I’ve been really slow in posting this. It is my adaption of William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence” and I did it more than six months ago. It is very long and I recorded it in my home studio and created a video. It took a very long time, but I think it was worth it!
I have always been impressed and inspired by the work of Blake. Two years ago I went to an excellent exhibition of his work in London. It showed it in the original context of the books he printed, and for the first time I really felt I understood what he was trying to say. Before then I was only guessing. Previously, the pictures tended to be isolated from the poems. I had his poetry in a book without illustrations, and I had seen the pictures in art books. The meanings totally change, and become clear, when they are brought together and seen as a whole.
This is the poem that was the inspiration for Jim Morrison of the Doors and used in his song “End of the Night”. I have spoken most of it and sang the ending lines which are powerful and iconic:
Every night and every morn, some to misery are born
Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night
BY CECILE PAUL OCTOBER 8, 2021
If modern art has taught us anything, it is that anything can be considered art. Picasso’s and Braque’s curious peeling newspaper collages of the 1910s spring to mind as the opening act for the ‘Modern Art’ movement. It was at this point in time, in the early 20th century where ‘real’ art – the academic 19th century kind, with all its airs and graces and establishment-imposed ‘rules’ – and this new lighter, less formal and somewhat random approach, parted ways. Modern Art as we perceive it was arguably launched by the quirky and wonderfully chaotic Dada movement that took root in central Europe around 1910 and flowered in New York in the early 1920s, causing a somewhat profound ruffling of the feathers of the status quo. And whilst we now see Dada as revolutionary, it was uncanny to discover that Dada had a look-a-like predecessor – not a direct ancestor, mind you, more like a forgotten uncle. ‘Les Incohérents’ was a short-lived French art movement that originated from Montmartre in Paris in the 1880s. Unconcerned with the intellectual, political or spiritual facets of the arts (which Dada would address a mere 20 years later), they did, however, attempt to question through satire and ridicule, what exactly ‘art’ was, who it was intended for and why on earth it had to be so darn square.
Paris in the 1880s was the capital of a flourishing world empire, serious and secure. Perhaps it could afford some cultural introspection and self-analysis, if only for its own entertainment? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the Incoherents movement had a point: why restrict the arts, visual, music or dance world to the same old tedious and traditional offerings? Why not open it up to fun, new rules and new media?
As a small group of self-publicists, Les Incohérents were fed up with the stale and rather dull version of the-then established Arts world and wanted to entice the public with an alternative and more joyful view on art and life.
Playful, ingenious, ridiculous and entertaining, the Incoherent’s message was delivered through social amusement of the public, not unlike today’s social media content. This was to be an art for all, not just for a chosen few intellectuals. There’s indeed nothing new under the sun: from the graffitied walls of Pompeii to the current explosion of self-indulgent imagery on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it’s human nature to tease and tinker with mainstream messages and offer an alternative opinion.
The Mona Lisa of the movement is quite literally, the Mona Lisa herself, enjoying her long clay pipe. Mona Lisa fumant la pipe created by the artist Sapeck (AKA Eugène Bataille) in 1883, is perhaps Les Incohérents’ most iconic identity piece. The crude application of the pipe and its smoke rings, shatters the reverence of the historic image, and let’s face it, Sapeck’s subject is clearly far more relaxed than Leonardo’s. No longer part of an exclusive private collection or purely the intellectual property of the elite, street art was now there for all to enjoy. Technological developments in printing and photography allowed ease of artistic appropriation of established iconic images and masterpieces. Contributors of the Incoherents movement continued to manipulate and distort all aspects of the Arts, from dance to opera, from poster art to photography in an attempt to provoke and rewrite the rules as to what ‘art’ was and who it was for.
The founder and leader of the movement was Jules Lévy, a Parisian writer, publisher and founder of a wine-loving literary club out of Montmartre during the Belle Epoque called Les Hydropathes, which had fizzled out in 1880. Working in newspapers of the day and familiar with volume printing and understanding the public’s appetite for news, in an anti-establishment move, Levy had decided to throw a public ‘exhibition of drawings by people who could not draw’. Billed as a charity event, the contributors could present works in a public forum. This was the first ‘Incohérent’ art exhibition, held on July 13th 1882 on the Champs Elysées. Appropriately, in true Incohérents style, the Champs Elysées show was extravagantly lit by candlelight due to a gas outage. A profusion of works were shown; drawings of all types, paintings littered with alternative and radical subject matter, miscellaneous sculpture and objects in all mediums and forms. These consisted of nonsensical, irrational and bizarre imagery, all engineered to question, provoke, engage and get a laugh from the public.
The success of the Champs Elysées event prompted Lévy to run a second show from his own tiny attic apartment in October 1882 which attracted some 2,000 people including Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. Imagine the art world’s most famous artists and critics crowded together to see over 150 works in a chambre de bonne (Paris’ matchbox apartments reserved for domestic workers). A stark contrast to the pomp and elitism of the prestigious art ‘Salon’ and its official circuits, it was nothing short of a parody. One academic called the radical counter-salon “an attack on art”.
