[Jack Daws "Minstrel Mice]

All mass culture “colorless” spaces on the internet are white spaces.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=watermelon

chicken nigger black fried chicken negro nigga fruit melon kfc poor fat chicken and watermelon drugs sex ass kool-aid water weed coon white cock grape soda ghetto cotton green penis dick african crime niggerfruit nigra cracker bling racist drink awesome drinks porch monkey food drunk pussy stupid person booze loser crack dave chappelle vodka queer tomato

In the same way that the revolution will not be televised, the work of art is never on the page or hanging on the museum wall. A work of art is nothing more than the effect that it has on actual people: those implicated in its creation and its reception.

Yesterday I went with some of the Mellon family to see the art of Ta-Aiken, who was there to greet us and others at the exhibition “Healing Hands, Healing Lands,” at Lowertown Lofts at 255 E. Kellogg Blvd. in downtown St. Paul, on the Farmers’ Market. Incidentally, Ta-coumba (with some help, of course) did the set design for Daak, Call to Action, Ananya Dance Theatre’s new performance, which we will see on June 15 (last summer we saw Pipaashaa).

Ta-coumba is a muralist, who has done the new St. Paul Labor History mural, and his work is part of the transformative urban geography that I think will be enormously influential in this new century, where artists take the public spaces they live in and make them their own, defacing capital in its strongholds and defying the unwritten and written strictures that define who lives and goes and does what where. The painting of trash cans in North Minneapolis by Juxtaposition Arts students also seems like a step in this transformative direction.

The impact of untitled

Perhaps the first thing that those conditioned by museums in their encounter with “art” will notice is that almost none of the pieces have names (the one exception I saw was a small piece for sale, poignantly titled “Alone?”). Ta-coumbas, who is very forthright and active in dialoguing with others about his art and offering his own take on it, explains that the pieces don’t have titles because it is you, the spectator/reader/audience, that must tell the story. This is a courageous self-effacement on the part of an artist, a putting-in-practice of the philosophy put forth by (2?) pieces in the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the first being a white-washed canvas with the standard placard that would state the artist’s name and the title of the piece being white-washed as well. The next piece, if it is indeed separate, was an assortment of paintings turned to lean against the wall with their “backs” to us, hiding their content. Obviously these pieces launch a powerful and multivalent critique in many different directions, but it is that white-washed placard that has stuck with me: I cannot even here cite the name of the person(s) who created this tremendous piece because that artist is completely removed from the piece itself. I am not even left with a title to derive some sense of what this critique is supposed to mean-I am completely alone in drawing meaning from the piece. In a museum context Ta-coumba’s pieces do have titles, but everywhere outside this capitalist context his work flows untitled. [The above painting was titled "Call and Response II" for Ta-coumba's Minneapolis Institute of Arts show collectively titled "Call and Response"]

The work of art will not be televised

The revolution, as I stated above, occurs in the mind, and that is where what is exciting about Ta-coumba’s work takes place. The artist dies in the name of community, a glorious anarchy of sense that brings people together rather than subjecting them to the will of some absent “artist.” Ta-coumba decenters the artist in many ways. He views his work as a kind of autopainting, giving himself over and submitting his work, to some extent, to the ancestors and spirits and cultures that he feels work through him. Similarly, Ta-coumba makes a space for nature and random chance, as in the story he tells of the set design for Daak, which he just completed. He was to combine rain, smoke, and dirt for these projects. When his pieces were caught in the rain he let nature do its work, washing it with water and dirt, combining with his own paint. Thus the community involved in the creation and consumption of his work is larger even than humans in their more traditional subjectivity.

Ta-coumba’s work runs through lines, the process of which he calls “spirit writing,” which form “rhythm patterns.” The process builds in complexity as often color is added in a next step, and figures begin to emerge, on which Ta-coumba elaborates. The paintings end up seeming almost infinitely complex, where figures within figures form larger figures as the ripples of the rhythm patterns intersect and cross. Thus the experience of his art is collaborative, as others help you see things that you don’t and all share in a joy and learning of discovery.

