Sunday 22 July 2018

Pressure drop

After yet more frantic work intensity, I found myself relaxing into music that was familiar and welcoming. Chasing down YouTube videos, I was reliving tracks (ancient and modern) I adored but hadn't listened to in ages … or finding myself suddenly seduced by more recent discoveries, all over again.

A playlist of sorts emerged, and if there's a theme, it is that 'release' I was searching for. All of these selections push whatever internal button I have that lets some pressure escape through the valve - whether it's through sheer beauty, infectious joy, distraction and agitation, highly-wrought emotion or catharsis … you'll probably realise which tunes belong to which category! But all of them rocket me out of my universe and into theirs, which was very much the point.

I hope you enjoy the line-up. YouTube videos come and go from time to time, so I've also added a Spotify version of the playlist at the end.


Let's go: "It is YOU..."

*

Toots and the Maytals: 'Pressure Drop'


ABBA: 'Arrival'.


Schubert: 'Impromptu D899, op.90, no.4' (performed by Maria João Pires).


Laurie Anderson: 'O Superman'.


Duparc: 'Chanson triste' (performed by Elly Ameling, Dalton Baldwin).


Portico Quartet: 'Clipper'.


Debussy: 'Reverie' (performed by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet).


Belle and Sebastian: 'Play for Today'.


Arvo Pärt: Fratres (performed by the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra).


Amayenge: 'Munise Munise'.


Olivia Chaney: 'IOU'


John Adams: 'Phrygian Gates' (performed by Ralph van Raat).


Procol Harum: 'Cerdes (Outside the Gates Of)'.


Miles Davis: 'Shhh / Peaceful'.


Radiohead: 'Staircase'.


Wagner: 'Lohengrin, Prelude to Act 1' (performed by Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Andris Nelsons)


Daft Punk: 'Giorgio by Moroder'.


Paul Simon: 'Hearts and Bones'.


Spotify version:







Wednesday 11 July 2018

What lies beneath: America's Cool Modernism

Writing quickly as I can feel the pressure of a deadline. This weekend, Mrs Specs and I made a trip to Oxford to see the exhibition 'America's Cool Modernism: O'Keeffe to Hopper' at the Ashmolean Museum. It turns out we just managed to get ourselves organised in time, as the closing date is Sunday 22 July. So, you have about a week and a half left to go - and if you can, you should.

Here's the description of the show's concept from the Ashmolean's website:

"This is the first exhibition to explore the 'cool' in American art in the early 20th century, from early experiments in abstraction by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Paul Strand to the strict, clean precisionist paintings of Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth ... In the Jazz Age of the ‘roaring’ 20s, and the ensuing Great Depression of the 30s, many American artists expressed their uncertainty about the rapid modernisation and urbanisation of their country by producing work that had a cool, controlled detachment and a smooth, precise finish."

I wanted to quote that exactly, for a particular reason. It's a technically and no doubt academically accurate description of the artists in their proper context, of course. But my gut reaction - the way the work made me feel - was anything but cool and detached. To me, many of the pieces were possessed of a broiling energy, something seething beneath the surface - even in their spaces and silences.

Even Georgia O'Keeffe's rendition of a relatively serene East River is framed by industry, bisected in the exact centre of the picture by a smoke-belching chimney.


The exhibition includes several other O'Keeffe works, some of which marshal her swirling floral lines into abstraction. I was particularly struck by a painting actually called 'Black Abstraction' which appears to represent a migraine-like tunnel vision experience. Sweeping black curves around a small disc of light, I could recognise its monochromatic distance - but at the same time, to me it said mental malfunction, turmoil.