The public was actively invited to engage with this new art through the mocking and mannering of old icons. To say they were intrigued and amused is an understatement. They were gagging for more. Masked balls and cabarets were advertised across the city as the vehicle for delivering their message, attracting the public to a variety of venues and experiences where a jumble of different media, random objects, miscellaneous artefacts, scratchings, pastings and other weird and wonderful objects would be exhibited. A sort of arts ‘rave’ of the day.
Les Incohérents, whether it was a ball or a happening or an exhibition, became a ‘must do and see’ event in the Parisian cultural calendar. October 1883 saw the first official exhibition of Incoherent art at the Galerie Vivienne in the heart of Paris. This show and all their future events would be run for charity, with the guidelines ‘All works are allowed, the serious works and obscene excepted’. The show was an Aladdin’s Cave of absurdities, parodies and pictorial puns and was furnished with a formal catalogue of the works, giving us some idea today of just how bizarre the content was. A whopping 20,000-plus enthusiasts visited the exhibition that October.
The next year, the Incohérents were again at Galerie Vivienne with yet more artful amusements. This time the catalogue, now effectively their manifesto, was lavishly illustrated with engravings of the peculiar works. The invitation card showed a ghostly broom-wielding dancer chasing blackbirds, perhaps an allegory for ‘out with the old and in with the new!’ The newspapers relished the event and as for the public, nothing could gratify their insatiable appetite for ‘incohérent art’.
Les Incohérents gave the Parisian public and celebrities of the day a chaotic and absurd serving of the visual arts, a barrage of eclectic offerings and experiences. Whilst never shocking nor challenging, the events were joyfully anticipated and was very much ‘a thing’ to attend and be seen attending in the Paris of the 1880s. But by the end of the decade, the success of the movement was catching up with Lévy. Accused of commercially exploiting both his artistic contributors and his public, the press began to describe him as a new form of the establishment, ‘the official unofficial Incoherent’. To add insult to injury, other enterprises in Paris started to cash-in on the branding, badging new cafes and titling magazines with the movement’s name and likeness
In order to distance himself from his accusers, Lévy organised a masked funeral ball at the Folies-Bergère nightspot to mark the end of the movement. In 1891, Levy tried to relaunch the movement with a new magazine, ‘Folies-Bergère’, but this also struggled to capture public attention. One last exhibition in 1893 was described this time by a critical press as ‘all that is outdated, outmoded. Inconsistency joined decadence, decay and other jokes with or without handles in the bag of old-fashioned chiffes’. Lévy plodded on until 1896, still trying to be the good Svengali and showman but his movement had flowered and wilted, and its audience had moved on for titillating entertainment elsewhere. Les Incohérents would be momentarily ressurected stateside in 1919 when Marcel Duchamp appropriated the Mona Lisa image, but this time, in place of Sabeck’s pipe, she now sported a moustache.
So little of the movement’s works is thought to have survived, that when the Musée d’Orsay devoted a retrospective to the Incoherent Arts in 1992, it was only able to exhibit archival documents and press clippings. Thousands of works produced by hundreds of artists during the movement’s zenith had all disappeared. Even by the 1930s, surrealists like André Breton, who often spoke about the Incoherents, had never seen their works.
With few traces of its existence, the movement was practically a lost legend; but more than a century later, unexpectedly in early 2021, seventeen important works attributed to the Incoherent Arts exhibitions were discovered in an old trunk. Unearthed amongst the storage of a private home near Paris, the large trunk full of a “jumble of documents, drawings, objects wrapped in rags,” included one work which has since been identified as the first monochrome in the history of art.
Another important find amongst the trunk’s contents was a piece of green cab curtain suspended from a wooden cylinder created by Alphonse Allais, given a title that roughly translates to “Pimps still in the prime of life and their stomachs in the grass drink absinthe“. To the untrained eye, it might look like just an old swatch of antique fabric, but the piece actually predates the Dada movement’s “readymade” philosophy, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe works of art he made from manufactured objects, such as his famous Bottle Rack (1915), the iconic porcelain urinal he titled Fountain (1917) and Bicycle Wheel (1913).
Unaware of the mysterious trunk’s value or significance, the homeowners were unable to identify its original owner – perhaps a co-organiser of Les Incohérents, one of the movement’s artists, or an early collector? Dealer and art expert, Johann Naldi, is still searching for answers while planning to present his findings to the public at the end of 2021, when the collection is also expected to go up for sale as a single lot. The Musée d’Orsay is rumoured to be a likely buyer.
And yet for such a historic find, bringing this collection to the world’s stage could be far more problematic that some would probably hope having just uncovered a missing link in the history of modern art. The problem being; the collection’s centrepiece, a canvas entirely painted in black, now identified as art history’s first monochrome, entitled “Combat de Nègres dans la Nuit“, which translates to “Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night”.
The provocative “joke” painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud, exhibited at the very first ‘Incohérent’ art exhibition in 1882 on the Champs Elysées, was thought to be lost forever. And now here it is, having resurfaced nearly 140 years later, facing a very different 21st century audience in the wake of a global racial reckoning.