The death of the painter (and whiteness’ 30-second art consumer)

So what does the death of the author really look like? These independent readings all form the artwork in question. The thing hanging on the wall is just an illusion: it is what happens in and between the minds of the viewer that is real. We are each endowed with specific perspectives, interests, histories, and circumstances that allow us to see different things in a work of art, bringing out different resonances and formations. Every time someone new looks at a painting, that person brings it an inch closer to completion, obviously a task that can never be fully completed. The death of the author seems difficult to accept in much of the written word, especially in the realm of literature, that myopic ivory tower where the lone genius white European artist is the fount of all creativity. It was this myopia that lent Roland Barthes’ ideas so much of their revolutionary resonance. Painting helps teach us how little the intention of the author really should mean.

The complexity of Ta-coumba’s paintings thwarts the European will to total knowledge (a colonial legacy that we inherit today; for a wonderful critique of this mentality, see the new Indiana Jones movie). At the same time, these paintings force you to look at a painting for longer than the average 30 seconds-they confront you with the absolute that you will never know this piece in its totality, never totally grasp it. You can, however, start, and build, and that is the process that you are forced to go through with this piece-a kind of reconstruction.

The politics, poetics, and mechanics of seeing color

“What do you see?” Ta-coumba incessantly asks this question of those who experience his art, and like the best of art’s questions, this one is at once infinitely complicated and infinitely simple. Ta-coumba states up-front that he had his first art show at 6 years old (he also adds himself that this means he’s been making art for 49 years). But things changed when an accident at age 11 damaged the cones in his eyes, taking away his ability to “see color.” Seeing color, obviously, is a concept that requires significant unpacking. Even black and white, as a friend reminded me, is not just black and white. There’s an infinity of shadings encased in (and always threatening to leak through) those two words. This becomes evident when comparing Ta-coumba’s “black and white” paintings. But it becomes immediately obvious that this artist has not lost his command of “color” as all sections of the spectrum are represented in his work. Ta-Coumba was forced to “relearn” color (after the accident his mother gave him ink and a pen and told him to work with it until he could see again), and it is this reconstructive process that helps lend such an experiential rush and a conceptual impact to his work.

This may be a stretch, but I am tempted to link this to the essay by Lawrie Balfour (which reads WEB Du Bois and James Baldwin through each other through their differing conceptions of double consciousness) that I read for the Mellon Fellowship’s second weekly session this summer, specifically the part where she discusses the claim that African-Americans can better know the concept of liberty (and if you take liberty as an essential American view, they also can better understand and live America) for having been deprived of it and forced to fight for it through the greatest adversity. Color is something that we take for granted, the way white people take for granted the ability to enter any space they feel like entering. The deconstructive work that Ta-coumba does, with his explosions of color alternated with more austere, subtly-shaded “black and white” compositions, helps us to understand color. Moreover, Ta-coumba’s own life story brings to life the biotechnical mediation that surrounds us all the time, the eye that is responsible for so much of our interface with the world, which, when we are forced to acknowledge and work through it, hits like a Copernican flash. There is no such thing as essential color, just a spectrum of light reflected back at us. Color has no real significance-like the relationship of the signifier to the signified, color is somewhat arbitrary-it does not arise from any organic relationship with the thing it represents. “Color” as we know it is just a shared construct, that we’ve given name to because of the similar biological machinery, eyes, that most of us are born with.

Almost all art, especially, it seems to me, more abstract forms of art, rely to some extent on a shared pool of signs. Conventional color, as a convention, is a set of these signs. But there are always glitches in this set. None of us has the same set of cones and rods in our eyes, and most of us don’t have the same set ourselves from one year to the next. So we mustn’t trust simply our own sight, but rather interact with others. Ta-coumba uses color but once you’ve heard his whole story you can never look at color the same way. Even broader than this, Ta-coumba is short-sighted, so he will look at the lines coming together in one of his paintings with his glasses on and with his glasses off, creating higher degrees of complexity and obviously different “gazes” within the art work itself. We thus would need an infinite array of gazes to exhaust the meaning from one of these works.

