Avant-garde and kitsch in the early 21st century

Today is Clement Greenberg‘s centennial

Crying Boy (?) – Bruno Amadio

Best-known for his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) he is more of an author to acknowledge rather than to admire. His above mentioned Avant-Garde and Kitsch is one of the first texts to one finds when one researches the two extremeties of the artistic experience: avant-garde and kitsch. Two terms coined during the industrial revolution, the first in Paris, the second in Berlin.

Avant-Garde and Kitsch does not deliver. Much more interesting and related reading are The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin, 1936), Notes on Camp (Susan Sontag, 1964) and The Aporias of the Avant-Garde (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1962). The intimate connection between avant-garde and popular culture was first celebrated in the 1990 exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.

I have a separate entry on death of the avant-garde.

Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit

Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night predates Malevich’s, Black Square on a White Field by 31 years.

As a term avant-garde was replaced by experimental in the 1960s.

Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994) was an American art critic closely associated with the abstract art movement in the United States. In particular, he promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement and had close ties with the painter Jackson Pollock. He is the author of Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Such was Greenberg’s influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the “kings of cultureburg”, alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.

He introduces his essay by juxtaposing forms of popular culture and high art:

“ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such different things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest — what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted — does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?”[1]

In the fourth paragraph he starts his defense of the avant-garde vs Alexandrianism (academicism).

“It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we — some of us — have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: — avant-garde culture. ”

Greenberg is a flawed writer. He uses scare quotes as clarification more than 30 times in this text.

His assessment of kitsch is shortsighted. He explicitly equates academic art with kitsch and vice versa. He is right to connote kitsch with the industrial revolution. Possibly he read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written three years earlier, which has the same kitsch/industrial revolution analysis but with much less of the judgementalness.

See also: cultural pessimism and elitism

Art’s Birthday

Fogos Copacabana 2009 - Fireworks over Copacabana 2009 by augusto.froehlich

Click for credits

The highbrow world is excited by “Art’s Birthday” which will take place in two days on January 17. “Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.

The lowbrow world already celebrated art’s birthday at midnight December 31 with the various fireworks. Talk about sumptuary excess. And synchronicity. Think about how many mouths can be fed with what went up the air. For entertainment. And yet I totally understand. I enjoy fireworks and consider them a primeval art.

I’ve previously posted[1] about sumptuary excess, expenditure and the general economy.

Filliou is co-responsible for: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966) – Daniel Spoerri, Roland Topor
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Death by bisection or dismemberment (excluding decapitation)

The final frontier in cinephilia is silent cinema.

I just discovered Ménilmontant.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoO2hLUMgG0&]

Opening scene of Ménilmontant (no intertitles, a flurry of quick close-up shots depicting an axe murder)

Ménilmontant (1926) is a silent film by Russian film director Dimitri Kirsanoff. His best-known work, it takes its name from the Paris neighborhood of the same name. The film is a silent, but does not contain any intertitles. It begins with a flurry of quick close-up shots depicting the axe murder (see death by bisection or dismemberment (excluding decapitation)) of the parents of the protagonists, two girls. As young women, they are portrayed by Nadia Sibirskaïa, Kirsanoff’s first wife, and Yolande Beaulieu; their mutual love interest is played by Guy Belmont. The film uses many other techniques that were relatively new at the time, including double exposure.

RIP Patrick McGoohan (1928 – 2009)

RIP Patrick McGoohan, 80, American-born Irish actor (The Prisoner, Braveheart)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-X5Hgbc688&]

The Prisoner

Patrick Joseph McGoohan (March 19, 1928 – January 13, 2009) was an Irish American actor who rose to fame in the British film and TV industry by starring in the 1960s television series Danger Man, cult classic The Prisoner and Mel Gibson‘s epic Braveheart. McGoohan wrote and directed several episodes of The Prisoner himself. He also had a part in David Cronenberg’s paranoiac Scanners as Dr. Paul Ruth, psychopharmacist.

Proudhon (Property is Theft!) @ 200

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon @200

Anarchy in Palermo by lulazzo [non vede, non sente, non parla]

Click for image credits

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon(1809 – 1865), who I mentioned here[1], was a French anarchist. He was the first individual to call himself an “anarchist” and is considered among the first anarchist thinkers. He was a workingman, a printer and autodidact. Proudhon is most famous for his assertion that “Property is theft!“, in What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (original title: Qu’est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), his first major work, published in 1840.

The book’s publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other: they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy.

My fave quote of him I saw once written on several carriages of a train in Antwerp Central Station.

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

Durtal is fascinating.

Self portrait, 1885, oil on canvas, by Félix Vallotton

Imaginary portrait of Durtal (2009)

Durtal is fascinating.

Durtal is the name of the the recurring fictional character in J.-K. Huysmans‘s novel sequence Là-Bas, En route, La Cathédrale.

Norman Mailer appropriated Durtal to rewrite Là-Bas — a novel by Huysmans about the first documented serial killer and pratictioner of Satanism, Gilles de Rais — in Trial of the Warlock, a novelette I am currently reading in a Dutch version in the collection Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction.