Perhaps tellingly, the international press has been uncharacteristically slow to pick up a story about the rediscovery of an entire art movement hidden inside a trunk. Mainstream newspaper Le Monde however, has followed the story among other French art world publications, describing Paul Bilhaud’s historic monochrome as the collection’s most significant attraction. Meanwhile, the French Ministry of Culture has declared the collective discovery a “national treasure”. Disappointingly, we found that the French media coverage thus far has notably and consistently avoided any acknowledgement of the inevitable outcry that would likely ensue were a racist artwork disguised as humour to find its way into a public museum today and be celebrated as a national treasure.
As a conceptual piece, it is decades ahead of its time, which is where experts no doubt find the majority of the work’s merit. But is it worth elevating as the movement’s pièce de résistance or better used to reopen the conversation about what we consider art? It’s possible these issues are being raised behind the scenes before the collection is presented on a larger international stage.
In many ways, the Incoherents did create flickers of the avant-garde before the avant-garde. The movement momentarily released the public perception of the arts from the confines of its establishment, but it was Dada that actually managed to break the mould of previous centuries’ art traditions. Where the Dadaist created art for the mind, Les Incohérents was perhaps more of an amuse-bouche; a teaser of things to come. Now it’s our turn again to decide what to celebrate as art for public consumption.
Here is a video and article from the site Open Culture. It relates to what I have written previously about art vandalism and the harsh treatment of it’s less famous perpetrators, especially as it is seen as real artistic expression by some major World artists, particularly Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei. It raises real issues of cognitive dissonance in how art is viewed, commodified and fetishized by modern capitalistic society.
“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” — Mark Rothko
In 2012, a Russian artist calling himself Vladimir Umanets wrote his name and the words “A potential piece of yellowism” in black marker on the corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 canvas Black on Maroon. The damage to the painting, housed at the Tate Modern since 1970, was substantial, and it turned out to be one of the museum’s most challenging restoration projects, as well as one of its most successful — “far more successful than any of us dared hope,” said Tate director Nicholas Serota. The painting went back on display in May of 2014.
Due to Rothko’s layered technique, the painting’s “surface is really delicate and it turned out that most of the solvent systems that could dissolve and remove the ink could potentially damage the painting as well.” Patricia Smithen, the Tate’s head of conservation, told The Guardian. The video above from the museum shows the art and science that went into restoring the famous work, an eighteen-month-long process that involved some reverse engineering from a canvas donated by the Rothko family.
Black on Maroon seemed like an odd choice for a protest, as a blogger at Art History Abroad wrote the following day: “‘Why Rothko?’. His paintings [are] often criticised by those who don’t favour their abstraction, but rarely deemed politically or socially motivated to a point that they might provoke vandalism.” The presence of Black on Maroon and other Seagram Murals at the Tate, in fact, mark an act of protest by Rothko himself (who committed suicide the day the paintings arrived at the London museum).
The Seagram Murals were originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Seven paintings were commissioned, Rothko made 30. He reportedly told Harper’s editor John Fischer he wanted to create “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.” When he finally got the chance to dine at the completed restaurant, he was disgusted, withdrew his work, and returned his commission, writing, “it seemed clear to me at once that the two were not for each other.” He spent the next decade thinking about how and where to display the paintings.
Umanets did not seem to care much about the history of the murals in the Tate’s Rothko Room and claims his choice had no meaning. “I didn’t single out Rothko to make my statement,” he wrote in a public letter of apology published after he spent a year and a half in prison. “I would have done the same had the artist been Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. It was a spontaneous decision and nothing personal.” Likewise, his Dada-esqe “Manifesto of Yellowism” outlines a program with a distinct lack of concern for specificity and a vaguely satirical desire to flatten art into one color, one purpose, one meaning.
Even as he publicly abjured his act of protest (maybe by order of the court?), Umanets also expressed a genuine concern for the future of art, “Art has become a business, which appears to serve only the needs of the art market. As a result the art world no longer has radical thinkers and polemicists willing to scythe new and different pathways. Everyone is playing safe.” He might have made his point more clearly by going after Jeff Koons. Rothko was a radical thinker, and his Seagram Murals represent a final refusal to compromise with the demands of the art market.
Black on Maroon is a large unframed oil painting on a horizontally orientated rectangular canvas. The base colour of the painting is a deep maroon. As is suggested by the work’s title, this is overlaid with a large black rectangle, which in turn encloses two slimmer, vertical maroon rectangles, suggesting a window-like structure. The black paint forms a solid block of colour but the edges are feathered, blurring into the areas of maroon. Different pigments have been used within the maroon, blending the colour from a deep wine to a muted mauve with accents of red. This changing tone gives a sense of depth in an otherwise abstract composition.
Black on Maroon was painted by the abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko. He is best known, alongside fellow Americans Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell, as a pioneer of colour field painting. The movement was characterised by simplified compositions of unbroken colour, which produced a flat picture plane. Black on Maroon was painted on a single sheet of tightly stretched cotton duck canvas. The canvas was primed with a base coat of maroon paint made from powder pigments mixed into rabbit skin glue. The glue within the paint shrank as it dried, giving the painting’s surface its matt finish. Onto the base Rothko added a second coat that he subsequently scraped away to leave a thin coating of colour. The black paint was then added in fast, broken brushstrokes, using a large commercial decorator’s brush. With broad sweeping gestures Rothko spread the paint onto the canvas surface, muddying the edges between the blocks of colour, creating a sense of movement and depth. Accents of red acrylic paint were dabbed onto the lower left corner. With time these have become more apparent as the pigments within the maroon portion of the canvas have faded at different rates.
