et cetera

As the plane approached the runway the Manhattan skyline was draped in pink gauze, lit by a limpid sun beneath a blanket of grey clouds. The first two sentences I overhear after landing are “How many cars did you bring” and “Can I borrow your phone? None of mine are working”. The city is dripping. The Long Island Railroad ticket woman is a gladiator with bleached blonde hair. On the subway a girl obstinately cries, making variegated demands on her father, to the collective amusement of the carriage. In the supermarket an old Jewish couple wear matching t-shirts in bold white print on black: “Prosecute Rumsfeld” and “Prosecute Bush”. One of the local homeless is having a detailed conversation with a store-boy on the varieties of milk. It is just about midnight, and the supermarket is packed full. There is no pattern to the people. They are well dressed, poorly dressed, young, old, alert, asleep, in groups, alone. Flip on the radio and WNYC has Wordless Music with a live recording of Nico Muhly followed by New Sounds and then Overnight Music. Voices are echoing out of apartment windows opened to let the air through. There are puddles pooled at the curbs. Businessmen loosening ties. People looking in at the window display of the bookstore, now well after midnight. With timezone shifts, I’ve now been up all night. This is the greatest city in the world.

In 1926, Edward Steichen brought into the United States a sculpture by Constantin Brâncuşi. The customs office declared that it was not a work of art and was therefore subject to import duty. On the advice of Duchamp, Brâncuşi paid the fee and then sued the United States Customs Court to recover his payment. Here is part of the transcript¹.

Brâncuşi was represented by attorneys Charles J. Lane, M. J. Speiser, and Thomas M. Lane. The government was represented by attorneys Charles D. Lawrence, Marcus Higginbotham, and Reuben Wilson. The witnesses for Brâncuşi were the photographer and importer of the work Edward Steichen, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, Forbes Watson, editor of The Arts, Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, William Henry Fox, curator of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Henry McBride, art critic for the New York Sun. Brâncuşi himself remained at home in Paris, where Ezra Pound wrote to him: “I was sick to hear a bastard in New York made you pay duty on your sculpture. I could spit in the eye of the skinflint in charge of these matters.”²

Mr. C. J. Lane: Where do you reside Mr. Epstein?

In New York.

What is your profession?

I am a sculptor.

How long have you exercised this profession?

I have been a sculptor for thirty years in New York, Paris and London.

Mr. Epstein, will you tell the court just where you are repre­sented as far as your work is concerned?

I have a piece of sculpture, I am happy to say, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in this city and in London in the Tate Gallery, which is the National Gallery in Britain for modern works. I have a piece in the Manchester Art Gallery, the Glasgow Art Gallery, the Dundee Art Gallery and in Ireland in the National Gallery in Dublin and in the Aberdeen Art Gallery.

Are you represented in Hyde Park as well?

Yes, I have a work in Hyde Park in London.

Mr. Epstein, are you acquainted with one Constantin Brâncuşi?

Yes, I have known Constantin Brâncuşi’s works for the last fifteen years.

I asked you about the man himself.

I knew him fifteen years ago. I met him from time to time in Paris and in London.

Are you acquainted with his work?

Very well acquainted.

Is Constantin Brâncuşi a sculptor?

In my opinion, yes, decidedly so.

Is he so considered in the world of art?

He is considered so in the world of art.

Mr. Higginbotham: I object to the “world of art.”

Justice Young: Limit it to his own knowledge.

Justice Waite: What is his reputation among artists, men who are judged artists. How is he considered as an artist?

He is considered as a very great artist I should say.

Exhibit One: Constantin Brâncuşi, L’Oiseau dans l’espace

Mr. C. J. Lane: Mr. Epstein, will you look at Exhibit One in this case and tell the court whether in your opinion that is a work of art.

In my opinion, it is a work of art.

Cross examination by Mr. Higginbotham: You say you have been working as a sculptor for thirty years? In what schools did you study?

I started at the beginning as a student at the Art Students’ League in this city and from there I went to the national School of Fine Arts and the Academy of Beaux Arts in Paris, where I studied for six months. Leaving there, I went to the School where I studied for about two years.

Did you receive a diploma or certificate from these schools?

I don’t believe diplomas are given in the schools.

Whether you believe it or not, did you receive any?

I know of no such thing as a diploma.

Justice Waite: Did you receive anything in the way of a certificate in writing as an acknowledgement of the work that you have done in these institutions?

