Harold's Sketchbook

“An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you’ve ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.”

Brian Eno’s earliest publicly available recorded work is the soundtrack to Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse (1970). Berlin Horse was Malcolm Le Grice’s first full-length experiment with the manipulation of film images, for which he combined a sixteen millimeter black-and-white film of his own footage showing nothing but a horse being lunged with fragments of The Burning Barn (1900) by the important British film pioneer Cecil Milton Hepworth.—from More Dark Than Shark

It’s probably impossible to assess the full scope of Kenneth Anger’s influence on contemporary film making and video—he is credited with having invented the entire genre of “music video” decades before MTV came along, for starters, and was recently the subject of a retrospective at PS 122 in New York.  I consider Anger to be just about the closest thing to a “pure” cinematic poet that America has produced in the years since World War II—our own Jean Cocteau of independent film, if you will.  Or if you won’t!

As one might expect, any film auteur in this country who operates outside the mainstream Hollywood Blockbuster loop has to contend with marginalization and lack of funding (consider Orson Welles, who spent much of his career after Citizen Kane searching for backers for his later film projects).  Nevertheless, Kenneth Anger, who is now 83 years old, continues to create mysteriously subversive, evocative short movies, and Missoni is his latest: a two-and-a-half minute film for the Missoni fall 2010 fashion campaign.  According to a recent article by Rebecca Pattiz at Interview magazine, several generations of Missoni family members appear in it—Margherita, Jennifer, Angela, Rosita, Ottavio, and Ottavio Jr.—their images layered in a kind of ghostly montage reminiscent of Mr. Anger’s 1949 classic, Puce Moment.  The haunting soundtrack was composed by the French symphonic composer Koudlam; I particularly love the distorted, compressed sound of atmospheric voices that fade in and out at the end, as if Darth Vader were being channeled through an old AM radio that is tuned between two distant stations.

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Thanks, Web Sheriff, for blocking the video of Mr. Dylan’s performance. I’ve given up on replacing the link.
“It’s hard to sing when you’re being restricted by the copyright police, too.”

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Anne Waldman, Poet

Anne Waldman reads “Makeup on Empty Space”

Anne Waldman Interviewed by Waylon Lewis at Elevision

Anne Waldman at the NYS Writers Institute in 2009

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When Philip Guston began showing this work at Marlborough in 1970, the negative reaction of the established New York art world was so overwhelming that the gallery would not renew his contract to exhibit there.  Hilton Kramer ridiculed the new paintings, and much of the art world dismissed the work as being “impure”—it was simply too transgressive for the sensibility of the art establishment, which revolved around a received notion that painting had to be “pure” to be seen as authentic.

Guston eventually moved to Woodstock, withdrawing from the city to focus on his new artistic direction.  The David McKee gallery began showing Guston’s new work and continued to do so until the artist’s death in 1980.  His painting output during this time period became a lightning rod for subsequent generations of figurative painters, who drew inspiration from his courageous break with the dominant trend of abstract expressionism.  Guston once said, “I’m puzzled all the time by representation or not, the literal image and the nonobjective. There’s no such thing as nonobjective art. Everything has an object, has a figure. The question is what kind?”

The current exhibit at McKee is a great opportunity to visit some of the very earliest of these protean works, which still pack quite a punch after 40 years.

James Kalm Visits the McKee Gallery: Philip Guston Small Oils 1969-1973

Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com