In early 1958 Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the exclusive Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Rothko was interested in the possibility of having a lasting setting for his paintings to be seen as a group. He wanted to create an encompassing environment of the sort he had encountered when visiting Michelangelo’s vestibule in the Laurentian Library in Florence in 1950 and again in 1959:
I was much influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo’s walls in the staircase room of the Medicean Library in Florence. He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.
(Quoted in Breslin 2012, p.400.)
Rothko started work on the Seagram commission in a large new studio, which allowed him to simulate the restaurant’s private dining room. Between 1958 and 1959 Rothko created three series of paintings, but was unsatisfied with the first and sold these paintings as individual panels. In the second and third series Rothko experimented with varying permutations of the floating window frame and moved towards a more sombre colour palette, to counter the perception that his work was decorative. Black on Maroon belongs to the second series. By the time Rothko had completed these works he had developed doubts about the appropriateness of the restaurant setting, which led to his withdrawal from the commission. However, this group of works is still referred to as the ‘Seagram Murals’.
The works were shown at Rothko’s 1961 retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and in 1965 Norman Reid, then Director of Tate, approached Rothko about extending his representation in the gallery’s collection. Rothko suggested a group of paintings from the ‘Seagram Murals’, to be displayed in a dedicated room. Black on Maroon was the first painting to be donated in 1968, although it was known as Sketch for ‘Mural No. 6’ or Two Openings in Black Over Wine. The following year Reid provided Rothko with a small cardboard maquette of the designated gallery space to finalise his selection and propose a hang. (This maquette is now in Tate’s Archive, TGA 872, and is reproduced in Borchardt-Hume 2008, pp.143–5.) Rothko then donated eight further paintings and the title of Black on Maroon was brought in line with the rest of the group (Tate T01163–T01170), four of which are also titled Black on Maroon and four Red on Maroon (Tate T01163–T01170). The ‘Seagram Murals’ have since been displayed almost continuously at Tate, albeit in different arrangements, in what is commonly termed the ‘Rothko Room’ (for installation views see Borchardt-Hume 2008, pp.98, 142).
Back in 2012 I made a mistake. I wanted to change the art world by introducing Yellowism – an autonomous phenomenon in contemporary visual culture – to the people. But defacing Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon at the Tate Modern was not the right way of going about it.
First, it was wrong to deface the work of a fellow artist, more poignantly a piece by Rothko, whose work and ethos I greatly admire. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” I didn’t single out Rothko to make my statement; I would have done the same had the artist been Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. It was a spontaneous decision and nothing personal.Advertisement
Second, my actions were wrong because they served not only to heap ridicule upon myself, but also to turn the public against Yellowism. It doesn’t matter how important one believes one’s ideas to be, nor how genuine one’s intentions are, it is unacceptable to deface someone’s property without permission. What I did was selfish. My act has hurt many art enthusiasts and I deeply regret it.
I spent a year and a half in prison, in which time the British public has paid huge restoration costs, and Yellowism has became associated with crime. While doing time I tried to be as constructive as possible, making drafts and notes on art, and studying British culture. After being released, I realised that as long as one’s health is good, and one is able to live freely, the problems we face, big or small, are things that everyone has to go through and there is no need to sweat the small stuff.
Notwithstanding the negative repercussions of my actions, I believe I can use this valuable experience for good. For example, I think it is important to comment on the contemporary art world as it stands today, which to my mind isn’t good.
Contemporary artists simply produce things which aren’t creative in their essence or spirit. Every work is a duplicate of a previous piece. It’s like dealing with exactly the same work only in different variations. The graphic designer Neville Brody once compared this condition to that of using the ingredients of different colours, shapes and sizes, where in fact real creativity is missing.
Our generation has become more productive but less effectual in the visual language that we use. Maybe because of the demands of the market, artists have lost genuine creativity. Where are the new art movements? Where lies the voices of visceral dissent and thirst for change? Art has become a business, which appears to serve only the needs of the art market. As a result the art world no longer has radical thinkers and polemicists willing to scythe new and different pathways. Everyone is playing safe.
Yellowism was established to confront this issue. I still believe that the concept of Yellowism is apposite, and for me, it is a tool that can bring about necessary change in visual culture. It shows that any intellectual or even emotional messages can be easily changed and reversed. Using very primitive and absurd examples of flattening all the meaning into a yellow colour, Yellowism shows in a very direct way that creativity in its pure form has completely vanished. That said, Yellowism cannot be used as an excuse to scribble on someone else’s art.
From this whole farrago, I have gained a valuable experience and learned an expensive lesson. I offer my sincere apologies to the Rothko family, to art enthusiasts and to the British public. I am very glad that the restoration project has finished, and visitors can enjoy Rothko’s masterpiece again.
The Guardian Thu 15 May 2014
Further reading
Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion, London 1991.
Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Rothko: The Late Series, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2008, reproduced pp.114–15.
James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago 2012.