I won my way into the Gallery Of Beaux Arts by competition with the entire class, where I had to model a figure so as to get in. I take that as meaning what you wish. You are not admitted unless you show yourself competent in some work.

Mr. Higginbotham: Your business now is what?

My business here, to exhibit a collection of my own works.

Your own works?

Of my own works, yes.

In this city?

Yes, Sir, in this city.

What line of sculpture is it?

I do everything.

When you say everything, do you do human figures?

Yes, sir.

Do you do any painting?

Yes, I have done painting.

Do you make painting your profession?

No, sculpture is my profession.

Do you have anything to do with making sculpture similar to Exhibit One?

Well, all sculptures are different.

I asked you if you made anything like Exhibit One?

I may not have the desire to make it.

I did not ask you that.

Justice Waite: Answer the question. Did you make anything like that exhibit?

No.

In all your thirty years?

No, I have not made anything like that.

Do you consider from the training you have had and based on your experience you had in these different schools and galleries—do you consider that a work of art?

I certainly do.

When you say you consider that a work of art, will you kindly tell me why?

Well, it pleases my sense of beauty, gives me a feeling of pleasure. Made by a sculptor, it has to me a great many elements, but consists in itself as a beautiful object. To me it is a work of art.

So, if we had a brass rail, highly polished, curved in a more or less symmetrical and harmonious circle, it would be a work of art?

It might become a work of art.

Whether it is made by a sculptor or made by a mechanic?

A mechanic cannot make beautiful work.

Do you mean to tell us that Exhibit One, if formed up by a mechanic—that is, a first class mechanic with a file and polishing tools—could not polish that article up?

He can polish it up, but he cannot conceive of the object. That is the whole point. He cannot conceive those particular lines which give it its individual beauty. That is the difference between a mechanic and an artist; he (the mechanic) cannot conceive as an artist.

Justice Waite: If he can conceive, then he would cease to be a mechanic and become an artist?

Would become an artist; that is right.

Mr. Higginbotham: You say you have known Mr. Brâncuşi for a good many years?

For about fifteen years.

You say he is known as a great artist?

He is known as a great artist.

Is he known as a great artist or a great sculptor?

I use both titles; they are synonymous to me. A great artist may be a great sculptor and a great sculptor may be a great artist.

You have seen many pieces of his work?

I have seen probably twenty or thirty pieces.

Were they all similar to the exhibit one here?

No, they are not similar; they are different.

In what way are they different?

Well, they are individual creations, each work must be different.

What do they represent, the ones you saw?

Some represented birds, some human forms, nude forms and anatomical studies even.

So he has made sculptures of human forms?

Yes, decidedly.

When you say some represented a bird, does that (Exhibit One) represent a bird to you?

To me it is a matter of indifference what it represents.

In so far as that piece of sculpture is concerned, in appealing to the aesthetic taste, it does not make any difference what it represents?

Not at all. There are limits.

We will say a certain piece of rock, marble, is taken by a sculptor and simply chipped off at intervals. As long as that chipping off at intervals was done by a sculptor, you would consider it a work of art?

The moment a piece of rock, marble, is begun in the hands of the man, if he is an artist, it can become, from that moment, a work of art.

Mr. Speiser: Mr.Epstein, I ask you if you are familiar with the works of Mr. Brâncuşi?

Yes.

I hand you a publication “The Arts”, dated July 22, 1923, and ask you if you have seen any of Mr. Brâncuşi’s pieces pictured therein as works of art, beginning at page 18 to 29?

I have seen one of these; this one on page 18.

Mr. Lane suggests that you might enlighten the court as to whether you would think that object (Exhibit One) a bird?

I would, of course, start off with that artist’s title, and if the artist called it a bird, I would take it seriously, if I have any respect for the artist whatsoever. It would be my first endeavor to see whether it was like a bird. In this particular piece of sculpture there are the elements of a bird, certain elements.

Mr. Higginbotham: What elements?

If you regard the piece of sculpture in profile, you see there, it is like the breast of a bird, especially on this side.

All breasts of birds are more or less rounded?

Yes.

Any rounded piece of bronze then, in other words, could represent a bird?

That I cannot say.

Justice Waite: Looks more like the keel of a boat, too?

If it were lying down.

And a little like the crescent of a new moon?

Yes.

Mr. Higginbotham: If Mr. Brâncuşi called this a fish, it would be then to you a fish?

If he called it a fish I would call it a fish.

