Diamanda Galás in New Orleans

Before this summer, I’d only listened to a few albums by Diamanda Galás. I knew she rarely toured the United States, and that her April show in New Orleans was a special occasion. The tour was promoting her two newest releases, All the Way, a collection of covers, and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem, a live album. Her New Orleans performance was at the Joy Theatre. From all the things I’d read about Galás, I expected her to be theatrical, dripping with blood and guts like on the cover of her album Plague Mass. Instead, the show was quite reserved. Galás dressed in a dark gown that was almost funerary in appearance. It was like something someone would be buried in. She was seated at a black grand piano in the center of the stage. The minimal atmospheric lighting was accentuated by clouds of smoke.

Many of the numbers she played were sung in languages I didn’t understand. They weaved in and out of tongues. The music wasn’t restricted to any one form. It shape-shifted through cultures, melodies, and rhythms, making her work hard for a layperson such as myself to classify. At it’s best, the music was abstract and animalistic. The vocals ranged from the guttural to the angelic. Added lyrics often changed the meanings of the original lyrics, and the pounding tempos of the piano altered the demeanor. It is partly this transformative power that makes Galás so interesting. She deconstructs these songs and digests them into her own vision. What she does can be likened to appropriative art, but instead of glue and scissors she might as well be using flesh and knives.

It was the second number, a thunderous rendition of Bobby Bradford's “She” (also known as “Woman”), that impressed me most. Galás hammered on the piano like a singular force of nature. The music of the piano was accompanied by a sequence of almost never-ending wails and moans. It’s hard to believe Galás created all of that sound with just her voice and a piano. Beams of light reigned down on her like abstract laser lightning. There was this brutal, emotional weight to the tune. It was a feeling that picked up again at the end of the first set with her rendition of “O Death,” an American folk song. After three encores, that emotional gravity peaked once more with Galás’ version of “Let My People Go” (a song based on the American Negro spiritual ”Go Down Moses”). Galas’ renditions of these songs, with all their screaming and growling, are mutated and personal. They feel confessional, not traditional, and have an expressive violence that speaks to the nerves.

Galás has stated that her new live album At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem is a collection of “death songs” meant to reaffirm life. They are songs about the struggle to live in a world that is constantly trying to destroy you. Her music comes to me at a time of seemingly endless death. Over the past year I’ve had a number of my friends, all of them younger than me, pass away. They’ve succumbed to drugs, suicide, accidents, and even natural causes. For many, healthy mourning can often collapse into a kind of toxic lamenting. Listening to Galás, I am reminded that mourning, no matter how full of rage, doesn’t have to be self-destructive. The best funerary rites are cathartic and recognize what a privilege it is to be alive. I believe what Galás has given us in her music is on par with that kind of experience.

Picabia and Pettibon in New York

In March of this year, I visited Manhattan to see the Francis Picabia retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Directions presented major works from every phase of Picabia’s shapeshifting career. Picabia never settled on a specific style and opposed any herd mentality, but central to his life’s work, and most important to me, was his Dadaist period.

Picabia was a master of Dada, and his Dada room was a gold mine of Dada history. Copies of both Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Picabia’s own 391 were present, and around the corner were copies of the Parisian Dadaist journal Littérature. The walls were covered with his mechanomorphic paintings. More like a draftsman than an artist, during his Dada period Picabia turned the spotlight on modern machinery. In these works he modified and repurposed images of machines from advertisements and catalogs. With a deadpan sense of humor, he made machines that would never be able to function in the real world and enhanced them with titles that humanized them.

The crown jewel of these mechanical works might be Amorous Parade. Picabia connected a phallic machine by way of some joints to a strange pumping device. This, in turn, was attached to a record player above it. The title, written in large uppercase letters, suggested some kind of hydraulic and kinetic orgy. Picabia, displacing the machines from their utilitarian purpose, reinvented them to serve a symbolically erotic one.

Walking around the room, I was suddenly drawn to a different kind of painting altogether. Placed on the back wall was The Cacodylic Eye. It was created in 1921 when Picabia was ill with an eye infection. As the story goes, he asked all of his Dada friends to sign and comment on the canvas. Some did, but others glued their pictures to it. At first glance, it seemed Picabia’s only contribution to the piece was the title and his own signature, both painted in an extra-large headline and byline. But he may have added the large looming eye in the lower right quadrant. Curiously, there is a contradiction in authorship with this piece. It was collectively made, but the orchestrator, Picabia, took credit. Also of importance is how Picabia presented the signatures. The piece resembled the graffiti on a bathroom wall, but when framed what was once not thought of as art was now seen as a work of art.