Phoebe Roberts
May 2016
Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
When I write I disturb. When I make a film I disturb. When I paint I disturb. When I exhibit my paintings I disturb, and I disturb if I don’t. I have…
Piaf and Cocteau: Les Enfants Terribles
Here is a video of photos that I took of the beautiful city of Ulm, Germany in January 2020. With the music of J.S.Bach.
The Velvet Underground and Nico embodies a seldom realised idea: that music really can change the world. A financial failure in its time, the loose collection of these New York artists’ self-titled debut took a decade to sell 100,000 copies.
However, despite its commercial failings, The Velvets’ humble flop was a primitively bright conceptual spark. While simultaneously hitting the bargain bins, greater forces were at play. Ripples of inspiration were subtlety mutating the face of popular culture. A powerful influence, the group’s deep-seated creative forces unified into something truly iconic.
Over a prolonged period of gestation word of mouth built in the musical underground. The innovative album passed hands while outspoken critics like Lester Bangs lionised the group’s achievement. To cite Brian Eno’s famous remarks to the LA Times in 1982:
“I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
A central reference point in seemingly every shake-up in rock music since its release, generations of unrelated musical movements drew something different from between the vinyl grooves. Post-punk, glam rock, art rock, new wave, noise, and even industrial can trace their twisted lineages to the iconic album. Its influence still courses fluidly throughout modern music, and remains a seminal name-check for anything primal and completely outside the norm.
Commercial pressures, powerful personalities and creative impulse can often lead to compromise in a band. The Velvets were by no means immune to these factors, but what is remarkable is how true each creative contributor remained to their individual inspirations. Take a moment to profile the unlikely constituents which gave rise to the sonic schizophrenia of the band.
Lou Reed was the cantankerous black sheep of a middle-class Jewish family. Informed by literary studies and a stint in a mental institution at age 17, Reed looked to expand the idea of what popular music could entail. Musically the young songwriter cut his teeth churning out Motown, surf rock and bubblegum pop sound-alikes for the unscrupulous Pickwick Records.
Yet the Long Island native sought to follow in the steps of the visceral literature of William S. Burroughs and his beat generation forbears. Hidden behind the clichés of rock and roll, Reed saw an unlimited potential to accommodate a broader range of meaning.
Breaking down the barrier between rock music and poetic narrative, Lou injected sleaze and degradation into rock. At a time when puritanical values and obscenity laws could still place a chokehold on the avant-garde, Reed sang about heroin, transvestites and rent boys. Yet the band didn’t kick off as some grand artistic endeavour. Looking to capitalise on a more contrary sound Pickwick encouraged Reed to bring together a mock rock group to perform single Ostrich live. Known as The Primitives, the group started gigging live; securing a fortuitous residency at New York’s Cafe Bizarre in 1965.
Playing alongside Reed at this time was John Cale. A Welsh emigrant, Cale was an acolyte of the avant-garde. After finishing his study in London he relocated to New York in 1963 where he made a name for himself playing alongside influential neo-classical musicians like John Cage and Terry Riley. The young artist was probably just as happy to play a single piano chord 50 times with his elbows as anything else, but after meeting Reed at a party, he agreed to join his group.
Sterling Morrison was a Syracuse University graduate who was invited to play with The Primitives after a chance meeting with Reed, his old high school acquaintance, on a Manhattan subway. Contributing a more conventional grounding to his counterparts, he provided both rhythmic bedrocks and duelling solos to ground Reed’s more obtuse fretwork. Leaving the band in the early 70s, Morrison would evaporate from popular music entirely until a brief return in the early 90s.
Filling in for Primitives’ drummer Angus MacLise, Maureen “Mo” Tucker’s biting percussive edge kept the group together. Like Cale, Tucker looked to music from further afield when informing her self-tutored approach. While MacLise had introduced ideas from eastern music into the band’s sound, Tucker made an even greater impact with her appetite for the African beats of Babatunde Olatunji and the economic rhythms of Bo Diddly. The metronomic Tucker provided a viciously pervasive thump. She would only play standing.
Indirectly Andy Warhol remains one of the great unacknowledged influences in popular music. Although he did little in helping the group sculpt its sound, few would deny his influence in fostering their attitude and style. “The Velvet Underground was part of Andy’s group, and Andy wasn’t part of anything,” Reed told Spin in 2008.
Even prior to meeting The Velvets, Warhol shared many links with the group. Andy was familiar with avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, both of whom had played with Cale in the Theatre of Eternal Music. This aristocrat of the New York scene also had associations with artist Walter De Maria, a drummer from an early iteration of The Primitives. Introduced through a shared acquaintance, Warhol quickly extended his patronage to the fledgling Velvets.
As art took an interest in popular culture and the mundane, pop and art collided with the Velvet Underground. Trashy could be classy. Ugly could be beautiful. He deconstructed consumer culture and captured unfiltered depictions of modern life. Like Warhol, Reed and company were particularly engrossed with that which was ignored or glossed over by the mainstream. As manager of the group, Warhol impressed into The Velvet Underground the idea that everything and anything could be art.