Returning to the pool of shared signs, communication relies on the fact that some of these signs are basically self-evident. Black is a fairly self-evident sign. Isn’t it? Taking this notion apart reveals the pitfalls of conventional thinking, and the power relations embedded within it. At first, I thought several of the black and white paintings were harrowing, looking something like what I imagine a photographic negative of hell might bring back to our senses. On closer inspection, this reading was mostly wrong, and it arose from the palette itself, and the prominent place that black space played in it. I am reminded of Malcolm X’s awakening, that all the symbolic, semiotic weight attached to black was negative, opposed to the goodness of white, an order that justified slavery and primitive capital accumulation. Black (and white), freed of these oppressive normative instrumental meanings that have colonized it, is not evil, ugly, or terrifying. It is simply how Ta-coumba sees the world, and it is evident from looking at any of his paintings that he sees much beauty in it. Our analysis, then, must go beyond this palette.

I dispute, though, that Ta-coumba’s paintings are universally positive. They are certainly about healing, but healing doesn’t happen in the absence of hurt. Ta-coumba’s words itself explain the contradiction well: there’s nothing wrong with representing suffering or the negative, the only real problem is when people deny that suffering exists.

The potential critiques of Radiohead’s “All I Need” video are legion. The most obvious, of course, is the potential conjuring of the helpless groveling third world subject just waiting for a few dollars from you in your first world to help buy some food/school supplies. I think the statement “you’re all I need” here works both ways: the more insidious reading is that the first world child needs the Third World child, subjugated, in order to provide for the first world child’s standard of living. But the lyrics and video mean more than this.

If we take the lyrics in a straightforward way, we see that this song is a critique of the traditional NGO/foreign aid/white man’s burden symbolic order. The incessant use of the “you” and “your” in the lyrics is taunting, and the speaker performs on itself the type of benevolent debasement that NGOs tend to map onto the Third World in the pornography of foreign aid (see Arturo Escobar’s work in critical development studies). “I am a moth/ Who just wants to share your light / I’m just an insect / Trying to get out of the night.” Obviously the “just” here is key, to the pantomime occurring here. The very next line sticks the point home: “I only stick with you / Because there are no others.” This is a mocking line, the absolute refusal to be subjected to the normal groveling position, that makes a fool out of the deluded tortured first world liberal.

The video is an important addition/revision to this. The song by itself represents an essential Third World denial of the call-and-response aid narrative, and its separate existence (from the video) is important. But this mocking denial in itself is not a complete plan. The video shows where we might go once the statement of the song independently is established. Once the third and first world subjects approach each other from a standpoint of mutual respect, then we can continue.

The video shows, now, the links, the blooming intersubjectivity, that might deliver us from the trap of the dominant foreign aid narrative.

The split-screen device here is meant to reveal, not what is behind, but what is between these two subjects: the link that binds them. And every link can be used as an opportunity for communication or domination, usually for both. It is a gesture not simply of condemnation but of empowerment. That is exactly the jouissance inspiring, moving Yorke to the song’s stirring climax, rising to fight against his submergence in the audio mix like a voice reaching for a connection between worlds. The startling beauty of the bridge as the piano asserts itself is not accidentally timed, it perfectly soundtracks the imminent revelations between the two subjects, of the latent connections between the two that remain unrealized, in every sense of that word. An isolationism, a moral and intellectual and emotional autoconservation that denies this link or refuses to further it will never bring about the worldwide revolution that so many of us hunger for so deeply in our hearts. This video is trying to film and simultaneously give birth to an intersubjectivity that is greater than each of us alone.

This was the dream of 1968-to bring these two young people together, each recognizing each other’s space in the global order and working mutually to displace that order.

But with all this talk of hearts and minds, what sets this Radiohead clip apart from Crash or, especially, Babel, two films of like fabric that I have railed against/satirized/dismissed vocally and in print? I have written about Crash as “the most anti-Brechtian film ever,” in ironic opposition to Haggis’ quoting of Brecht at the Academy Awards. These films are designed basically to turn the theater or whatever place of viewing into a space of release, a safe space to access the anxieties of race relations and release all such tensions, leaving them back at the movie theater.

