_{cover artwork by staalplaat}

listen to extracts from Temple Carcass and Meesur - both from
A Box of Silk & Dogs (Staalplaat 1999)
... an extract from Lahore - Lahore & Marseille (Soleilmoon 1998)
... an extract from Bethlehem is Free - Hummus (Soleilmoon 2002)
... an extract from remix03 - Remixes Vol 2 (Soleilmoon 1998)

For background information on Muslimgauze.

The most comprehensive Muslimgauze site: pretentious.

If you go to Berlin, be sure to go STAALPLAAT @ TORSTR. 72 - as well as having a vast range of Muslimgauze and other weird and wonderful noise for sale, they are extremely helpful and friendly.

For free and legal Muslimgauze downloads, and a well-written description of the music, search for Muslimgauze here.

For streamed tracks and a rare concert performance: Arabbox

Download this text as PDF

Contents

1. A World Apart
2. The Music
3. The Politics
4. Lahore & Marseille

[Note: Although he was the sole member, when speaking of Muslimgauze Bryn Jones used the plural form, e.g. “Muslimgauze were at zero”, or "Muslimgauze re-mix, loop and re-edit themselves," which suggests that Muslimgauze were an individual working as a team, a pack rather than a lone wolf.

Sometimes Muslimgauze come across as deliciously schizophrenic, slipping from 'I' to 'We' and back again in the space of a few sentences: "I didn't have a band, I just played around. The more famous German bands are what we listened to before we decided to start making music ourselves. Now, we just like getting in our own sort of cocoon and concentrate on what we are doing. It just barely supports me financially." *

Bryn Jones was explicit that it was not important who got credit for the music of Muslimgauze. By creating the 'group' Muslimgauze, Bryn Jones gained anonymity for himself and granted the music a degree of autonomy. So throughout this text Muslimgauze are referred to in the plural form.]

_{artwork by Bryn Jones (?)}

1. A World Apart

Muslimgauze was everything contemporary music tends to flee from: passionate, political, palpably angry, difficult, disturbing, utterly uncompromising and obsessively experimental – it’s difficult to think of anyone who has managed to be more consistently and willfully non-commercial than Muslimgauze.

Without having used a computer, Muslimgauze produced great stacks and streams of electronic music, the beats, bass and textures of which still leave the dons of dance, dub and ambient paddling and splashing about in the shallows. Occasionally, e.g. on Zuriff Moussa, Muslimgauze produced tracks which hint at the ease with which they could have carved out a niche in the more experimental, harder regions of dance music, and sometimes it’s tempting to wish Muslimgauze had invested more time in shredding up the beats of drum and bass and trip hop. But this is to wish Muslimgauze had not been Muslimgauze.

As Richard Gehr notes, Muslimgauze is an exemplary example of nomadic musical production: they sped through their albums, erasing them from their DAT tapes as soon as the label had a master copy. Muslimgauze had no time to listen to their own albums, let alone those of others. What counted was the project at hand, and this sort of single-minded focus requires a degree of amnesia. Muslimgauze used what was around at the moment and no doubt absorbed the reverberations of various brands of dance music, but Muslimgauze worked so fast and went so far ahead of their time that they discarded and transgressed genres before they were fully-formed. Muslimgauze put out albums that were radically different from each other, in very short succession: compare 1995's harsh, machinic Izlamaphobia with the unsettling Arabic dub of 1996's Gun Aramaic. This restless wandering is, of course, is in stark contrast to rock stars and other musicians who sit on their arses and laurels, cranking out a new genre-prototypical album every two or three years.

extract from Hudood Ordinacee, from Izlamaphobia (Staalplaat 1995)

extract from 8am, Tel Aviv, Islamic Jihad from Gun Aramaic

Rather than cultivating an audience and targetting music at them with an aim to please, Muslimgauze pursued an absolutely ruthless line of experimentation - from beginning to end. The soundscapes of Muslimgauze push the limits of what is listenable, undermine our notions of what the difference between noise and music is, test our stamina and sound systems, and ultimately make it difficult to listen to anything else that is not as intense. The music often induces goosebumps and spine-tingles with its beautiful, hypnotic driving rhythms; but their sounds are also frequently unbearable, or they at least require an effort on the part of the listener: to acclimatise and adjust their tolerance settings. Muslimgauze were not primarily out to tickle our fancies - the main agenda was to wind us up, push our buttons and draw our attention to political issues that perhaps we’d prefer not to think about, rather than please us on a superficial, pop-consumption level. Muslimgauze were educators, not entertainers:

Well, there is a fine line between preaching and information. As soon as you start writing songs and lyrics you are preaching to people. Also, most music is ruined by people who can't think. So if we have everything done for us and we can' t think for ourselves, then there are no songs as such. The titles are used as my marks to guide people to hopefully get more information on the situations. *

Muslimgauze were not dogmatic preachers who spoonfed their political views to their listeners. They gave tracks and titles names in the hope that people would follow them up and think: they are intellectual stimulants that can be taken advantage of, or not:

The Blue Mosque is a magnificent building in Turkey. It's one of the great architectural works of Islam. It's just another side to Islam that other people don't see. Instead of all mobs chanting in the streets, there's another spiritual and architectural side as well. So that was the reason behind the title, somebody might see Blue Mosque and start wondering what the hell it is *.

Islamic Architecture.org

2. The Music

While using Western electronics (but not computers) on the one hand, and Arabic, Chinese and Indian 'drums, tams and cyms' on the other, Muslimgauze's prolific output cannot be reduced to a simple dualistic war between the technological occident and an organic orient - if only for the reason that Muslimgauze used electric and electronic equipment in a very organic way.