It was with Warhol’s patronage that the group was brought into the nexus of New York’s underground scene. The group transplanted from Cafe Bizarre to The Factory. With Warhol’s encouragement they become a house band and the sonic centrepiece of Warhol’s multimedia phenomena the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
The group’s immersion within the polaroid art world of Warhol’s Factory placed them within a surrealistic scene where hustlers, transvestites, socialites and living theatre converged. Warhol would also help co-finance their debut album along with Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales exec.
Chanteuse Nico was a late addition to the band. Thrown in by Andy Warhol, it was his belief that the chic actor, model and vocalist could provide the group with some extra edge. In his on words the group were lacking a much needed “charisma.” Noted for her acting in French drama La Dolce Vita, the femme fatale’s icy persona belied a burgeoning (if moth-like) creative impulse. In line with Warhol’s fetish for film, she lent a detached and cinematic quality to the group.
Her injection into the band was far from a smooth transition. The German expat struggled to find acceptance amongst her peers. She would often clash with her bandmates due to her partial deafness and general eccentricity. But with her addition the cards were stacked; recording the album in early 1966 the group had few creative restrictions other than what the ubiquitous clarion call of “no blues.”
The deceptively tranquil Sunday Morning opens the album with sweetened pop. A crooning Reed embodies an effortless cool. Jangled guitar and beguiling innocence provide a moment of alluring misdirection, while subtly paranoiac lyrics anticipate the album’s darker undertow.
Things take a turn towards the more abrasive with Waiting For a Man. The second track’s lyrical world is intended to be real. Relating the details of a drug exchange, it weaves outsider depictions of the stark realities of street life and subterranean culture. A jilted piano echoes the Tucker’s juddering pulse.
With all the defiant deviance the group can muster, I’m Waiting For The Manconflates drugs and sexuality. The song lives within a reality aligned against the prevailing values of the day. It conveys a sense of moral decay which would see the record banned from major retailers and banned from radio airplay. Reed is the model of passivity and dependence. As raunchily as the song resounds, its feeling is voyeuristic.
While earlier tracks exude desperation and the idea of living on the edge, Femme Fatal swirls into gentle fantasy. The track places Nico in central focus. Her alluringly deadpan vocals are carried above a baroque chord progression.
The velour S&M fantasy of Venus in Furs verges on hypnotic. While the band averted themselves from the lysergic ripples of West Coast counterculture, it’s difficult to classify the paradoxical Venus in Furs as anything but psychedelic.
Run Run Run raggedly demonstrates the group’s celebration of stupidity and ugliness. Musically they revel in circular-minded banality. All Tomorrow’s Partiesmakes musical sketches of Warhol’s Factory scene.
Despite Reed’s contentions that he wasn’t glorifying anything in his music, Heroinprovided a directness and frankness about substance abuse which made the missives of counterculture seem childish in comparison. Cale’s sound experiments drone over the ostinato of a two-chord motif. Tucker’s percussion imitates a pulsing heart before inexplicably dropping out. Out of tune, primitive and never far from falling apart, here the group remain vital at every moment.
The punchy There She Goes Again situates itself as a straight ahead rocker, albeit one incorporating elastic time signatures. I’ll Be Your Mirror shimmers, while The Black Angel’s Death Song teeters into formless noise. Closer European Son pays homage to poet Delmore Schwartz while distortion and feedback dominate the album’s dissonant conclusion.
The black-clad Velvets would not last long. The group quickly parted ways with Warhol and exited The Factory scene in ’68. Nico and Cale would also depart. After dropping another two albums the group had all but disintegrated. 50 years onward the beauty and rawness of the group’s untamed innovation continues to resound throughout popular culture.
Much of music’s modern history has crossed currents with these New Yorkers’ commercial folly. It provides proof of concept that a group of individuals can instil music with a sense of intelligence and meaning. The Velvet Underground and Nico remains an enduring cornerstone of popular culture, echoing through time with an unwavering magnetism.
Source: The lasting influence of The Velvet Underground and Nico
“What other text from the 60s so accurately describes the shit we’re in?’ – Will Self on Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. Photograph: Situationist International
Will Self takes a walk through the banlieues of Paris and is astonished by the prescience of Debord’s 1967 masterpiece, which so accurately describes ‘the shit we’re in’
A small green tent was pitched on the small daisy-spotted patch of greenish grass. It looked tidily enough done; suitable perhaps for a summer rock festival. But this was just outside the Saint-Gratien RER station, north of the rundown riverine port of Gennevilliers, on the outer whorl of the Parisian fingerprint; and the tent – which had the limp-wristed bough of an evergreen touching its flysheet in benediction – was quite clearly being lived in.
The mental picture the non-Parisian has of the city’s banlieues is framed by the fictive: gangster movies such as La Haine, or TV cop shows such as Spiral that do battle with similar Danish, Swedish, British and, of course, American vehicles, in a race to see which can sandblast its respective society with the greatest quantity of grit. But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history, and in particular by the widespread rioting of 2005 that thrust these under-imagined locales on to TV screens worldwide. Not since the événements of 1968 had Parisian street fighting commanded such attention, but whereas the soixante-huitardscould be characterised as the vanguard of a stillborn revolution, the young second-, third- and probably fourth-generation immigrants who chucked molotov cocktails at the flics and the CRS during the émeutes neither donned, nor were measured up for, any such ideological camouflage.