Radiohead’s clip, instead, focuses on the capitalist structures that link these two people together, leaving with the haunting image of the matching shoes. We get the emotional impact, but it is up to us to go out and find all the steps in between the two points on this chain. And once the mythological veil of commodity fetishism starts to be unveiled, a chain reaction begins. We are forced into newer and more contorted strategies of repression of these links and responsibilities.

How the hell do you walk away from your placement in the global capitalist system when those shoes you’re exiting on have just been graphically depicted in that system?

I showed this video to my friend and he thought it was a comedy sketch. No, actually it’s a big budget Hollywoood full-length feature. Apparently this was a spiritual journey for Mike Myers in memory of his lost father. I shit you not: “With the guru Pitka, after my father died, I went on a spiritual quest, and it’s very hard when you’re a comedian to go on a spiritual quest, because your natural instinct is to be cynical. But when you do come across wisdom and things that actually make you happier, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life, [you think], “That’s an area I’d like to make a movie about.” I don’t want to ruin the movie for people, but I’ll try to build some hype by letting a few comic jewels spill out of the laugh sack. Straight from the horse’s mouth: “I am from the town Hairinmykeester, in the valley of Lintinmybelly. My guru is Tuggingmypoota, his guru was Cheddarfromundah, and his guru was Hasasmallweena. [Laughs.] I like silly things. This is a very silly film.” Apparently ol’ Mike cracks HIMSELF up. I can’t blame him, “Hasasmallweena” IS quite the kneeslapper. If you don’t think it’s funny, maybe you just didn’t get the joke. See, if you break up that long town name into smaller words…

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1585104/story.jhtml

Also, JT’s in this movie. He has an accent, but it’s French-Canadian. So do I still rupture ties with JT over this? PRIME existential dilemma of the day.

I’m surprised Kal Penn didn’t get a piece of this. Maybe he was too busy reprising his star/Executive Producer double threat production role in the next Van Wilder spin-off.

Don’t worry this one went straight to video:

Marxism is so passe.

This video is being shown extremely frequently on MTV in France. I think the French version has more words.

I am seriously starting to be impressed.

The real holy trinity?

John Murphy’s 28 Days Later score deserved more recognition than it got. Godspeed! You Black Emperor, a Canadian anarchist art collective and one of the post-rock scene’s founding lights, was the perfect music for 28 Days Later. It scored the film in Danny Boyle’s head during much of his creative process. Their relationship would be a tortured one.

John Murphy-In the House-In a Heartbeat

Brian Eno-An Ending (Ascent)

Godspeed!’s politics made them naturally extremely wary of any licensing, but Boyle won them over with what was then a sincere pitch for a leftist art house film, and they licensed two songs. As production progressed, however, 28 Days was picked up for major distribution. Godspeed! were disgusted and felt betrayed, and refused to license several more pieces that Boyle requested, but they had already signed away two songs, which made it into the final film. Without Godspeed!, Boyle went to Murphy, and basically gave him the task of copying Godspeed!’s sound. The tactic succeeds greatly at certain points, and while “In the House” lacks much of Godspeed!’s touch, it works well for the occasion, and is reused much more prominently in this sequel. Since then, it’s been ubiquitous in TV and film: in a Beowulf ad I saw and many other places.

“In the House,” progresses from two quiet piano notes to full-blown electric guitar, coming right up to the explosion and then falling back again to build-up more. The guitar plucks sound like paranoia, insanity knocking patiently at the door, and the lengthy operatic guitar-driven third act hits just the right balance of subtlety and strength.

The title, “In the House-In a Heartbeat” underlines the urgency of political engagement in the face of an external that can come crashing into your spaces of privacy, while ambivalently hitting nerve endings on the organs of fear and loathing grown in the population by conservative rhetoric of fear and loathing (the red phone and all that business). The peaceful extended outro is similarly open to multiple readings. Have we reached peace on earth or simply accepted the impossibility of a progressive order and passed on to the next world?

Traffic, a mirror travail and the film composer’s craft

 I’m reminded here of one of the many wonderful commentaries on the Traffic DVD, by DEA man Craig Chretien. His comment on the ending of that film brought out a sober dramatic resonance that I hadn’t felt before. Benicio Del Toro’s character sits in the stands of a night game at the baseball field he demanded be funded in exchange for his whistleblowing with US drug authorities. Chretien saw this ending as very bittersweet for Del Toro: he’d gotten what he wanted, and was content, but knew that he would soon be killed for his betrayal.