If he called it a tiger, it would change your mind to a tiger?

No.

In your thirty years experience you have met many other sculptors and artists?

Yes, Sir.

You have seen their works?

Yes.

Do any of them do works of this class and character?

There are other artists that do work similar, not absolutely like Brâncuşi, but of that character.

So he stands practically alone and isolated in this particular class of art?

No. He is related to a very ancient form of sculpture; I should say even to the Egyptian. He does not stand absolutely alone. He is related to the fine ancient sculpture like the early Egyptian three thousand years old. If you would like me to bring into court a piece of sculpture, ancient sculpture, which I happen to have, I can illustrate. (Witness leaves the stand to get the sample³.)

Constantin Brâncuşi, Sleeping Muse I, 1909-10, Marble, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.

Giza: G 1171, Faience bird from G 1171 (found in sand): Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 37733. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

What is that piece you have there?

That is a hawk.

Will you show it to the court so as to illustrate your answer?

This is an ancient Egyptian hawk, three thousand years ago.

Justice Waite: You can see some similarity in form, with what you understand to be a hawk?

An ornithologist might not find it. I see the resemblance to a bird; the feathers are not shown; the feet are not shown.

Justice Waite: The wings and the feet are not shown, still you get the impression it is a hawk?

Yes.

1. Reproduced from “The Case of Constantin Brancusi vs. the United States of America: an extract”, in The Art Newspaper, Vol. 63, October 1996. A full transcript is available as Diane Francesca Rose (Ed), Brancusi vs. United States: The Historic Trial, 1928, Preface by Margit Rowell, Afterword by André Paleologue, Vilo, Paris, 1999. This book was actually originally published in France as Brancusi contre Etats-Unis, translated by Jocelyne de Pass, Adam Biro, Paris, 1995. The original transcript can be found at MoMA; see http://arcade.nyarc.org:80/record=b520131~S8. For a scholarly account of the trial see Thomas L. Hartshorne, “Modernism on Trial: C. Brancusi v. United States (1928)”, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, April 1986, pp. 93-104. For a journalistic account see Martin Gayford, “When art itself went on trial”, in The Telegraph, 24 January 2004. [↩]
2. Gayford, Ibid. [↩]
3. I have not been able to find any information on the piece of sculpture introduced here [↩]

One, two.

La Monte Young, The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119.

(The piece is “a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer”, playing non-stop here).

My friend Tyler is starting a new radio show and you should all listen to it, as his blurb makes absolutely clear:

This show features a combination of field recordings and experimental sound art (Glenn Gould, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Max Neuhaus), home-recorded folk and pop songs (Charlie Mcalister, Simon Joyner, Wio), as well as more traditional indie rock (Palace, Neutral Milk Hotel, Animal Collective) and British shoegaze (My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins). I will focus primarily on artists who explore non-conventional recording techniques and experiment with ways of capturing sound outside of the studio context. More generally, rather than conceiving of radio as a means for merely transmitting prerecorded material, I am interested in approaching the medium as a potential site of artistic production – stitching together acoustic fragments and layers of static, noise, and junk, to create spontaneous sound collages. What would it sound like, for example, if one superimposed a handheld recording of an industrial dishwasher and two people fighting in a wooden room, on top of an audio biography of Helen Keller, and used the resulting chaotic garble as a segue between a Cocteau Twins song and a home-recorded folk song about owls and fried oysters? I suspect that, at the very least, certain familiar songs would be reenergized by the new contexts in which they were embedded and, if one listened even more closely, occult voices would eventually begin to emerge alongside the death rattle of the everyday. Running water would sound like fires in the street.

There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with Harper’s, and I like very much that the brief biographical note appended to the article does not mention The New Yorker.

An aside.
One of these days I will write a long essay here about Harper’s and The New Yorker, explaining why Harper’s is clearly superior, flawed though it is by the omnipresence of Lewis Lapham’s imperious ego.

Another aside.
Lazily entering the phrase “new yorker” into my browser search bar just now, I forgot that I had it temporarily pointed at the OED, and discovered that the second possible disambiguation there is:

B. adj. (attrib.). Found in or characteristic of the magazine The New Yorker (founded 1925), noted for its urbane and sharply observed view of American life.