Instead, the violent eruption of the Parisian banlieues was anatomised by reference to a body politic sickening with pathological metaphors. Implicitly, explicitly … ineluctably, the rioters were the Muslim Other, which, having been almost accidentally ingurgitated as part of the colonialist couscous, was now playing havoc with Gallic digestion. The French state had found itself – willingly or not – as a fellow-traveller on the neocons’ coach trip to the rapturous intersection of medieval chiliasm and Fukuyama’s neoliberal end-point.
Walking from the RER station towards the Seine, I passed not through what the fictive might lead you to expect, but rather low and hummocky hills, the swoop of a B-class road, outcroppings of commerce, small apartment blocks, car parks, duff public sculpture, off-cuts of quasi-open space – over it all an ambiguous miasma of street furniture and signage: this was France, certainly, but a France at once decoupled from any sense of pays, and divorced from the least suggestion of the urbane. In a comparable district of London – picture, if you are able to, Ruislip or Hounslow, Abbey Wood or Enfield – there would be myriad subliminally registered cues, all of which would combine to force on the spectator the unavoidability of her metropolitan condition. In London, the interwar spread of municipal socialism through the arteries of the tube system was accompanied by the soft-modernism of the suburban stations and Harry Beck’s matching diagram, which completes their connectivity. In London, the map really is the territory, because the territory really is the map. Not here.
The vexed relationship between the map and the territory suffuses The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord’s 1967 masterpiece, which argues that not only authentic social relations, but even the bricks and mortar that frame them, and the tarmac that connects one to another, have all been replaced with their representation; a 1:1 scale model. Moreover, for Debord, as a sequel to the paralysis of “historical development”, the contrast between town and country has become submerged in a sclerotic suburbia. He is at pains to point out that this annulling is no cod-utopian “supersession” but rather an “erosion … visible in the eclectic mélange of … decayed elements”.
From the beige depths of a heavily shuttered house beside a hillock from which I could spy the Eiffel Tower, a deep, dark voice spoke: “Qu’est-ce que vous cherchez?” I suppose, had I been the ghost of Jane Jacobs I would have experienced this as reassurance: the eyes, even if unseen themselves, remained on the street. But, instead, I muttered pacifications: “Nothing … just having a look … about”, then walked on down and around the hill through a scree of crushed fag packets, centrifugally impelled aluminium trim and the petrified tears shed by long dead cars. Dragon’s teeth were sewn across the scabrous roadway – I queased between them and found myself within 100 metres of the riverbank. The A15 soared overhead: two pilotisplanted this side of the river, the next pair on the far bank, its two carriageways separated by curved air. Up there was the city, conceived of however you so pleased. Down here, however, was this un-place, an inter-zone, under-imagined and thus free to be itself. Sprays of cherry blossom mimicked by tangles of wire and a shaggy pelt of weedy grass. Two small brown kids sat beside an oblong concrete depression filled with dank water, one had her hair tied in pigtails. They were playing with tin cans, cups and a bucket. Beyond them, right on the river’s edge was their Paris: a bidonville of shacks built from bits of scavenged packing cases, plastic tarpaulin, car tyres and all sorts of other stuff.
Many of its most sympathetic readers experience The Society of the Spectacleas a concerted howl of disgust. I cannot agree – for me it is the Spectacle that, far from being the creation of some malevolent or false god, emerges instead as the hero of the piece, inasmuch as any hero can be conceived of as the unconscious product of insensate historical processes. The Spectacle, Debord writes, “is the heart of the unrealism of the real society”. We are all jammed up against the plate glass of the Spectacle, our faces crushed as we “lèche-vitrine” in search of the same old commodified poison.
The entirely manmade nature of the world from which the individual subject experiences alienation is not, for Debord, a factual programme to be passively viewed on the TV screens of the global village, but a belief that is actively entered into. It is the genius of Debord to have characterised the totalising capability of late capitalism so early in its post-industrial manifestation. The Society of the Spectacle reads – if you will savour a cliche – as fresh as paint. Debord’s analysis of time itself as a series of epochs is dizzying: such “pseudo-festivals” as sporting events (the Olympics springs immediately to mind), act to convince the denizens of the Spectacle that they are still living in a cyclical and eternal go-round, while only the anointed few, the celebrities, are imbued with the attributes of money and power that signify the ability to make choices – to progress into a better future. “Being a star,” Debord writes, “means specialising in the seemingly lived.” Sound familiar, “Sir” Peter Bazalgette?
But it is most of all in its analysis of the ideology of the Spectacle that Debord’s text repays close reading. It is the Spectacle’s genius to have “turned need against life” and thus effected “the separation and estrangement between man and man”. Hence the Spectacle’s embrace of economics as the only form of instrumental – indeed “scientific” – knowledge worth possessing; hence ritual obeisance made before the gods who will confer growth, and hence the fact that more or less any contemporary western politician – from Hollande, to Merkel, to Cameron, to Obama, and back again – who had eyes to see, could find their own Caliban image raging back at them from the pages of The Society of the Spectacle.