While the gallery is bookended to some extent by its 'headline' artists - Hopper's 'about-to-happen' atmospheres dominating the final section - perhaps the greatest pleasures of an exhibition like this are the discoveries you make along the way. Highlights for me included:
  • The 'empty building' paintings of George Ault - especially 'Hoboken Factory'. The factory has two storeys, a lower level which appears to be the original 'traditional' warehouse-style building, but with a glass upper floor on top, presumably a later extension. As the accompanying text points out - the bottom half is in darkness, but the glass section radiates light - and this beneath glowering black clouds. Again, the technique suggests an unsettling, alien quality; so why did I find it fascinating on almost a horror-movie level? I can only say that I felt that light pulsing, so vividly was it rendered. It didn't feel like a mere optical illusion or surreal gesture - more that there was action in that building, something terrible happening that we cannot see.
  • The magnificent etchings of Louis Lozowick, bending the straight lines of New York and Minneapolis into folds and cascades, somehow giving the cities back their three dimensions.
  • More buildings without people from Niles Spencer, but here, like a kind of proto-pop-art Escher. The colours leap from the canvas and the lines / structures create their own movement (staircases, railings, angled roofs) so that your eyes constantly range around the pictures, occupying the scene yourself.
  • The kinetic power and graphic-design sensibility of Charles Demuth - cryptic inscriptions; tilting skyscrapers and citadels; sun, shadow and neon signs. His depiction of a fire truck hurtling towards the onlooker (based on a poem by friend William Carlos Williams, or here, simply 'BILL') - not in any sense a realistic painting but a kind of Impressionist/Vorticist mash-up: the truck itself is an immaculately controlled, but still indistinct red shape - however, its shining 'No. 5' races relentlessly towards you, reaching you in three instantaneous flash-moments. The buildings at the side of the street seem upended in the chaos. Yes, the painting is immaculate - but doesn't its energy simply explode out of the frame?


  • Perhaps the most telling images in the whole show are from Joseph Stella, who seems to sum up the otherworldliness of much of this work by conflating familiar urban sights with explicitly religious symbols: telegraph poles and wires become crosses, windows reflect coloured light, turning them into stained glass. 

Was this movement of sorts an unconscious joint attempt to somehow contain these rapid developments that couldn't necessarily be controlled? The exhibition displays a fantastic tension between art that seems to embrace the change - etchings that show sun-streamed skyscrapers leaning outwards, imposing themselves on the viewer - and that which would almost suppress it - such as the rural yet pristine landscapes of Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford.

For me, the 'coolness' of this work was somehow fed through a modernism machine that generated excitement, foreboding, forward thinking, and paranoia. You can keep your distance all you like: the future is still coming for you.

Faster than you think, in fact: remember, the exhibition is only on until 22 July. (The catalogue is affordable, and handsome, with excellent reproductions - but all of this art, with its strange auras, deserves to be seen first-hand.) Here's the Ashmolean website, for more detail.

(Images:
  • Georgia O'Keeffe, ''East River from the Shelton Hotel', 1928
  • Charles Demuth, 'I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold', 1928
...as tweeted by the Ashmolean Musuem. Follow them on Twitter here.)

Thursday 5 July 2018

High Line to skyline

I had never been to New York before, so to me, the place was almost fictional. Does every first-time visitor experience this weird thought process? In some ways, NYC seemed utterly familiar, through hundreds - surely, thousands - of films and photographs. So, when I actually got there, walking its streets and staring up at its skyscrapers, it felt more surreal, as if I was playing a role in my own movie. Virtual and actual reality combined.

Obviously, I snapped away myself, hoping to bottle my own memories so they don't get lost among the New York images that belong to everyone. As regular Specs readers will know, I put my photography on the blog from time to time - whether it's the portraiture work I produce in collaboration with friends, or simply my personal record of trips and travels. I hope that visitors enjoy its occasional appearance as another spoke in the blog's overall music/art/culture wheel.

So this is the first of perhaps a couple of posts recalling our New York trip. Here, I've divided the shots into two groups.

High Line

I took this set of pictures across a couple of visits we made to the High Line, the remarkable elevated park - regenerated from disused rail tracks - above the west side of Manhattan. While the High Line gets busy, its leafy path feels like an oasis of sorts as the daily chaotic routine continues beneath it. The whole route offers surprising and captivating views of brand new, cutting-edge architecture bedding in alongside historic tenement buildings and warehouses - as I hope these pictures show.








("What do you mean, you don't like heights? You're a pigeon, Eddie.")







Skyline

It's impossible not to photograph it. It doesn't matter if millions of people have done it before, from exactly the same vantage points. (Perhaps some of you have a local view that you're drawn to, and like to snap. For example, if you're familiar with London, you may know Tower Bridge, an iconic landmark crossing the river Thames. From the nearby London Bridge, you get a classic view of it, which I can't help photographing more or less every time I see it. In NYC, whichever way I turned, I had that feeling intensified to what felt like the power of 100. I don't know how New Yorkers go anywhere or get anything done.)

We love a viewpoint, and took as many opportunities to survey the city as we could.

From the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:


From a coach!


From the observation deck of the Empire State Building. (This was around 11pm to midnight. It's open to 2am.)




From the Staten Island Ferry:


From the 'Top of the Rock' - that is, the Rockefeller Centre observation deck:



 

To be continued...