Followed by the following quotes:

1934 Fortune Aug. 75/1 No advertising man is believed, by the editors, ever to have understood a New Yorker joke. 1948 Hearst’s Internat. May 175/1 Literary critics and editors of other magazines are always referring to ‘The New Yorker style of writing’. 1959 Times Lit. Suppl. 2 Jan. 4/2 He surveys the established Old Guard.., the new ‘realists’.., the New Yorker School. 1992 New Yorker 3 Feb. 65/1 (advt.) The design is distinguished and very New Yorker: Eustace Tilley-patterned endpapers.

(A search for “harper’s” results in the suggestion to try harping, vbl. n.)

End asides.
One of the most remarkable sections of the article is a passage briefly enumerating the stories of the bodies this couple has found. The following is a small part of this:

Last night I was very fortunate to see a performance of work by Ha-Yang Kim at Roulette.

The first piece, Metasmatter, was performed by a mixed sextet comprised of piano, flute, violin, cello, bass clarinet and percussion. This is a wonderful eclectic piece clearly influenced by jazz and Balinese music, and was performed with much exuberance by the assembled musicians.

The second piece, not listed on the original program for the evening, was a performance by Kim and percussionist Nathan Davis, who have frequently worked together as the duo Odd Appetite. They played Sotong, a small and delicate work of Kim’s, originally scored for theatre, involving a loop of cello recorded and repeated through guitar pedals coupled with delicate melodic counterpoint on cello and metal percussion instruments.

Sotong
[audio:http://www.oddappetite.org/audio/Sotong.32.bounce.mp3]

The third piece was a debut performance of Threadsuns played by the Flux Quartet, who announced Kim as their newest member. This was easily the highlight of the evening. The piece is in three movements. The first movement is a bracing, discordant rush of halting themes that reminded me of the filmic soundscapes—Decasia and Gotham in particular—of composer Michael Gordon—which indicates something of the magnitude of the sound the quartet was able to generate. The second movement is a restrained and subtle exploration of microtones and harmonics, a frail echo of the first movement, as if we were standing amid the final ripples of a wave smashed against the walls. The third movement is a gradual extraction of the melodic core of the themes hinted at in the earlier movements, culminating in a beautiful unrestrained outpour of sound ascending to the climax. Like all of the work performed, the piece as a whole exhibited a pure blend of traditional Eastern and contemporary Western musical influences, and a perfect balance of traditional and experimental lines of musical heritage. In introducing the piece Ha-Yang described the origin of the title in Paul Célan’s Fadensonnen, and how the piece represented for her a vision of the sun as a symbol of wholeness in contrast to the fractured nature of the contemporary world—and it is natural to superimpose the image of a fitfully rising sun over the work as a whole.

(William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 700).

Kim’s debut record Ama was released last year by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and we can only wait patiently for a recording of Threadsuns.

The long bare corridor was brightly lighted and empty, until a young man with a thin face, a slightly crooked nose, and a weary expression which embraced his whole appearance, passed them. —There, there’s the guy who was working on this, he’s one of the writers. Hey, Willie… But the weary figure went on. He was carrying two books, one titled, The Destruction of the Philosophers, the other, The Destruction of the Destruction. He rounded a corner away from them muttering, —Christ. Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 734.

Willie, a figure glimpsed on the fringes througout the novel, is widely interpreted to directly represent Gaddis himself. This is the last appearance he makes. The corridor is in a television studio, and the project referred to is a television series called The Lives of the Saints. The books he is carrying are English translations of Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (تهافت الفلاسفة) by Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (ابو حامد محمد ابن محمد الغزالی) and Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (تهافت التهافت) by Abū ‘l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd (أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد), more frequently translated as The Incoherence of the Philosophers and The Incoherence of the Incoherence respectively.

Christopher J. Knight, William Gaddis, and Tom Smith, “The New York State Writers Institute Tapes: William Gaddis”, in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 667–693.

CM: Gaddis never graduated. Apparently, there was some incident, and he had to leave school.

de K: The story I heard was that he was at the Hygiene Department, being measured or weighed or examined or something. And he was either smashed, or very, very angry about something. Anyway, he jumped out of a second-story window onto the street. And he was, I think, cashiered from the college for that reason. He was very, very depressed and angry, I think, at the time. He didn’t like being in college in the middle of the war.

“Ormonde de Kay talks about William Gaddis in an interview with Charles Monaghan“, The Gaddis Annotations, 24 December 1993.

Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers, Published for the US Sanitary Commission by Hurd and Houghton, New York, 1869, p. 235.

Their breath came short and their pulses raced, but they were within those limits that had been predicted and considered safe.