I have never touched a computer / sampler, I use old analogue equipment, old reels, amps anything. I hope Muslimgauze sound unique, separate, belonging to no set formula of music. To use computers just doesn't appeal to me, I like rough analogue results. *

When compared with the crystal clear sterility of the likes of Aphex Twin and two lone swordsmen, the ‘music’ of Muslimgauze is thoroughly messy. It is lo-fi at its fuzzy, frayed-at-the-edges-best, with layers of crackle, throbbing distortion, beat slippage and pile ups, volume and speed control gone haywire – it is a rejection of machinic perfection in favour of organic error and sonic mutation.

We don't really use drum machines now. Everything's done by hand. We tend to do things like that, you just get a better feel I think. *

Muslimgauze's soundscapes are the embodiment of an attitude to music that is utterly alien to the neat and tidy packaging of sound into hits, songs or even compositions: "nothing's pre-written. It's all instinct." *

The extract from Lahore above comes from the fifteenth minute of a track that clocks in at 17.43 secs, and that's the short version - on Your Mines in Kabul there is a 31.45 secs version. The track has no real beginning, middle or end - it really could go on forever. Lahore consists of: a relentless, pulsing five 'note' bassline that varies in its intensity and level of distortion; a delicate, plaintive flute loop; a minimal snare which slips in between the bass; a pervasive, constant crackle that immerses the other elements; an often barely perceptible synth loop; and Muslimgauze's stock effects (i.e. bucketloads of phase, volume shifts etc.). Lahore is an environment, not a composition. There is no progression and nothing is resolved. It's merely the same, constant elements endlessly recombined in different relationships of intensity. Listeners can make of it what they will: focus and get into a blissful trance, let the music become wallpaper, play it on a continual loop for weeks, use the music to channel agression and scare the life out of their neighbours... whatever.

It takes considerable, single-minded confidence and a fair amount of fuck-you to send a track like Lahore out into a world where inane 3 minute bitesize light popsnacks are the norm. Perhaps comparisons could be drawn with the likes of Fela Kuti, who frequently recorded songs where vocals make their first appearance after 8 minutes of instrumental lead-in, or John Zorn, who basically does whatever the hell he likes. However, there is a point where comparisons just break down: both Fela Kuti and John Zorn had/have positive relationships and feedback from enthusiastic audiences, and artistic communities to support them; whereas, apart from a few weird remix collaborations conducted by post, a handful of unsatisfactory concerts and the support of their labels, Muslimgauze went it very much alone and cut a very singular and isolated path (..Bryn Jones did not believe that Muslimgauze had fans). Also, Fela Kuti and John Zorn were/are phenomenal composers and orchestrators, and while Zorn often wanders off into abstract soundcape experiments, he seems to be most at home experimenting with pre-written compositions. With Muslimgauze, you can hear the track emerging in live space, at the moment of its recording.

3. The Politics

cover artwork by staalplaat

In the 90s Bryn Jones was somewhat isolated in his passionately pro-Arab, anti-Zionist, anti-US stance. But the post 9/11 political-cultural landscape has retrospectively shown how acutely sensitive he was, as if he was already registering shockwaves from explosive events in the future.

“The time is coming when everybody and every country will have to take sides, pro-PLO or pro-Zionist, the war to resolve this is not far away.” (Bryn Jones interview, 1990)

“Do you think that Islam will spread even more so than it already has?

Yeah, I think it's growing quite well as it is, maybe down the road there will be some sort of a conflict... “ (Bryn Jones interview 1995)

The Man

When it comes to the politics, it is quite helpful to keep in mind the distinction between Bryn Jones’ unshakeable political convictions and the political content of Muslimgauze’s productions. Bryn Jones’ political stance was the non-adjustable setting at the core of the production: the source of motivational anger, the raison d’être, the justification for the style and content of Muslimgauze.

In the few interviews he gave, Bryn Jones laid his political cards on the table in bold and unambiguous terms. The convictions are absolute, espoused without a hint of ambivalence or the slightest concessions to complexity, and are more valuable for their capacity to generate feeling rather than coherent, airtight arguments. The core of the outlook is:

• Israel and Zionism is the enemy: the regime is a vile occupying state which oppresses and murders Palestinians.

• The US sponsors Israel and interferes in Arab countries in the name of freedom, when what is really at stake is oil – the US does not interfere when there is no oil at stake.

• The Palestinians have the right to take violent action against Israel as they have no alternative means of attacking the occupier.

• There can be no peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict – there will only be peace when Israel is totally defeated and relocated.

• Unconditional support for the PLO/Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

• Support for other places where Arabs/Islam is repressed (e.g. Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan are all places that figure in Muslimgauze tracks or albums)

Part and parcel of this package of convictions is righteous anger with the West’s hypocritical and mendacious dealings with the Middle East and its compulsive ‘interference’ in countries which, in Bryn Jones’ view, should be left alone to make their own choices. So, whilst being non-religious himself, Bryn Jones could look upon the rise of Islamic fundamentalism with perfect calm:

“If they want more religion then that's what they'll get. It's up to the people. Again, it's not for the west to dictate what these lands, these people want, which is what always happens.” (Bryn Jones interview 1995)

This laissez faire attitude to fundamentalism is coupled with a support of nationalism as a power which expresses a people’s right to self-determination. Bryn Jones looked upon communism with as much loathing as he did upon the technocapitalist West: communism was imposed at the barrel of a gun on Islamic populations in the former Soviet Union, and was totally alien to Islamic culture.

Apart from the rock solid motivation drawn from these core political beliefs, Bryn Jones also cited a motley line-up of figureheads as sources of ‘interest and inspiration’ - Arafat, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein etc. – though this does not necessarily mean that each figurehead was always a positive inspiration for him. When asked about his attitude to Saddam Hussein he seems to express support for Hussein in his defiance of the West, but described himself as ‘pro-Iran’ and hoped that Iran would take over Iraq, which suggests that he sided with theocratic totalitarianism of Khomeini and the Iranian mullahs, rather than secular totalitarianism of Hussein.