On the same wall as The Cacodylic Eye was a splatter of ink Picabia blasphemously named The Blessed Virgin. Another piece next to it was simply a sheet of paper with his name written across it. The title of that piece, naturally, was Francis Picabia. Walking through the exhibit I was reminded that, no matter how often his style changed, Picabia continued to play and experiment. At every turn, he fought the bourgeois concept of art. Sometimes he did it with humor, but he also brought together unexpected figures that were contradictory in color, form, or concept. And like with his mechanical works, his other periods often borrowed from popular culture. Even his earliest works, the faux-Impressionist paintings, were based on postcards, while his later Kitsch period lifted images from Hollywood.

The following morning I left my hostel in the Chelsea neighborhood and ventured through the freezing weather to the New Museum. While my main reason for visiting New York was the Picabia show, I was also there to see Raymond Pettibon’s first major survey A Pen of All Work. Pettibon is largely known as an illustrator of punk rock albums and fliers. While the show covered that period, it was broader in scope and exhibited works less familiar to punks.

I started the exhibit from the top. The first room I entered contained many of Pettibon’s political drawings. A portrait of Joseph Stalin cleverly read, “I should be president of the United States.” Another, this time of Che Guevara, was headlined, "At least I still got my own good looks.” Like Picabia, Pettibon often lifted images directly out of the mainstream. His drawing of Guevara was no different than the iconic image of Guevara. Yet, by a simple juxtaposition of words with images, Pettibon morphed the image into a provocative caricature. More than often on this floor, Pettibon’s drawings took on a less comical tone. In Untitled (To Make Him Decent), a flag was used to cover up a dead naked soldier’s genitals. The piece touched on how society’s irrational fear of sexuality can often overshadow two things that are truly indecent: war and violence.

Untitled (To Make Him Decent), 2004

The next floor down showcased Pettibon’s best-known material. These works centered around self-destruction, drugs, teen culture, punk rock, and suicide. A woman hung herself over Elvis’ death. A nameless commentator judged The Beatles by penis size. A teenage girl expressed her lustful feelings about Jesus to a nun. In the main room, a number of Pettibon’s zines were placed under glass, while Pettibon’s most famous publication, 1978’s Captive Chains, was posted page for page on the center wall. Throughout it were images of bondage, rage, and murder. One of these pages, an image that would later adorn the cover of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown single, had two men fighting in what appeared to be an office. One held up a chair like a lion-tamer, and the other his fists. In a world that has criminalized our humanity all we have left is our animal anger.

Untitled (Don't Complicate The Moral World), 1987

Occasionally, Pettibon’s humor appeared juvenile, like drawings of Gumby with an erection. Other times, he entered the sublime with large portraits of cathedrals and surfers on giant waves. These works seemed like anomalies in his body of work. The large sweeping waves, in particular, seemed to represent an escape from the chaos of everyday social formalities. In one a surfer rode a large red and black wave. Looming above the wave like a caption in a comic book were the words: “Don’t complicate the moral world.”

Leaving the Pettibon exhibit, I passed a poster in the subway for the Picabia show. The poster had a quote from Picabia in black bold letters. It read, “Civilization invented crime.” I was taken aback by how much this quote complimented Pettibon’s work. Pettibon’s attitude doesn’t come out of a vacuum. The hypocrisy he cynically attacks in his work is the same that Picabia and the Dadaists revolted against a century ago. The common ground between these two artists isn’t just in the borrowing of images and turning them on their head. Each artist expressed contempt for a world that has remained stubbornly two-faced and toxic throughout modern times.

The Red Disk

The first time I went to the New Orleans Museum of Art was in the Fall of 2015. I remember being surprised when I reached the second floor and discovered the George L. Viavant Gallery. Several Joan Miró paintings were hanging in that room, and one in particular dramatically stood out. The Red Disk was different from the usual Miró paintings I’d seen in museums throughout the United States. A large red disk in the middle of the painting is placed over a blob of white tendrils. The tendrils reach out haphazardly in all directions surrounded by white specks. The blob’s texture is more like that of an industrial spill, and around the red disk it looks as if the surface has been repeatedly rubbed. The disk is slightly off center. On its left is a much smaller transparent yellow dot. In the upper right corner there is a purple dot with an additional blue dot to the right of the red disk. All of this is set against a black and dark blue void.

