the moment. I’ve finished updating the categories in the sidebar, thus rendering the old subject index obsolete. The index of names is still there, still out of date. New content soon, with the rest of the website looking betterdifferent.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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“…since they are dead are ghosts and as such inhabit the same world we do.” — John Cage
Monday 11 January 2010
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Thursday 7 January 2010
Henry Brant, “The Fourth Millennium” (1963). American Brass Quintet.
(9’16”, 12.44 MB, mp3)
(9’16”, 12.44 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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This Way to the Miracle
Thursday 7 January 2010
Filed under: Art, London by Ben.H
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Mystery Glass Pieces
Tuesday 5 January 2010
The rather wonderful Other Minds Archive has put up a concert by Philip Glass in San Jose from 1978:
This program include [sic] a number of pieces for organ, written in Glass’ trademark minimalist style, as well as a piece for orchestra and electronics.
You may have noticed that the wording of that sentence is a little bit slippery. The information page for this recording is of no real help, listing an “unidentified piece for orchestra and electronics” by Philip Glass, followed by four “unidentified pieces” for organ, also by Glass.
I find it hard to believe that the first piece is by Glass at all – in that style, for those instruments – so both what it is and who wrote it are mysteries to me. The organ pieces are obviously Glass: Music In Contrary Motion, “Bed” and “Knee Play 4” from Einstein on the Beach, Fourth Series, Part 2 (aka Dance No.2), and, and….
What the hell is that second piece? None of the descriptions in the list of compositions on Glass’ website seem to fit. Is this a solo arrangement of a piece I’ve never heard, or some of his theatre music? It’s too cold to go out to the library, a few minutes’ googling was no help at all, and listening to free samples of likely candidates on Amazon drew a blank.
Here are excerpts from the two mystery pieces:
- unknown piece probably not by Philip Glass, halfway through its 24-minute duration
- unknown organ piece by Philip Glass, start of a 13-minute performance
I presume the organ is being played by Glass himself. Having grown up on his glossy studio productions from the 1980s, it’s sort of nice to hear him hitting all those bum notes here.
