SOUNDTRACK: Æ MAK-“We Have It Right Here” (2020).
Æ MAK is Aoife McCann. She creates a fascinating tapestry of music. It feels classical and operatic and yet also feels very electronic and oddly poppy.
This song begins with muted xylophones -sounding electronic tones playing a pretty melody (which reminds me of Björk).
McCann’s voice comes in and lilts and flutters almost bird-like. She sings in English but with interesting emphases on words.
Her vocal delivery and melodies conjure Regina Spektor.
About halfway through the, until now entirely electronic song, adds some soft acoustic guitar and gentle bells.
The second chorus is almost all voice with simple percussion and a kind of Kate Bush vocal trill.
The electronics come back in and suddenly start getting fuller and louder–filling up your headspace with sounds as her voice echoes itself and adds other lines before building to a remarkably catchy ending.
There’s so much going on in this song even though it often feels very minimal.
And wait until you see her on stage.
[READ: September 21, 2020] On Contemporary Art
I have enjoyed Aira’s novels and was intrigued by this short essay about Contemporary Art.
The entire book is 60 pages and it includes and Foreword and an Afterword. That jibes with the premise of the imprint itself. Ekphrasis Press reprints works about visual art that are not meant to be academic in nature–but compelling as prose.
In the Foreword Will Chancellor, talks about how language can throw you off. He recalls bring a child and seeing the Objects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear warning. He wondered how objects and their appearances could diverge. He continues that Aira suggests this gap between appearance and reality might be the origin of cotemporary art.
~~~
The main body of the book is Aira’s essay, translated by Katherine Silver.
He starts by saying he is a writer who looks for inspiration in painting. He says that cave painters painted facts, but it took a person relating the adventure, the storyteller, to make the episode come alive.
As a lover of art, he subscribes to many art magazines, namechecking Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, art press and more. He says the magazines look better every year but that their ability to convey art gets worse every year–they cannot properly convey what an art piece looks like. You have to read the texts to see what is happening.
His essay concerns the Enemy of Contemporary Art who says that today’s
frauds who pretend to be artists depend on a justifying discourse to validate the nonsense they produce.
They say that contemporary art doesn’t speak for itself–that it needs critics to explain it.
He says that true art has always had reproduction. The ancient Greek statues were originally made in bronze and marble was used for the copies (who knew?). Whereas now reproductions are made so quickly that reproduction becomes art without work.
He asks, are the concrete examples of art a bit shabby,
with the prestige they offer to the semieducated, as a fishhook for tourists or millionaires…. That oft-repeated question, “What would you save from a fire in the Louvre?– or the Prado, or MOMA–doesn’t it reveal , because repetitive and classic, the pleasure it would give us to see a veritable intuition enveloped in flames, to be finally released from the burden of that grab bag full of trinkets.
He wonders if it is necessary for us to reproduce art? For centuries it sat and waited for us to see it,. With magazines so quick to reproduce art, it is now the job of the artist to make art that is inherently hard to reproduce–in photographic or even being written about.
He moves on to the naming conventions of artistic movements. Art could have functioned without labels, but auction houses needed labels for sales. They came up with names for all previous movements, but what could they have called works that was created after 1970?
The name they chose without straining their brains and with a meager vision of the future, was “Contemporary Art.” A perfectly absurd name, not descriptive, or provocative, or geographic, and astonishingly neutral, almost a parody.
Traditionally, he says, one of the barriers to becoming an artist was the apprenticeship of learning technique. It is now quite easy, and it brings up the possibility that we will finally meet the next great artists who in other epochs would have remained unknown because they had no patience for or access to apprenticeship.
This is most true about film. An Argentine director said that
When film ceases to be a heavy industry , expensive and cumbersome, when making a movie will be as easy as picking up a pencil and writing a poem, only then will film become a full-fledged art, and everything prior to that will be seen as a poignant history.
But what if the facts prove otherwise. What if
obstacles of technique and studies and financing are integral and essential parts of the art of the cinema.
And what of literature? The Enemy of Contemporary Art is indignant that an artist makes millions of dollars with a sleight of hand.
But the writer who is the equivalent to that type of artist, the radical experimental writer doesn’t earn millions. The one who does earn millions is the author of best sellers, but in that case he earns it through the sweat of his brow because he has learned his métier and practices it conscientiously.
He ends the essay talking about Magritte, Duchamp and Dali. They admired each other and were finds. But they were opposite in some ways.
Duchamp didn’t care if the work was made by somebody else, or not made by anybody, or was bought in a bazaar, as long as the discourse that supported it was his and nobody’s but his… Dali, on the other hand, had no problem with many of his book being written by others or composed by others from his notes, which were written in shaky handwriting and worse syntax. But his pictoral work was intensely his, using techniques from the Renaissance of intense physical and temporal charge.
The “problems” with contemporary art are Duchamp’s fault. His work lay dormant for half a century until it was reborn with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg as they worked on new trends like pop, minimalism and The Happening.
Thus was created the myth of Duchamp, that he has already done everything. Thus the contemporary artist adds a tiny fraction of 0.01 percent to the 99.99 percent that Duchamp covered.
~~~
The Afterword is by Alexandra Kleeman and it is wonderful. It may even be a short story unto itself
She arrives at a gallery. They are doing a retrospective of a recently deceased artist. The line is out the door and down the block. She says an exhibit of the artist’s works a few months ago would have had no line at al.
After an hour of no movement, some people left but other people began to talk to each other. They speculated about what the exhibit would have. One man suggested it would contain the artist’s dead body. A woman said that would be too grim for someone whos work was always so playful.
The line grew longer and hours had gone by with no movement. Had something happened? Were people inside refusing to leave? Should their be a limit on how long people can stay at an exhibition?
The the author realizes that perhaps the line they were standing in was the point of the whole thing.
Our line encircled the whole entire work and set it apart from the busy metropolitan background… We set in motion stories about the work’s contents, just as we would have done has we been inside to see it.
This short work had a lot packed into it and it was certainly an easy read.
For ease of searching I include: AE MAK, Cesar Aira, metier.
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