In many ways, the painting is like a Rorschach inkblot. It can have a variety of interpretations. But what is not ambiguous about the painting is its explosiveness. The static paint tricks the eye and appears to be expanding outwardly and infinitely. Action and aggression permeate from the canvas. There is something bodily about it. It excretes a volcanic discharge. Without words, the painting seems to speak directly about the intimacy and violence of nature. It expresses something primordial in a way language cannot.

Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun, 1960

Jacques Dupin, in his book Miró: Life and Work, sees The Red Disk as a pendant to a similar work, Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun. Both were produced around the same time, and each has the red disk as a central theme. But the sweeping red brushstrokes of Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun distract the viewer. Its colors have contrast, but lack depth and variety. The whiteness has been watered down to dry brushstrokes. It doesn’t have the raw power of the thick nebula seen in The Red Disk. In addition, Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun is somewhat whimsical, like much of Miró’s earlier work, while The Red Disk is harsh and brutal.

Miró created The Red Disk in 1960 after spending the previous five years focusing on lithographs, engravings, and ceramics. His return to painting was backed by an intent to break from his traditional forms. While The Red Disk still hides some of Miró’s trademark symbols within the disorder, it shows him taking chances with techniques outside of his regular arsenal. Due to the lack of drip marks, I imagine Miró laid the canvas down horizontally and poured the excessive amount of white paint onto the canvas, like something an abstract expressionist might do. In Miró’s lesser known mature works, he would increasingly use this sort of improvisation. He would focus on space, spontaneity, and rage. The Red Disk predates these concerns, but it’s clearly a catalyst for the work he would do in the seventies. Its seed can be found in the violence of his Burnt Canvas series, the anger of his May 68 painting, and the splatters of his celebratory Fireworks triptych.

Laughlin's Inner World

Before being a photographer, Clarence John Laughlin was an urban explorer. He was a lover of ruins, the streets, and history. He would often ignore no trespassing signs, and sneak into off-limits locations to enjoy the beauty of something wasting away. A love for ruins has always been a part of the Romantic mindset, as can be seen in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin. But unlike his predecessors, who focused on the ruins of medieval castles, churches, and Roman cities, Laughlin looked to the plantations of the Old South, and the changing face of the American city, most notably New Orleans.

Laughlin’s New Orleans streetscapes and cemeteries, when at their strongest, resemble the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Shadows become enigmatic. Pillars and archways, void of people, look like places you might have visited in a dream. Sometimes there is an ethereal vanishing point. At other times, the rough roads or elegant interiors take on a complexity that mixes branches and old wooden doors with spiral staircases and cast iron fences. Camera in hand, Laughlin passed inside broken houses and down dark alleyways, preserving in photographs the old world that modernism was trying to erase. But he also used the city as a source for interpretation. The camera became not just a tool to document, but a tool to view the world in new disorienting ways.

Outside of New Orleans, his favorite subjects were the dying plantation houses along the Mississippi. When it comes to death these photographs are twofold. They are images of old structures coming apart at the seams, but they double as symbols of a different kind of darkness. The plantations were once places where people were enslaved, tortured, and murdered. No matter how beautiful the buildings look, it’s a history that cannot be erased. The locations serve as markers of a repulsive past, but there is a unique beauty about the buildings that pulls the viewer in. The feelings are contradictory. When not shown as matter-of-fact photographs, Laughlin double exposed the plantation mansions with Oak trees covered in Spanish moss, as if to combat the history and decay with some kind of positive representation of growth. It’s what surrealists would identify as the unification of two opposing states. The resolution of life and death.

Laughlin considered himself a surrealist. It’s even written on his tombstone. Similar to Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, he often used double images to project his own inner world onto the outer world of appearances. When shot correctly, Laughlin could make a burnt melted object take on the characteristics of a human face, or transform a pineapple into a rocket ship. He disrupted the mundane ways of viewing the world and gave the viewer new eyes. When a heart-shaped wreath was placed just right on a tombstone, Laughlin showed that it might also be viewed as a strange living creature, such as in his photograph The Insect-Headed Tombstone. The viewer sees things that aren’t physically there but are still somehow captured through the camera lens.

The photographs of Laughlin’s that affect me most are his veiled women. Largely collected in his photographic group Poems from the Inner World, these women are a repetitive motif. He littered them throughout the ruins, mansions, cemeteries, and partially torn down buildings. They are hidden behind black veils and sheets or masked with mirrors. Some are even wrapped in plastic. They mimic classical statuary. Women frozen in time. Parallels can be made to Rene Magritte’s shrouded women, as seen in a painting like L’Invention de la vie. They are mysterious, dark, and unavailable. Sometimes they are the centerpiece of the composition, but they can also be hidden in the picture, mixed in with the surrounding environs.