The Crux of the Matter

Bryn Jones’ core convictions could only be maintained by massively simplifying tragically complex conflicts, and they led him to develop a rather unwholesome fascination with, and even support for, despots and their repressive regimes.

There won't be any peace. There can't be any peace, it can't be solved. *

In rejecting any peaceful outcome to the Arab-Israeli conflict that did not involve Israel’s total retreat and defeat, Bryn Jones sided himself with political groups which practised the indiscriminate killing of civilians and which have no qualms about turning children into explosive weapons. He foresaw an escalation of violence that would inevitably brutalize both sides of the conflict, and he committed himself to it politically.

His non-negotiable belief that interference is simply wrong and that nations have a right to self-determination forced him to wash his hands while atrocities were being committed in the name of Islam. When asked for his opinion on the situation in Algeria, this was his reply:

“The Algerians want change, if one looks at what happens over there now. It is their problem, the outside interests don't have a word to say in this country.”

So, if a bunch of theocratic, misogynist headcases should massacre and terrorize populations, or seize power and impose a tyrannical, feudal regime maintained by a barbaric religious police, then it is none of ‘our’ business. The track record of the Taliban and the agenda of fundamentalists in Pakistan shows that such regimes tend towrds banning voting rights and education for women, imagery, music and sport, and this makes Bryn Jones' non-interventionist 'tolerance' particularly baffling. If the fundamentalists has their way, it would be illegal to listen to Lahore in Lahore.

When I ask him what reception he thinks his music might receive from the Bassij, fundamentalist Islam's culture police, he simply laughs. (Interview with Bryn Jones by Richard Gehr, Village Voice ( October 28, 1994)

The claim that intervention might be justified through appeals to universal human rights would lead us into a tit-for-tat slanging match. What about Israel’s abuse of human rights? The US-led West only intervenes when its own interests are at stake. etc. etc. And we could go spiralling round in circles of abuse ad infinitum, as one does in the current memepsychosis.

The tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict is a tragedy - in the sense that there is only a choice between two dire alternatives. There is no 'right' side to be on because both sides can line up a set of convincing and emotive arguments that merit sympathy. The passions deployed by the memes which plague the region are so blinding and overwhelming that truly open discussion and sincere compromise are out of the question. From a secular rationalist perspective the conflict is a prime example of humanity's susceptibility to meme manipulation, and of a deep-rooted inclination towards zero-sum situations.
...

From the handful of interviews that Bryn Jones gave, it sometimes seems that he conceived of Islam as a passive victim of occidental depredations and colonial exploitation. This now-fashionable point of view is both very indulgent towards Islam, in that all of Islam’s failings can be blamed on the West and all crimes can be justified as retaliation against the West; and deluded and patronizing, in that it denies Islam has its own agency, agenda or expansionist program. (e.g.)

At other times he seems more aware of more pro-active and dynamic potential latent in Islam. From an interview in 1995:

You have an earlier CD entitled the United States of Islam. To me that seems to hint at a common prophetic theme of a unified Arab-Asian military alliance against the west. Do you foresee a union of former Soviet states, China, North Africa, and other Islamic countries?

Yeah, it could be a Pan-Arabic force like Tajikistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, a whole force... Whether it will come off or not, I don't know. It should, but they've all got their own interests so I don't know whether Syria would join up with Iran or Iraq.

Bryn Jones professed to be utterly indifferent to European culture, or even fundamentally opposed to it when it was allied to US interference. Seeing that the Arab-Israeli conflict would lead to an increasingly polarised, inescapable and global conflict, he made it quite clear what side he would be on, when it came to the crunch.

These days Bryn Jones would not have been so isolated, now that there are pro-Islamic political groups and movements in the UK which wear their love of totalitarianism and hatred of Zionism on their sleeves. But the parasitism of Islamo-Marxism would have no doubt disgusted Bryn Jones: Marxism being for him just another form of Western imperialism; an imposition of values alien to Islamic culture.

The Music

Fortunately, as has been noted, the music of Muslimgauze is vastly more complex, varied and emotionally subtle than the viewpoint expressed so tersely by Bryn Jones in interview.

Bryn Jones’ political stance was the general setting which provided the unique, extreme position from which Muslimgauze could generate soundscapes in response to specific events. To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari, Bryn Jones provides a rock solid molar stratum from which Muslimgauze conducts fluid, molecular experimentation.

“Muslimgauze usually take a word or action etc. and from that evolves a basic idea, which is then altered etc. until the finished pieces come to life.” *

“We usually start off with a political fact, or a photograph or something that's happened, and then work off that into a musical idea.” *

"A piece inspired by Algeria has Algerian voices." *

"Vampire Of Tehran is based on a man, a taxi driver in Tehran who killed females. When caught he was hanged from a crane after the relatives of his victims had been allowed to flog him; justice." *

extract from Sikh Out from Vampire of Tehran

It is much more interesting and fruitful to explore the individual strands of the vast web woven by Muslimgauze than it is to decry the shortcomings of Bryn Jones’ political views. Muslimgauze infiltrate the cramped confines of Western music and rip then up with rhythms and dense textures and from the outside. This is to restate that Muslimgauze were sophisticated educators, not single-minded preachers.

It is even possible to find ambivalence in the music: the second track of Jaal Ab Dullah bears the ludicrous title ‘Kabul Is Free Under a Veil’, while track number sixteen is reassuringly entitled ‘Kabul Isn’t Free Under a Veil’.