Richard D. Lyons, “Apollo Doctors Pleased At Astronauts’ Reactions”, in New York Times, 21 July 1969, p. 5.

According to the publisher, Beckett is in good health and went swimming over the weekend.

“Beckett Accepts Nobel; Refuses to Attend Rite”, in New York Times, 28 October 1969, p. 40.

I was lucky enough to come by the last ticket to the last performance of the Peter Weiss play Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade—or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade—in the recent production by The Classical Theatre of Harlem. Along with the definitive Gate Theatre production of Waiting for Godot, which N and I saw for her birthday last year, this was one of the best performances I have seen for a very long time. At once visceral and conceptual, in your face and ambivalent, Marat/Sade is that most endangered of aesthetic creatures—a work satisfying in every last respect. In the Oxford English Dictionary entry under theatre, theater, n. there appears the following paragraph:

(b) Phrases: theatre-in-the-round: see ROUND n. 5d; Theatre of Cruelty [tr. F. théâtre de la cruauté (A. Artaud (1932) Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté)], a collective term for plays in which the dramatist seeks to communicate a sense of pain, suffering, and evil through the portrayal of extreme physical violence; Theatre of the Absurd, a collective term for plays (chiefly French) portraying the futility and anguish of man’s struggle in a senseless and inexplicable world (cf. ABSURD n.); also fig.; Theatre of Fact, documentary drama.

Marat/Sade satisfies every one of these definitions. The play is set with spectators surrounding the stage (theatre in the round), Weiss was strongly influenced by Artaud (theatre of cruelty), the play is an icon of anti-theatre and includes a philosophical dialogue between de Sade and Marat that makes L’Étranger seem like self-help (theatre of the absurd), and—perhaps most remarkably—the entire play, including the play within a play structure, is based in part on the real life story of de Sade, who spent thirteen years in the insane asylum at Charenton (theatre of fact). As if that weren’t enough, it’s also a musical.

The central among many themes in the play is the tension between human nature and political progress. de Sade on the one hand expresses a cynical, atoms in the void determinism while ordering his actors around the stage like puppets, while Marat—seated in a bathtub in the middle of the stage (the real version of which can be seen in the Musée Grévin), pen and paper in hand, for the duration of the play—urges on the French revolution. Eventually Marat is stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday, who visits him under the guise of offering inside information about an imminent counter-revolutionary uprising. Symbolically, the play represents the triumph of realism over idealism. Weiss, having lived through the—for him, personally heartbreaking—failure of communism, clearly sides with de Sade over Marat, and the play delivers an aesthetic statement designed to ram this message home to a complicit audience.

The New York debut of the play was reviewed in the April 1966 edition of Harper’s (p. 124):

It was reported that two women fainted at different performances, a third had a heart attack, and I know of at least one gentleman who stalked up the aisle midway through the evening, muttering, “It’s nothing but a Goddamn freak show,” to his wife.

There is also an interesting review of this same production by Stuart Hampshire from The New York Review of Books in February 1966, though he gets it all wrong, mainly by misunderstanding the relationship between the theatricality of the play and the political themes. The problem is that he completely ignores the historical context in which Weiss is writing—though in his defence, the 3 volume Weiss masterpiece Die Ästhetik des Widerstands was still more than a decade from seeing the light of day. He also, bizarrely, says that “the audience will leave the theater without being assaulted or disturbed”. I don’t know how this could be possible; at the Harlem production, I was literally soaked with an industrial strength hose sprayed by one of the asylum inmates into the crowd. The highlight of the production, though, was the end. The play finishes with a riot, the asylum inmates revolting against the director of the asylum, the Abbé de Coulmier—another real life character–who is killed while his daughter is raped. The inmates then flee, leaving corpses strewn around the caged stage. It isn’t clear whether the play has ended. Very, very gradually, the corpses stand up and sarcastically applaud the audience, looking into our eyes, and walk away. de Sade strolls casually off stage, smirking. Eventually the crowd, deciding there is no further entertainment forthcoming, starts to dissipate.

I was reminded of the play when Mike and Giovanni and I recently visited the Strand, where I was delighted to find an autographed copy of David Markson’s The Last Novel. Markson writes that Artaud himself “spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums” (p. 32) and died “sitting up at the foot of his bed” (p. 128). On the way out of the store there was a card lying alone on the top of some books, with a print of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat.

Poetic harmony demanded that I steal it.