Inspiring Stuff #6

The Surreal Object: Sketched thoughts on Poetry, Duchamp, and Things 

I've always felt that Surrealism was at its best when experimenting with objects.

In searching for a 'physics of poetry' (Breton's words) it exposed and reconfigured the 'everyday' in ways that, for me, are even more radical than the film experiments of Un Chien Andalou or Dali's photo-real dreamscapes.

Man Ray

...Or if not more radical, then at least more immediate somehow, more unsettling. They insist on a new way of looking at very ordinary 'things'.

I'm not sure how true this is, but I read an essay recently on the relationship between the work of Marcel Duchamp and American poet William Carlos Williams which seemed to suggest that the path to American Modernism could perhaps be mapped in the following way:

European Realist Painting/Sculpture > European Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Modernism (Which crystallises the abstract and draws out a more definite focus.)

American Modernism then insists upon a distilled 'Abstraction' that brings 'the thing itself' to the foreground.

Dada/Surrealist experiments with the snow shovel or urinal for example.

Marcel Duchamp

But I'm jumping ahead of myself really... What I wanted to say was that I was surprised during a recent visit to the 'le Surrealisme et l'objet' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that my first thought was of Carlos Williams' Poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow':

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Again, there is the intense focus on the object itself.

Then later, trawling through the Internet for information, I discovered a concrete connection between Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams.

My initial thoughts are that the object intersects with the poetic at two key points:

1) Object as the fulcrum for a wider narrative
2) The 'uncanny object': A moment of very ordinary disquiet

The first seems to share more with Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow - The theatre stage prop, or gun glimpsed on the wall in the first act of a play by Chekhov. The second functions as a tripwire, a perfectly structured metaphor.

I like both.

 Salvador Dali / Alberto Giocometti

Inspiring Stuff #5

Jacques Brel

"... Even if it's dangerous... Even if it's impossible... Especially if it's impossible."

Inspiring Stuff #4

Poetry, Pret a Manger, and Luke Kennard

I'm convinced that 100 years from now, academics trying to make sense of Britain's contemporary literary landscape will divide writers into 2 categories:

1) Those who reference Pret a Manger in their work
2) Those who do not

The former will be hailed as having truly understood what it means to be human and living in the early part of the the 21st century. The latter will not.

You can write expansive novels on the interconnectedness of societies, on the fascinating/terrifying impact of emergent technologies. You can riff on the way twitter and social media have toppled despots or served as the catalysts for riots/uprisings but if you're hoping for longevity, you need to capture the heartbreak of buying a tuna baguette, announcing 'it's for here', and turning to find all the tables are taken.

If Nicholson Baker had been British, and born later, Mezzanine would have mentioned Pret a Manger.

Luke Kennard mentions Pret a Manger at least once as far as I can tell and so, according to my basic ranking system, he understands fully what it means to be human. He is currently my favourite poet.

If Dostoevsky had been British, and born later, Crime and Punishment would have mentioned Pret a Manger.

I don't feel as though I know enough about poetry to correctly analyse Kennard's work or to describe precisely why I like it, but I will bullet point a few thoughts and quotations below and hopefully some of it will make sense. I'm also only going to reference his 2012 collection 'A Lost Expression' because it's the only one I have to hand and it's cold and I don't want to get out of bed to find another one. He actually doesn't mention Pret a Manger in this book.

A Few Thoughts on What I Like About Luke Kennard's Poetry with a Few Quotations

- The exploration of the absurd in the everyday (or vice versa.)
- Humour, used as both weapon and exploratory device.
- The battle between self-determination and a world determined to impose it's own sense of chaos upon the individual:

This'll be easier if I try to give you an analogy. A
Parable. Okay. Let's say I'm running a cattery.
No, let's say I'm trying to steal business from an 
existing cattery by touting my own domestic 
cattery outside the official cattery gates...

Then later:

... I've been inundated 
with cats. Scores of them. I can't afford all the food.
I don't remember whose cat was whose. Some 
of the cats are dead. The constant yowling and 
meowing... No, actually, that isn't what I'm 
trying to say at all...
- [Jerimiah] / [Man in his 30s, professional. Shirt and jacket, tie.]

- The sense here that even in imagined situations within imagined situations, the hero has no control over the world or how he would like to describe it. (Later, the character is in charge of a tannoy
system that will only communicate feedback.)