4. Lahore & Marseille

The Badshahi Masjid, in Lahore - one of the world's largest mosques and one of humanity's greatest architectural treasures

If a Muslimgauze album is entitled Lahore and Marseille, the thing to do is ask why those cities are bound together in the title? And is there anything that binds the individual tracks to their titles?

Maybe it is because they are both old cities, both are economic hubs, and both have rich demographic and linguistic mixes:

Lahore:

According to the 1998 census 86.2%, or 6,896,000 of the population are Punjabis, 10.2% or 816,000 are Muhajirs There are known to be more than a million Pashtun refugess in Lahore (the vast majority of whom are settling), probably about 15% of the population. Finally, the Seraikis at 0.4% number about 32,000. Many languages are spoken in Lahore, including Punjabi, Urdu and English.

Marseille:

The vast majority of the Marsellaise are descendants of the waves of immigrants that arrived at the port in the early 19th century. Among the ethnic groups of Marseillaise are Armenians, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Russians and North Africans. Approximately 25 per cent of Marseille’s population is of North African origin, mostly Algerian, and Tunisian. The Jewish community is also the third largest in Europe.

Lahore, with its stock exchange, IT industry and booming economy has the potential to be a technocapitalist 'success story' - the relentless bass in Lahore drowning out the mournful flute could be the inexorable encroachment of capitalism on a traditional way of life? is this why the flute 'dies out' after 10 minutes?- but this potential is undermined by the steady rise of fundamentalism, which has even set its sights on music:

Lahore is one of Pakistan's most cultured and cosmopolitan cities and capital of Punjab province, home to Pakistan's moderate mainstream culture and long known more for food and festivals than religious zealotry. Yet here student couples have been physically attacked on college campuses for holding hands. The bar association recently elected a lawyer from a fundamentalist party as its head. And on the streets lately, night-riding vigilantes have been splashing paint on billboard images of unveiled women.

Clerics have mounted a partially successful campaign to curb the spread of pedestrian-friendly "food streets" in Lahore's historic walled city. Such amenities, the clerics say, promote mixing of the sexes and prostitution.

"I have questioned them: Is there room for entertainment in your religion?" said Kamran Lashari, the U.S.-educated head of the Punjab Parks and Horticulture Authority, which has promoted the food-street plan. "I think they're basically joy killers. I don't see any event which has brought public joy and happiness being accepted by these elements."

Leaders of the religious coalition deny they are seeking to emulate the Taliban. They say they are committed to the rule of law and to working within a democratic system. "Islamization is not Talibanization," said Farid Ahmad Paracha, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest party in the religious alliance, and a member of the national assembly from Lahore. "There is no model of Iran or Afghanistan."

Paracha said that while Islamic law forbids most forms of music, "we are not going to eliminate it at once. . . . We believe in educating society toward the Islamic system." He dismissed the billboard vandalism, which many people here believe to be the handiwork of party followers, as "just a reaction of some people" and "not an organized campaign." *

With Lahore, Muslimgauze once again showed acute foresight - if entitling the song is seen as a prophetic identification of a city that would have increasing significance for the West. Who in 1997 would have predicted that a town in Pakistan would have such an impact on Britain in 2005?

extract from Lahore

Marseille, however, perhaps presents more grounds for optimism.

Marseille's core is a spicy stew of nationalities, giving it a make-up like no other in France.

The free and easy mixture is one answer given by Marseille residents to the question posed over and over in recent weeks: Why has their town had relatively little trouble?

"It's the special quality of Marseille," said Dia Ghazi, a Palestinian-born proprietor of the Royal Bazaar, a hodgepodge of made-in-France textiles and Middle East-manufactured coffee makers and pine nuts. "Here, we all have contact with each other. That's the way it's always been here. We are not separate from each other."

In relative terms, Marseille suffered little violence during the flare-up that shook France. One night, arsonists torched 35 cars, but that was about the extent of the unrest. Around Paris and other French cities such vandalism occurred almost nightly, and included schools, businesses and government offices as targets.

That's not to say that all is well. A trip to the outlying northern neighborhood of Oliviers revealed the same depressed social and economic conditions found in the suburbs of Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other tense cities. Residents complain of police harassment based on skin color, of joblessness and substandard schooling. But the prevailing sentiment is that people feel at home here and that's why Marseille didn't burn.

"We have our troubles, but I can go to the center of the city without thinking I am entering enemy territory," said Abida Hecini, a mother of six. "We belong to Marseille and Marseille belongs to us."

History is one source of this stability. While other cities in France fret about the arrival of immigrants over the past 50 years, Marseille has been a magnet for outsiders for well over 100: Italians fleeing poverty, Greeks and Armenians escaping wars, Moroccan sailors jumping ship, Spanish smugglers looking for a haven, Europeans returning from France's former Algerian colony and impoverished Algerians themselves seeking work.

This could be reflected in the different moods that Muslimgauze's Marseille I, II and III evoke: the unmistakable tension of Marseille I in contrast with the decidedly laid-back and even dreamy Marseille II and III.

extract from Marseille I
extract from Marseille II
extract from Marseille III

from Lahore & Marseille (Soleilmoon 1997)

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Posted by loosavor at 07:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Vahan Bego wrought this bronze with acid and hammer upon a balcony in Poznan, and considerable steam did belch forth in the process.

A MEMORABLE FANCY

I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

There they were reciev'd by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.

Posted by loosavor at 11:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

cool ship

explain this

"... This will all sound a bit vague if I do not mention briefly the function of this software: to model electric particles moving under the influence of their mutual attraction and repulsion on a toroidal surface. The electromagnetic fields generated by the particles can then be turned into coloured pictures.

This idea is quite simple, and to me aesthetically engaging. Although the resulting pictures have to be classed as abstract the subjective factor does not dominate in their production. One might even call these pictures realistic in so far as they are stylised impressions of a fundamental modus operandi matris naturae --- Coulomb's inverse square law of electrostatic influence. Akin to still lifes, but using electrons and positrons rather than apples or pears.