Joseph Losey @100

Joseph Losey @100

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVXuBW1Y2s]

Famous seduction scene (with dripping water faucet and many Pinter pauses) of The Servant

Joseph Losey was an American theatre and film director (1909 – 1984). One-time student of Bertolt Brecht, his best-known film is The Servant (1963).

The Servant stars Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig, and James Fox and was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter (the first of his three collaborations with Losey, the others are Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970)) from the novel of the same name by Robin Maugham. It is a tightly woven psychological drama that focuses on the relationships between the four central characters. The intricacies of class, servitude, ennui, role reversal and Pyrrhic victory are examined and exploded.

Each of the collaborations with Harold Pinter examined aspects of the British class system in their reflection of the master-servant relationship.

Outside of The Servant, I’ve seen The Go-Between (1970), The Prowler (1951) and Galileo (1975).

On my wishlist are:

Introducing the late Tina Aumont

Tina Aumont in Frédéric Pardo‘s Home Movie

Male viewers pressed for time may want to scrub to 2.37

Tina Aumont (14 February 1946 – 28 October 2006) was an American actress of French, and Dominican descent.

Her parents

She was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of actors Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez who he had met in Hollywood. Maria Montez was known as the Queen of Technicolor, an early camp icon and idol to American experimental filmmaker Jack Smith, whose Flaming Creatures (1963) is basically a travesty on Hollywood B movies and tribute to actress Maria Montez.

Back to Tina

Tina married actor and film director Christian Marquand in 1963, at the age of 17.

She made her debut as Tina Marquand in Joseph Losey‘s 1966 movie Modesty Blaise. She worked in Italian cinema with, among others, Alberto Sordi (Scusi, lei è favorevole o contrario?, 1966), Tinto Brass (L’urlo, 1968 and Salon Kitty, 1975), Mauro Bolognini (Fatti di gente perbene, 1974), Francesco Rosi (Cadaveri eccellenti, 1975), and Federico Fellini (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976).

In 2000 she retired from film work and died in France at age 60.

PS: Tina Aumont was brought to my attention via a Dutch blog. Moon in the Gutter was there[2] before me. Here[3] is a Tina Aumont photo taken by Frédéric Pardo from the site http://paris70.free.fr/ dedicated to French counterculture of the fashionable variety (as contrasted to the political variety). I discover Philippe Bone.

A plate of soup, a girl, and a coffin, or, Lev Kuleshov @110

Lev Kuleshov, Russian filmmaker and film theorist @110

For Kuleshov (1899 – 1970), the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment. In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor were intercut with various meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, and so on) in order to show how editing changes viewers’ interpretations of images.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grCPqoFwp5k&]

Kuleshov Experiment

Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, an old woman’s coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience “raved about the acting…. the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.”

Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings.

The effect has also been studied by psychologists, and is well-known among modern film makers. Alfred Hitchcock refers to the effect in his conversations with François Truffaut, using actor James Stewart as the example (although Hitchcock mistakes Kuleshov with Pudovkin).

The experiment itself was created by assembling fragments of pre-existing film from the Tsarist film industry, with no new material. Mozzhukhin had been the leading romantic “star” of Tsarist cinema, and familiar to the audience.

Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov’s view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The raw materials of such an art work need not be original, but are pre-fabricated elements which can be disassembled and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions.

The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema, culminating in the famous films of the late 1920s by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, among others. These films included The Battleship Potemkin, October, Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, and The Man with a Movie Camera.

Soviet montage cinema was suppressed under Stalin during the 1930s as a dangerous example of Formalism in the arts, and as being incompatible with the official Soviet artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.

Here is Hitchcock explaining the Kuleshov effect:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY]

Alfred Hitchcock

See also: continuity editing, shot reverse shot.

RIP Bill Landis (1959 – 2008)

Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square (2002) – Bill Landis, Michelle Clifford [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Via Tim Lucas comes the news that Bill Landis is dead.

Bill Landis (1959 – 2008) created the Xeroxed fanzine Sleazoid Express in 1980. It featured reviews of the exploitation films playing New York City’s Times Square’s 42nd Street grindhouse and reports on the local scene. The later issues also featured reviews from acclaimed Jimmy McDonough.

Sleazoid Express (1980-1983, and later editions) was the house journal of the grindhouse movie scene in New York circa 1964-1984. Edited by Bill Landis, a projectionist and devotee of the crime-ridden sleaze houses, the magazine not only captured the genre affections but the whole Times Square milieu of drugs, violence and prostitution. Typical films shown in the movie houses, which centred around the city’s 42nd Street, included Bamboo House of Dolls, Blood Sucking Freaks, The Corpse Grinders, Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In and The Ultimate Degenerate.

Far from representing a marginal off-shoot of the movie business, the grindhouse films would be later plundered for ideas and imagery by mainstream cinema, while the trash ethic and aesthetic of the magazine itself would be effortlessly copied by many others.

Bill Landis co-wrote with his wife for 22 years Michelle Clifford, who is the principal author of Metasex.

Footnote: Bill Landis was fond of Alice Arno and Karin Schubert