To-ward thee Avant-Garde....

According to the Oxford online dictionary the definition of “avant-garde” is someone who is working with new and experimental ideas and methods in art, music and literature. Or  a group of artists, musicians or writers working with new and experimental ideas and methods. This is an accurate description of the pathway I am travelling in my artistic practice and it is with this in mind that I seek to flesh out some of my  influences  and attempt to hone the parameters of my artistic journey and workout exactly what I am actually trying to investigate within the context of my postgraduate study. 

 

 

I remember reading Kerouac’s “on the road” when I was in my mid-teens and was inspired by it’s viscerality and immediacy, from then on I always wanted to write and make art, whether it be performance, fine art or the written word.

 

In Burroughs groundbreaking first successful novel Naked Lunch (1959),named so by Kerouac,(the analogy being that you can see exactly what is on the end of your fork), Burroughs presents his humanity in the upmost honesty and is unequivocally nude. Burroughs writes in the manner of a set of routines which accurately prognosticate the instruments of control(algebra of need)that manipulate our socio/political horizon. This relates more especially to the authors constant battle with heroin addiction and the modus operandi which that implies. It is non-linear yet perfectly formed with the most beautiful poetic sense and is “savagely funny.”(newsweek)

 

 

 Since then Burroughs has always been my favourite author, his non-linear style, routines and shocking honesty about himself has always struck me as being the  best that literature can offer. The way he uses the time and space continuum as an artifice to exorcize a socio-political point, (for example in the “Cities of the Red |Night” trilogy) the inherent intelligent of his prose urges me to keep inverstigating his prose and the “novels” they are contained in. I find his cutups to be sublime and the denizen of a lot of hidden truth as to the nature of our existence,for example the uncanny merging of dream and reality. As Burroughs says in the 1991 documentary “Commisioner  of Sewers,” “Your life is a cutup.”

 

For Burroughs image and word can be substituted, for when you read a word or collection of, an image definitely pops up in your mind.The random sublimnity of these words and images makes the cutup a great tool for exorcizing the control that others have over your destiny, opens your mind and allows you to feel freely and open your mind to new ways of thinking.

 

This idea of the cutup translates well to the world of avant-garde cinema, more epecially in Burroughs and Bryon Gysins,“Towers Open Fire,” which plays with ideas of word and image control and the concept of  a “persistence of vision, ”brought about by treating the image and soundtrack as if it were a dream, the reification of the open mind if you like engaged by the opening of the pineal gland/third eye.

 

The jump-cut, montage and energizing of sign and symbol can also be seen in the cosmic artifice and occult laden work of Kenneth Anger’s “Magick Lantern Cycle”. Painstakingly created over many years and often-reworked in new editions Anger’s films use image, sign and symbol as a direct link to Jung’s “collective unconscious” and is influenced heavily by |Crowley’s Thelema, the mysteries of Hollywood and in later years the counter-culture of the late sixties.

 

In terms of avant-garde music, arguably the most surreal and groundbreaking is Captain Beefhearts 1969 double album “Trout Mask Replica.” The record has the intention of being taken as an anthropological field fecording,it is experimental and abrasive and although it sounds extremely chaotic,there is within it an extreme control and trust in this chaos, legitamized by the vision of Captain Beefheart and the tireless diligence of his magic band.

 

On the record sounds spill around, mistakes become motiff’s on cappella tracks such as “orange claw hammer” and “the dust blows forward and the dust blows back,” the recording benefit’s from the Captain(Don Van Vliet) hitting pause on the tape recorder and starting lines over again. The recording was documented and produced  by Frank Zappa on a SHURE eight-channel mixer and an UHER portable tape recorder. Many of the vocals were initiated without the use of headphones, rendering them only slightly in synch with the instrumentation.

 

To develop the album the band lived together and practiced for up to fourteen hours a day, they were so attuned to each other that when it came for the band to record it only took four and a half hours. Beefheart wrote most of the album on piano and the parts were transposed for the benefit of the magic band, learning and executing this music must have took extraordinary effort, however the recording does not sound like the work of control freaks.

 

So during this term I intend to explore the notion of word and image in relation to the avant-garde. I shall write a book which will be illustrated by my paintings and also make recordings which refer to this material in an attempt to understand the juxtaposition between word and image and how greater truths can arguably be gleaned through this juxtaposition.