From my own particular standpoint doing this work has a secondary effect of motivating me to study certain aspects of mathematical physics. Curiously this time around I have found myself able to comprehend things which were formerly impenetrable mysteries, and this has given me greater insight into the development of the scientific world-picture.

My intention had been to do a lot of study and planning before writing any computer code. Suddenly, however, I found myself immersed in it, and in only three days got a first version up and running. The thrill was that this time I could see moving pictures. I watched these little movies for several hours in an almost trance-like state. They seemed to be communicating at a deep level. Then the computer crashed and the lights went out. My feeling of joy at the pictures was so great that it enabled me to take the blow quite calmly, though I did feel a little bit numbed for a few days."

baubles

doormat

slapstik 2

strange-little-creature

encounter

One of the (many) interesting things about the productions of impal Qipitz is that while they are to a certain degree autogenetic - and I am not sure to what extent - they also clearly bear the imprint of their supervisor's personality and mood at the moment of production: one day they can be breathtakingly optimistic and jolly, the next dark and troubled.

Perhaps impal Qipitz would suggest that on a mysterious level there is communicative feedback between human sentience and electrons and positrons; that human moods can hold sway over electromagnetic fields and particles.

These productions are small in real life, reflecting their supervisor's 'modesty is the best policy' approach to life. If you are ever lucky enough to receive one via snail mail, it will be the size of a postcard, or a 3cm x 4cm joyous rectangle tucked snugly into the corner of a page.

Posted by loosavor at 12:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

_{Zbieracz Chrustu (The Brushwood Gatherer), pastel on card, 2005}

Zbieracz Chrustu (The Brushwood Gatherer) was inspired by something Vahan saw in the Armenian mountains in 2004.

As the bus groaned and heaved its way up the mountain, Vahan saw a silver Jaguar - a symbol of obscene wealth and status in Armenia - coming in the other direction. Then Vahan's eye fell upon a figure at the roadside. It was a 'humble person' who was slowly, patiently collecting brushwood from the ground and adding it to the bundle on their shoulder. As the glistening Jaguar passed the brushwood gatherer, Vahan had an epiphany:

All of us are like that brushwoodwood gatherer. On a world scale, we’re all like ants, and whatever we do in life, whether we’re filthy rich businessmen, farmers, presidents or artists – whatever – we’re all just trying to add sticks to our little bundles. There’s nothing that technology can do to change that. We all want to be warm and have food in our bellies. So we go out everyday and gather sticks. This is ‘pierwotność’ (the primal).

After returning to his accustomed penury in Poland, Vahan wanted to send out a simple message to the world from his 'hovel', in the form of a pastel: primitve living conditions do not just co-exist alongside hyper-developed technocapitalist society, in the margins and peripheries; in fact on a fundamenatal level we all seem to be condemned to feathering our nests and obeying the dictates of survival mechanisms. Brushwood gathering is the inescapable primary setting. All social climbing is, at best, superficial and, at worst, doomed. All your wordly possessions can disappear in an instant if the earth quakes beneath your block of flats. In which case you will pick up the pieces, gather sticks.

The figure in The Brushwood Gatherer us not bowed down or bent double beneath his load: there is an undeniable dignity in his gait. It could be a scene from thousands of years ago, were it not for the telegraph poles which echo his angular posture. The blue sky, the pastel-induced heat haze and the mountainous terrain suggest Armenia, but the location is as vague as some of the pastel outlines. This is a primal 'Everyman'.

[The message must have arrived at its destination, as The Brushwood Gatherer 100cm x 70cm was awarded the Grand Prix by a panel of international judges in the Biennale Pasteli 2004 Competition.]

A Time For Drunken Horses

In the autumn of 2005, Vahan saw Zamani barayé masti asbha (A Time For Drunken Horses) 2000 and said:

If I'd seen this film before I did The Brushwood Gatherer, in all likelihood The Brushwood Gatherer would never have come into existence.

A Time for Drunken Horses is an elemental yet everyday drama of humans battling with a landscape, just to get by. The implacable, unforgiving landscape and severe weather play a leading roles in the film: it is the terrain that can partly be blamed for keeping these Kurds in such primal conditions. There is simply no other way of getting the huge loads over the mountains other than on a human or mule's back. The extraordinary adversity these people pitch themselves against day after day takes on immense proportions when seen from a child's perspective.

The film would have made Vahan's Zbieracz Chrustu redundant - had he seen it - because it had already said everything that needed to be said. Landscapes have immense significance in Vahan's conception: he will often compare the Armenian people to stone, and this is not just a metaphor: the Armenian people are so resilient and durable because their character has been shaped in a wrestling match with their mountainous terrain. In this way, over thousands of years, a people can internalise their landscape. This is clearly what has happened with the Iranian Kurds in A Time For Drunken Horses: they are involved in primordial relationship with the land and elements - hardcore pierwotność.

Posted by loosavor at 12:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Miłosna Kompzycja pt. Vulkan, by the artist Vahan Bego, demands some processing.

A few things that could be borne in mind:

• Love Composition Volcano, a fairly epic painting, weighs in at 140cm by 200cm. Though it is obviously best seen ‘in the flesh’, some of its power can be felt in the claustrophobic confines of JPEG.

• Quite exceptionally for this day and age, the painting was executed entirely in oil paint.

VOLCANO

1. The Foreground
2. The Background
3. Magma Chamber
4. Tectonic Environment
5. Seismic Experience
6. Genesis
Download as

PDF

1. The Foreground

At first sight, the painting seems to be fairly innocent, one a swift and lazy mind might dismiss as a psychedelic-surrealist-erotic-Daliesque kind of affair. It is worthwhile trying to disengage such facile, ready-to-hand schemata, just for a moment.