Interestingly enough, master film composer Cliff Martinez used Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” to score this epilogue. He’d attempted the same task as Murphy aping Godspeed!: he’d used Eno’s song as a placeholder until he composed his own song to replace it, but was never content, and in the end he and Soderbergh agreed to simply purchase the song for the movie and leave it as is. Since then, that song has become a film soundtrack staple, but it’s most notable inclusions were on the soundtrack for Traffic and, you guessed it: 28 Days Later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphor. The simulacra and illusions of postmodern capitalism is an entire world of metaphors. Money (and perhaps credit) is the metaphor of metaphors for our time. We have become adept at interpreting postmodern capitalism’s doublespeak, it is the second language of almost the entire world.

I generally subscribe very strongly to the spirit of the idea that all art is indirection. Art says things without saying it, obscures things to arrive at an even more striking truth, a truer than truth. But when our world is full of truths that are truthier than truth, might metaphor not work in the opposite direction?

Videos and more after the jump…

  The politics and mechanics of anti-war art

In Ngugi Wathiongo’s Devil on the Cross, as in much of his work, we see this action at work. His magical realism, of course, is more real than real. Instead of embedding capitalism as some arcane concept to be critiqued, he lays the true nature of capitalism bare, as experienced by real people. Whenever the word “capitalism” might be said, Ngugi instead substitutes “theft and robbery.”

Thus I am here writing in praise of a certain raw and sanguine poetic praxis in this age of Patriot Acts and Iraqi Freedoms. It is in this spirit that I praise Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later.

As 300 (and the Patriot Act) teaches us, fascism now lives out in the open, normalized. We live with it until it smells like home. Perhaps this choice has already come to us, perhaps there never will be such a point, but I predict that should the final tipping point to utter fascism come, it will be like the choice between butter and margarine.  

I was concerned, of course, about whether or not 28 Weeks Later could carry the mantle of its predecessor. Boyle moved to a reduced role, going from director to producer, but fortunately that may have been the best such move since George Lucas took a backseat from directing for The Empire Strikes Back.

 Zeitgeist

Fresnadillo has nailed the zeitgeist of international tension more than any contemporary film that I’ve seen in my lifetime. This director’s grasp of genre, filmic technique, and ability to boil down an enormous budget into a heart-pounding 90-minute film without an inch of fat are technical achievements worthy of lengthy analysis in and of themselves, but it is Fresnadillo’s ability to simultaneously signify on so many of the fears nipping at the edges of our vision that is so startling. The idea that globalization, the enormous power of Big Pharma, and the unchecked military-industrial complex may produce diseases unlike any the world has ever seen, embodied in SARS, drug-resistant TB and many other diseases, as well as anthrax, is one of these fears. Another, the idea that terror and total social collapse could happen overnight in our most secure fortresses, like New York, London, and Paris. Terror, of course, struck in 9/11. Thus, the idea that this is primarily an anti-Iraq War film is reductive, which has been advanced by both exponents and detractors.

But it is Iraq, the rawest of American wounds as this film was released, which is the entry point for Fresnadillo’s metaphoric technique.

Sequence Analysis

Iraq is instantly recalled as the protagonists are transported into the “Green Zone,” a sanitized and US military-controlled island in the midst of infected London and the UK in general. The returnees are pilgrims of a sort, coming to reclaim their land. They stay in hotels, surveilled by military snipers through their scopes (crucially, one of the perpetrators of this is a very sympathetic character, showing that it is our friends and family who operate these government control apparatuses). Government-military surveillance. Too heavy-handed? Or just heavy-handed enough in this age, where even this metaphor escapes most? Sometimes it’s simplification, or rather, a different form of clarity, that’s needed.