The Repulsive Bed, 1941

The most haunting of these women is in Laughlin’s photograph The Repulsive Bed. A woman, dressed in black, sits on a collapsed piece of furniture. It is presumably a bed, although it’s impossible to tell due to its mangled condition. She is veiled, but she is also in the shadows. She sits in a spacious, yet destroyed room. Behind her is a burnt door with paint peeling off it, and to her right is a fireplace. Taken after one of Laughlin’s many divorces, the photograph can’t help but point to Laughlin’s own troubled relationship with the opposite sex. In his caption for the piece, he wrote that this is the image of a marriage without love. Usually, I find that what an artist has written about a piece only obfuscates the real meaning, but with this caption, I think Laughlin had an extraordinary moment of transparency.

It is photographs such as these mentioned that make Laughlin a paragon of sorts. He held the keys to a new field of vision. His entire body of work, which spans over 17,000 images, was a continuous exploration of what he called the enigma of reality. When I’m exploring New Orleans, whether in it’s famous cemeteries, the French Quarter, on levees, or even under freeways, I can’t help but wonder how Laughlin would have framed what I’m seeing today. New Orleans is a place where you surrender to the atmosphere. Hidden within it are doors to other worlds, and you only need to find the right way of looking to walk through them. Laughlin knew this. He opened the doors.

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You can browse many of Laughlin’s photographs online at The Clarence John Laughlin Photograph Collection courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.

Like Cattle Towards Glow

In May of this year I went to the United States premier of Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s film Like Cattle Towards Glow. The screening was held at San Francisco’s Alamo Theatre, which felt almost too posh for a movie by Cooper. Cooper has always been one of the few modern fiction writers that piques my interest. I must admit, what I like best about Cooper’s work is his dangerous approach to sexuality. His stories are known for their carnal violence, and the characters in his novels often do things that should nauseate me, but somehow I feel excited. More often, I feel conflicted.

I know nothing about Cooper’s co-director, Zac Farley. He didn’t speak much at the premier, either. But this is not the first time Cooper has collaborated on a film: 1995 saw the release of a film adaptation of Cooper’s novel Frisk, which stylistically comes off as a lo-fi copycat of a Gregg Araki movie. I’m not sure how much involvement Cooper had with the Frisk adaption, but it didn’t seem to stay true to the tempo or voice of his writing. With Like Cattle Towards Glow, Cooper and Farley are able to find that balance in the cinematic realm. Following in the footsteps of the French director Robert Bresson, they use untrained actors and capture performances that are often made up of just movement and words. By eliminating the contrivances of professional actors, the characters come off as very cerebral and earnest.

But the minimalism doesn't stop with the performances. Split into five unrelated scenes, the film starts out very simple and realistic but gets otherworldly as it progresses. In the first scene, a young man hires a male prostitute to play dead for him. The second has a punk noise band performing at an underground club, where the singer is gang-raped in front of the audience. In the third, a junkie rims and fists a suicidal male prostitute near some train tracks. And the fourth has a young blond raped and murdered in a dreamlike snowscape. The culprits are two delinquents dressed as demons.

It’s the fifth and final scene that is, for me, the money shot. A young man is stalked by a woman using a remote control drone. She follows him along a beach. He takes solace in some old graffiti-covered ruins. Inside the ruins, the woman has set up surveillance cameras. Despite their different languages, the two are able to share a conversation, albeit one mediated by technology. Like many of the young men in this film, he looks lost, or as if he is running from something. The two seem to be having a conciliatory talk until the woman says, “There is a tragedy to you. What the drugs have done to your looks, that's incredibly hot.” Despite her nurturing, motherly side, she can’t help but see him as a sexual thing. Even with the most righteous intentions, desire’s predatory head can emerge.

Not every scene in Like Cattle Towards Glow involves fucking, but in each one there is sexual tension. The desire for another’s body, the want to dominate them, is always present. But these interactions don’t mimic the fake pleasures of an X-rated film. When we do see them, the erections and assholes are handled imperfectly. The unsimulated sex doesn’t get you off. More importantly, in each scene there is an awkwardness in how the actors interact with one another. I’ve always felt it’s very difficult to truly know another person. Our words, touches, and expressions often fail us. There is always something in the way. In a world that sees desire as a sinister force, wholeheartedly connecting with someone seems impossible. Simply fucking can’t always shatter that estrangement. And I think Like Cattle Towards Glow touches on that failure.