The painting has a clear triptych structure involving three main figures: the red net curtain, the cold statuesque man and the potent red outline of a fiery woman.

This woman, so embedded and woven into the landscape, if not the central figure, is at the core of the symbolism flowing through this space.

It seems she has been slashed, or as if she is proliferating gashes. Bego’s technique here is fundamentally that of a sculptor - she has been carved out of the canvas, and these are the violent, primordial slashes of his first sketch which have returned to the surface to take the form of bloody lacerations. Her legs are rooted in the earth, her sex a dark core, above which, in the transparent terrain of her womb, lies a fertile field of wheat and a solitary tree. At the mountainous horizon we find her, in fleshed out form, behind the landscape. Her breasts are situated at this vertiginous height because this is the height of yearning, the searching look upwards for maternal nourishment; developing into the primordial spiritual search for light and enlightenment at the horizon. Then her head is obscured by an outpouring of blood-red lava. She is walking fire, an erupting supervolcano, an explosion of feminine sexuality towering over the East.

So, to the man. He his first and foremost a statue: monumental and passive – an absolute lack of activity - carved out of icy granite. His form consists of abstract shapes, rather than renaissance anatomical-correctness.

One of the few artists Bego really takes his hat off to is Henry Moore, whose reclining figures are a clear inspiration for Bego's 'painted sculptures':

Henry Moore “Reclining Woman” 1929.

At first glance Bego's Reclining Man might seem like a cool customer, even arrogant, as he reclines, with his huge, thighs and hands. But then his pin-sized head and stretched, elongated neck – recalling the sketches and sculptures of Giacometti and the paintings of Modigliani – seem to be melting, perhaps by virtue of being in close proximity to volcanic woman.

Giacometti - Busto di Diego 1964

Amedeo Modigliani. Portrait of Lunia Czechovska. 1919

The eyes of Bego’s monument-man betray tragic awareness of the fact that his ascendancy is over. Man has gone from being the head (of the family/tribe/state/empire) to being a sperm donor. A slow-melting figure from antiquity, maybe from the last ice age, he has absorbed elements from his surroundings: the events he has witnessed are engraved in his look.

The red curtain has been pulled back, theatrically, to reveal two elemental players - a statuesque man melting in the central foreground, and molten woman, embedded and erupting. - in a scene of domestic intimacy blown up to global scale.

2. The Background

Bego frames 9/11 as an iconoclastic attack on the symbols of the West. For Bego, 9/11 was above all symbolic warfare.

There are, of course, many examples of attacks on symbols. English Protestants whitewashed churches and went on statue smashing rampages during the reformation; the Soviets destroyed Buddhist temples in Mongolia and any iconography connected to Genghis Khan; the Soviets either destroyed Mosques or converted them to functional buildings (such as cinemas) in the Muslim areas of its Empire (e.g. Dagestan, Kazachstan & Uzbekistan). Such attacks on symbols are attacks on the ethnic or cultural groups that identify themselves with them and in extreme cases (e.g. Lenin and Stalin’s depredations against the Crimean Turks 1920-1945) are accompanied by ruthless ethnic cleansing and genocide.

There are, however, two iconoclastic forerunners to 9/11 which are particularly important to Bego:

September 26, 1687: the Turks and the Venetians managed to destroy the Parthenon - the Turks through ripping up the temple stones as they turned the Acropolis into a bastion and using the Parthenon as a powder magazine, and the Venetians by bombarding the Acropolis for 8 days until they managed to make the aforementioned powder magazine explode and start a fire which lasted for 2 days and gutted the Parthenon. This destruction cannot be described as a deliberate attack on a symbol of antiquity and pagan religion – the Venetian attack was part of a European ‘Holy Alliance’ attempt to put a stop to Ottoman expansion - the very acts of using the Parthenon as a powder magazine and the Venetian bombardment of the Acropolis reveal the contempt in which both parties held the Ancient Greek religions. Adherents to the Greek pantheon being rather thin on the ground in 1687, the casualties were goddesses and gods.

In 1687, newspapers were in their infancy and the pictures are not of very high quality:

March 2001: the Taliban bombarded the Buddhas of Bamiyan for one month. These 55 meter and 37 meter statues of Buddha, carved into the cliffs of the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan, had stood for 1500 years before the Taliban decided they were idolatrous and overcame great difficulties in demolishing them: During the destruction, Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal lamented that, "this work of destruction is not as easy as people might think. You can't knock down the statues by shelling as both are carved into a cliff; they are firmly attached to the mountain.”

This time CNN 'obtained' pictures and the BBC had to rely on the word of mouth of an archaeologist until reporters were allowed to visit three weeks later. There were 'protests' from Buddhists and 'the international community', but nothing was actually done. It might be argued that this was destruction without victims, but this would be to ignore the fact it was sacrilegious for the world's 370 million+ Buddhists.

September 2001: The 9/11 attacks on The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacks on a American symbols: the Twin Towers were a modern sculpture, the instantly recognizable symbol of American dominance in global trade; the Pentagon was/is the symbol of military power, the temple inhabited by the military caste.

Bego: “I saw the Twin Towers as the computer world, like these two huge antennae sticking out of the Earth – Can you imagine how many computers there were in that building? They thought ‘Hmmm, so we blew up the Buddhas and nobody did anything. Let’s attack a modern sculpture this time.”

In terms of spectacle, the 9/11 attacks outdid anything in film history: on a paltry budget of between $400,000 and $500,000, with the backdrop of a clear blue sky, the terrorists’ destruction was broadcast live across the globe, the main feature lasting 102 minutes (start: WTC1 struck at 8.46.30, end: WTC1 collapses 102 minutes later).