 Of course, all hell shortly breaks loose, and infection reaches the Green Zone, triggering Code Red, the military’s containment plan. The snipers are at first instructed to shoot only the infected in the coming crush of fleeing bodies. Here, the metaphoric screen almost collapses completely in the most notorious use of the particular poetry I am highlighting here. Disembodied voices with almost video game-level acting skills muse incredulously “I don’t see who’s a target,” and “Man, this is FUBAR.” This is the worst acting of the movie, it is cheesy, alienatingly so, and it may be in part due to the generic actioner nature of the dialogue, and it may be due to a simple shortage of talent here, but I believe that here we see instead the almost total rejection of the metaphoric apparatus by Fresnadillo. We are seeing here a metaphor that is something more and less than a metaphor. It is almost directly portable to the situation in Iraq, for through the government’s covers sometimes a poet’s bludgeon is necessary, to break through hegemony’s grasp on our skulls. This is not acting, this is not cinematic technique, this is the closest thing to documentary reality that can be mustered in a fictional film. It lays its cards on the table, its agenda, its manipulations, its mythmaking, but it is from here that we get a sense of things. We are shocked to a certain twin consciousness as the film’s diegetic events and its Iraq War referent come into focus.

As the stampede becomes a flood The Wire’s Idris Elba (Stringer) orders the snipers to “abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything…We’ve lost control.” The acting improves, and the movie’s action hits its stride action. John Murphy’s fantastic Godspeed!-aping “In the House, in a Heartbeat” builds to its climactic swell, and the film’s magic becomes evident. With all of the suspension of disbelief required of a genre film, a military/zombie one no less, and just having been hit with heavy-handed and politically strident metaphoric technique, Fresnadillo sweeps us up all the same. The violent paranoia and bedlam into which we are thrown is not simply gutwrenching but heart-rending. Again, it is the virtuoso command of these cinematic, generic, political, and emotional scales that makes this film and its director so special. I was hit emotionally by this film harder than any I’ve seen since, perhaps, Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

The American snipers’ shooting becomes increasingly frenetic and emotional, and utter chaos envelops. The human wave rushes down steps into a hail of chain-fed gunfire and Fresnadillo breaks away, his mission accomplished.

 Blackwater: A different sniper video, a different approach to documentary

I am reminded of nothing so much here as a youtube video I dug up years ago of Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq. Everyone that I’ve shown it to has been utterly disgusted by it, so of course watch at your own risk. Little metaphoric separation is available here.

The video is a side view looking at a Blackwater sniper perched in a nest on a rooftop with a group of snipers. The sniper fires almost continuously for the entire length of the 7 minute video, and generally we are given very little idea as to how he is picking his targets, who they are, or how often his bullets are making contact with human flesh. Then, all comes into sickening, horrifying focus when at the 5:01 mark the sniper exuberantly exclaims “Jesus Christ! It’s like a fucking turkey shoot!”

Has a more American statement been made in Iraq?

A few words on going to the movies. Reviews are a very useful tool. They get things wrong sometimes, like with the early hype surrounding 300 and Transformers. But if you learn how to speak the language you will be rewarded.

So if a film hits theaters that seems too good to be true, that seems unlikely for a major studio to back, and it tickles your fancy, go see it. I’m thinking specifically here of The Lookout, which left me raving for weeks, a story about a _BOY_ who becomes mentally disabled and then lured into a heist, but there are other categories. If you’re a_WOMAN_ who goes to the movies, make a point of watching films with _FEMALE_leads, a disappearing category (unless of course they’re fascist horrorshows, like the Jodie Foster vehicle last year.  Many of the best films of the last few years have been entirely unjustified box office bombs. I went out to support Grindhouse twice, despite its problematics, as the world would be a better place if major studios took those kinds of risks more often.

Grindhouse and 28 Weeks Later were both major box office bombs, the former being one of the most significant and discussed of the year. The triumphant, unapologetic fascism of 300 became the year’s most talked-about runaway hit. I saw all three of these films in theaters, 300 on its opening weekend. 28 Weeks Later was poorly promoted, probably: it ended up taking in far less income than its predecessor and had a fantastically more opulent budget than Boyle’s stripped-down DV-shot production. Grindhouse and 300 both, to my mind, offered terrific cinematic experiences, and on content alone should have been two of the year’s biggest hits. Oh well. I’m no box office analyst, but I want to really encourage all of you to rent 28 Weeks Later.