At Argenteuil centre-ville, I found echoic pedestrian underpasses, faux-19th century streetlamps of twirled iron and postmodern apartment blocks built of scaled-up children’s construction toys. I walked on across the oxbow of Gennevilliers, still feeling that I was nowhere at all in particular – standing beside a grocery store or an office block, then crossing between parked cars. The bridge across the re-encountered Seine that led to Clichy was lined with cheerful window boxes, planted with a gaily patriotic tricolour of blooms pinker, pinker and pinkest. Where there are window boxes there must, of course, be a window – this one framed the mirrored cuboids of La Défenseto the west, structures that might have been designed expressly to conform to the Debordian paradigm.
And then, some way past the Porte de Clichy, I was quite suddenly – if at an indefinable point – in Paris, a city to this day that defines itself by the micro-associations of its smaller parts: the awning of an alimentation, a drain cover, the angle of a pissing dog’s leg, the furl of paper around a stick of bread, the white apron around a smoking waiter – quite as much as the high extravaganza of its grand boulevards and gold-leafed public buildings. Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again not only by Debord’s astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we’re still in? – but also wondered how it was that his dérives across the Paris of the time could have so attuned him to the way in which the urban environment of the near future would become quite so decoupled from any element of the felt or experienced life. After all, Pariswas by no means the most Spectacular city of the late 1950s and early 60s; indeed, it’s still not on an equal footing to London. Unplanned London, which has just arrived at its square miles of parametrically designed junk space, its CCTV-overseen gated business cantonments and Chinese party cadre-owned luxury encampments, its logo skyscrapers and purpose-built “iconic” tourist destinations.
It occurs to me that Haussmann’s attempt to impose civic order and authority on the medieval jumble of mid-19th century Paris had not only paved the way for the Spectacle, but it had also afforded its – and his – enemies with the material to rip up for their barricades. There seems a nice congruence between the go-rounds of the Grands Boulevards and centrifugal/centripetal current of French theorising, whereby notions given form in the cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the classrooms of the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure swirl out in widening circles from the metropolis, only to then gurgle back in again, before eventually disappearing up the arses of their originators.
Seen like this, The Society of the Spectacle is at once the bastard progeny of the French Enlightenment – out of Diderot, by means of the Napoleonic Code – and a salutary reminder of how the pursuit of some millenarian ideological purity only ever results – if successful – in the rumbling of tumbrels; or, if a failure, in its wholesale co-option by its stated enemies. That we no longer hear quite so much about “the spectacle” as shorthand for any of the following: the ludic element of consumer society, the post-ideological character of western “democracy”, the web-cum-matrix woven by the internet, the glocal character of late capitalism, may be because Debord’s concept has now been so thoroughly appropriated – one might fairly say détourned – that there’s nothing left of it but its coldly numerical bones.
Had Debord not shot himself in 1994 in his rural fastness of Bellevue-la-Montagne, he probably would have turned his gun on the likes of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren (and no doubt me as well); pop music impresarios whose much-trumpeted situationist influence – such as it was – consisted only in a series of pranks, that, while they may have given succour to the culturally anomic nonetheless only resulted in the profitable sale of records, posters and other memorabilia. I doubt, somehow, that either Wilson – chiefly known for managing Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, and setting up Factory Records – or McLaren, rather more famous for his role as the Sex Pistols’ svengali, can have subjected The Society of the Spectacle to a sustained critical reading. Had they done so, they would’ve realised that their antics were anathema to Debord; that the playful elements of situationist practice – the bowdlerising of cartoons, the daubing on walls of whacky slogans, the exaltation of drunkenness – were only ever to be sanctioned if constitutive of a genuine insurrection, such as the few short weeks of 68, and as precursors of that revolution of everyday life (to adapt the title of the competing situationist theoretical work, written by Debord’s greatest rival, Raoul Vaneigem), which was to follow the final and complete dissolution of the Spectacle.
The relative success of the Situationist International during les évènementsalso sowed the seeds for the détournement of The Society of the Spectacleitself. I say relative success because it can be doubted – and will always be disputed – the extent to which Debord and his loose confraternity of freelance bully-boys and wannabe revolutionists actually succeeded in either manning the barricades themselves, or screwing the courage of the mob to CRS’s sticking post. But the important thing was that the situationists were perceived as having been in the thick of things – as instigators and ideological choreographers of the distinctively ludic elements of this particular civil disorder. The sneering, de haut en bas reception of The Society of the Spectacle on its publication the year before in French, was followed the year after by its rhapsodic one when it appeared in translation. By then, of course, the game was effectively up – something Debord, a man obsessed by war games and strategising, undoubtedly grasped. The Society of the Spectacle so far as being an animator of events, had in a matter of months become simply another text to be subjected to scores, hundreds, thousands of exhaustive academic analyses. The best that could be said for the thing – from its author’s point of view – was that the royalties paid his wine bills, and helped to supplement a lifetime of unabashed – and indeed, self-righteous – sponging.
Of course, The Society of the Spectacle still animates serious protest to this day – or, rather, since to admit to having been one of the Invisible Committee that authored the highly Debordian The Coming Insurrection (2007) is to court arrest on those grounds alone, the very style of the earlier work remains inflammatory. As to its content, The Coming Insurrection has nothing much to add – how can it, when, as I say, never before has Debord’s work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine – as he would wish – and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants.
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