After a series of disappointing and preposterous special effects-driven apoco- disaster movies in the 90s (Independence Day, 1996, in which the Empire State Building and the White House were trashed by Aliens; Deep Impact,1998 – New York flattened by a megatsunami; and Armageddon 1998) Al Qaeda finally came up with the goods, providing jaded, desensitized audiences with death and destruction that was, at last, genuinely shocking. And provided an abundance of material for TV replay disaster porn.

So real were the attacks that they defy belief: they were/are so unbelievable that people in some quarters still cannot accept the fact the attacks were external. On 9/11 reality became painfully and demonically cinematic.

Three months after the attacks, cinema audiences began their three year retreat into the realistic fantasy of The Lord of the Rings – a world of lifelike digital characters, creatures and landscapes where the express aim was for CGI to be believable, to be indistinguishable from reality. As audiences were captivated by this reassuring and predictable war of the ring, a somewhat more disconcerting war, which variously goes by the names of 'WoT', 'WWIV' or 'Global Jihad', was already busy unfolding.

In Volcano, the world beyond the screen is devastated and torn by disputes. The lines from the cave pass ingeniously into the screen: their point of impact is through a scroll bar. It is as if the scroll in the display window assists them in their flight – a sign that the West's technology is being turned against itself.

Bego sees the screen as being the chief determinant of the West's perception. The color of the landscape on the screen is in stark contrast to the color of the landscape beyond the screen, and yet it is, apparently, the same landscape in both. Volcano casts 9/11 as an attack from beyond the screen, an attack that the screenheads watched helplessly.

This desert terrain features a decapitated pyramid – foundation stones enduring from antiquity. They were symbols erected by a civilization which wanted to leave its mark on the landscape in the shape of indestructible stone; people who identified themselves with their symbols and underlined their being by means of them. Elevated parts of the landscape evoke the highlands of Armenia, a land whose people have had more than their fair share of atrocities. As we approach the lacerated woman and devastated landscape again, it becomes clear that civilisations waging wars over symbols is nothing new.

3. Magma Chamber

In Volcano it is no accident that the figure of woman is located at the point where the Earth is carved up into arbitrary borders across crucial arteries, forming the basis for conflicts which last for centuries.

Woman is found superimposed on, and underlying, two of the world's most contested terrains: the Middle East and Tibet. In the case of the Middle East, at a crossroads of arteries, it seems that it is the faults and hotspots of the Earth itself that steer the conflict. Bego wonders how conscious humans are when they carve lines in the earth and then fight to the death over them. What compels the human families/tribes/states which inhabit (and interfere with) this region to embroil themselves in irresolvable, bewilderingly complex feuds?

Alongside the land, the symbolism of woman is also bitterly contested. The war which is kicking off around her is, on a deep level, about her image, or rather what can be seen of her. There are two extreme forms that woman can take: one form is woman covered and protected, walking the street like a sculpted, abstract shape, a gem that 'needs' to be kept hidden away, safe from attack; the other form is woman confidently advertising her deterritorialized sexual power (no longer chained to her childbearing potential), with legs, midriff and cleavage bared, strings and straps on display, shapes outlined so clearly that imagination is unnecessary.

In conversation Bego suggested this concealment of woman could be driven by two motivations:

1) to protect woman from the sight and potential attack of predatory males whose genes are bent on self-replication – which in practice keeps female reproductive potential (and thereby her sexuality) firmly under the control of the male.

2) to protect Man from woman: if woman were to have control over her reproductive power, the consequences for Man could be disastrous.

For Bego, after 9/11 the next attack on symbols was the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh on November 2 2004, in response to his controversial film Submission, made in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The film addresses the issue of violence against women in Islamic societies and features naked women with Qur’anic verses unfavorable to women in Arabic painted on their bodies. Though Bego does not have a very high opinion of either the film's artistic merits or van Gogh's crude provocations, he sees the murder as an unequivocal statement about what cannot be shown, under pain of death. This murder, which took place three years after Volcano was finished, confirmed the theme and symbolism of the painting for Bego.

Bego conjures up a revised Pandora story: Pandora's box actually contains Pandora herself. Pandora must stay in the box because if she is let out she will erupt and rule, as she is doing in the West, where the climate change brought about in the wake of her explosion induces Man to become increasingly effeminate. The feudal, fundamentalist mindset looks ahead to the post-reformation West and sees what will happen to Man if the volcano blows her top.

Bego, being an Armenian, a culture that still has male and female ‘enclaves’, admits to a certain amount of ambivalence on this point. It would be crass and pointless to suggest that either of these extreme shapes that woman can take is ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than the other. Nothing could be more stupid than to say that woman is necessarily 'freer' because she displays her body (or her body is on display). Bego’s observations are based on what he has seen on the streets and they are above all aesthetic observations: the clash of civilisations as a clash of shapes. His vision of the female volcano comes from the formidable sight of scantily-clad, sexually confident women with their metrosexual, manscaped other halves strolling arm in arm along the streets of Central Europe. On the next patch of pavement chador-clad women sporting designer sunglasses and expensive shoes walk inscrutably behind their husbands. Bego is fascinated by this apparent clash and what it symbolizes (for man and woman).

4. Tectonic Environment

Volcano is a Guernica for now.

Similarities

Picasso's Guernica was painted as an immediate response to carpet bombing of the Basque town by the Nazi Condor Legion and Italian fascists on April 26 1937. Guernica had no military significance and the 1650+ dead are seen to be the first civilian victims of an aerial bombardment. The total destruction of the town, helped by the use of incendiary bombs, was a trial run for the Nazi Blitzkrieg doctrine .