- That his writing plays with language as much as imagery. A similar Russian doll effect is applied to language in the poem Leather-Bound Road:

It's what the singer does between the words
that makes the words the words and not just words.
- Leather-Bound Road

And, flicking back quickly to another poem, I've just remembered a similar effect through repetition:

Today The Sunken Diner is more or less empty,
everything sequestered to its relevant museum:

Museum of Coffee, Museum of Pancakes,
Museum of Ticket Stubs Dropped while Fumbling for Change,
Museum of Cigarette Cartons You Knew Were Empty
but Checked Anyway. Museum of Lowered Gazes.
- The Sunken Diner

There's more to be said about what is happening here than I'm able to say about what is happening here. Note to self: maybe google 'Constructivist Poetry'. It makes me think of Matthew Welton's pamphlet Waffles. This may or may not be a valid connection.

- His ability to craft similes and metaphors that make you feel as though a rug is being pulled from beneath you. Sometimes he makes me think of Simon Armitage. This may or may not be a valid connection.

I'll stop now because I realise I've turned this post into a rambling list and I think I've made my point. What was my point? Oh just to say that I really like Luke Kennard's poetry.

You can, and probably should, buy 'A Lost Expression' from Amazon.

Inspiring stuff #3

Free Improvisation Music

Roger Turner is by far one of the most exciting drummers I’ve ever encountered. He plays like a thunderstorm; crashing and exploding one minute, clattering and splashing around the kit the next. 

Free Improvisation music is as polarizing as Marmite but I don’t know why it should be. Perhaps in throwing away the map and refusing to stick to verse/chorus/middle eight/break patterns it leaves people feeling lost and unsure of how to listen.

This is what I like most about it though. 

You navigate it, at least I do, in the same way you would the sounds of the everyday world around you – footsteps/a car passing/someone practicing on a piano in a nearby building.

Only it becomes more exciting than the everyday because each sound is made to walk a tightrope of chance and the whim of the performer.

It reminds me of August Strindberg’s 1894 essay On Chance in Artistic Creation in which he writes:

I've been told that the Malays drill holes in the bamboo stalks that grow in their forests. When the wind blows, they lie on the ground to listen to the symphonies produced by these gigantic Aeolian harps. The strange thing is that each listener hears a unique tune and a unique harmony, all according to the whim of
the wind. 

Inspiring Stuff #2

Being Unique: Gaetano Pesce at the Barbican

Gaetano Pesce is an Italian designer who has been blurring lines between beauty and utility for over 40 years. Whether working on furniture, jewellery, fashion, or Architecture, his designs aspire to become art with function. He is driven by the idea of uniqueness and that people be given the opportunity to actively explore this - whether through their own design, or through adapting one of his own creations. The Fontessa shoe, for example,  is designed to be cut and re-formed by the user.

Speaking at the Barbican last night, he made a point that I found particularly interesting: visual design - whatever its form - is a method of communication. The message can be determined and anchored in the design itself - the manicled foot stool as a commentary on female emancipation for example - or it can be purely suggestive - as in the primitive shapes of his house in Bahia. Either way, to design in basic shapes, to build standardised high-rise block towers (yes, I'm looking at you Liverpool street), is to design mute.

Inspiring Stuff #1

Objects as Theatre: Ceramics and Edmund de Waal

At some point I thought I'd struck upon an interesting idea - 'objects as theatre' . Why not strip away the actors completely, I thought. Why not create Mary Celeste type worlds in which all the action happens off stage! Or more precisely; worlds at which we arrive late - where the action has already taken place, leaving the objects to resonate with experienced drama!

And then I stumbled upon Edmund de Waal... What I love about his work (ceramics specifically because I've not read The Hare with Amber Eyes) is his understanding of the drama of objects. His work explores the relationship between 'things' - very often simple pots in varrying shades of white. Their composition is always poetic and often concerned as much with what is there as with what is not. What I mean is that they are structured in such a way that the silences, the blank spaces, are as important as the pots themselves. Silence is an interesting description actually because many of his ceramic filled vitrines feel as though they could be 'played', as if the pots are scored notes waiting to be interpreted and heard.

One of his largests vitrines is hidden in the roof of the V&A in London - you can see it from the lobby if you peer up and beyond the giant coloured chandelier. My first thought is that space must be as important in the display of his 'pieces' as it is in the structure and composition of the objects which make them. For me, this playfulness makes his vitrines as enjoyable as opening an old book to find a forgotten love letter or shopping list. They are each little worlds within worlds.

Coming Soon!

Watch this space! I just bought a new pen!