“By May 1st, news of the massacre at Guernica reaches Paris, where more than a million protesters flood the streets to voice their outrage in the largest May Day demonstration the city has ever seen. Eyewitness reports fill the front pages of Paris papers. Picasso is stunned by the stark black and white photographs. Appalled and enraged, Picasso rushes through the crowded streets to his studio, where he quickly sketches the first images for the mural he will call Guernica. His search for inspiration is over.”

Bego's Volcano was painted as an immediate response to the 9/11 WTC attacks – after receiving an hysterical phone call, Bego watched the spectacle live on the Internet. Then he locked himself in his studio for the next three months (experiencing utter exhaustion on completion of the painting (and losing six of his teeth)).

Bego adores Picasso’s temperament and approach to painting and Picasso exerts such a powerful influence that Bego has to make efforts to escape it. Often without success. Without even thinking of Guernica at the time, without realizing for ages, Bego produced a work which is similar to it in many respects.

1. The scale – though Volcano is far smaller than Guernica's huge 349 × 776 cm proportions, both paintings are epic and monumental, reflecting the significance of the events they grapple with.

2. Both paintings incorporate the media in which the news was received into the composition of the painting: Guernica is restricted to the black and white tones of newspaper photography; Volcano makes watching the WTC attacks on a computer an integral part of the painting.

3. The composition – the paintings have a triptych structure. Particularly notable is the way the light falls on the right side both paintings.

4. Both paintings are symbolic. The symbolism of Guernica is still capable of creating controversy. Though Volcano is considerably more realistic than Guernica, neither painting is clear or unambiguous, neither provide any answers. One person who saw Volcano said that the painting is so extreme that only Rudy Giuliani or Osama Bin Laden could buy it and hang it on their wall.

5. Both paintings created controversy. Guernica was universally panned by the critics after its appearance at the Spanish Pavilion in Paris. Volcano was entered for the Art&Business Painting of the Year competition 2001, but was not even accepted for the last 100. Quite unusually for Art&Business competitions, a huge, heated internet discussion developed on whether or not the painting had deserved to win. Since the painting was judged from a tiny JPEG on computer screens, it is somewhat surprising that it managed to provoke such strong feelings.

Differences

Despite these similarities, Bego's painting style owes more to the renaissance and baroque's painstaking attention to detail than it does to Picasso's revolutionary, violent approach to form and perspective.

For Bego, revolution in style has become rather meaningless. He wanted to create a realistic landscape, so that a child could recognize the tree in the woman’s womb. In contrast, Picasso’s mutilated figures are entirely symbolic and allegorical. There are no specific references to the town of Guernica in the painting. It is more an abstract, general symbol of the destruction of civilization by war.

Bego is first and foremost a sculptor who adores the art of painting. He paints in a fury, trying to carve a three dimensional space out of/into a two-dimensional canvas; the process uses time to realize art in space. This is why Volcano has a decidedly static feel even though the process of painting is dynamic: it is a moment frozen in time. There is also a sad beauty in the landscape, despite its ravages: it echoes the mournful music of Djivan Gasparyan. Tragic subjects are few and far between in Bego’s vast oeuvre and it seems that even when dealing with tragedy Bego is unable to refrain from creating something beautiful. The contrast to Picasso, who clearly took a measure of enjoyment in disfiguring and distorting three dimensional space, is obvious.

The two influences that Bego refers to are Tinteretto and Rembrandt:

Tintoretto – The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave 1548.

It is Tinteretto’s attempts to capture a moment in time in depth that inspire Bego. Tinteretto went to great lengths to help his figures gain a true feeling of depth:

“To help him with the complex poses he favored, Tintoretto used to make small wax models which he arranged on a stage and experimented on with spotlights for effects of light and shade and composition. This method of composing explains the frequent repetition in his works of the same figures seen from different angles. He was a formidable draughtsman and, according to Ridolfi, he had inscribed on his studio wall the motto `The drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian'. However, he was very different in spirit from either of his avowed models -- more emotive, using vivid exaggerations of light and movement. His drawings, unlike Michelangelo's detailed life studies, are brilliant, rapid notations, bristling with energy, and his color is more somber and mystical than Titian's.” (from here)

Rembrandt – Danae 1636

This painting has many formal and thematic links with Volcano. Danae was shut away in a brass tower by her father, Acrisius, because he had heard from the Delphic oracle that her son would one day kill him. Zeus became besotted with Danae and overcame her as a shower of gold that poured down into her lap, which led to the conception of Perseus. Acrisius locked Danae and Perseus in a chest and put them out to sea. Perseus later killed Acrisius by accident at the games in Larissa.

[And the moral(s) of the tale? That repression rarely works, that youth and beauty can’t be caged without this backfiring on the repressor, that the godly desire and the fates cannot be thwarted in their inexorable process?]

Somewhat boldly for 17th Century Dutch painting, Rembrandt depicted Danae completely naked. Her brass tower is replaced with plush curtains which are pulled back to enable the entrance of Zeus, whose gold light bathes Danae. The meticulously painted curtains and the illusion of depth created by Rembrandt’s masterly use of light are inspirations explicitly cited by Bego.

Bego's Volcano creates a similar illusion of depth through its use of sculpture: literally, in the central male figure and stylistically, in the complex layers of planes.

In contrast, Picasso's Guernica occupies one flat, violently fragmented plane where the figures are quite literally flattened.

5. Seismic Experience

Bego experienced natural disaster first hand in December 1988, when an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale “turned blocks of flats into mincers of human meat” and he lost his house, studio and worldly possessions.

He draws a distinction between such natural disasters and political disasters, such as the Armenian Genocide or the 9/11 attacks: “When there is a natural disaster like that people feel dwarfed by the immense power of nature, but they immediately start going about the business of survival, they start digging about in the rubble, trying to find firewood. It strengthens them in some way. But after political disasters there is an atmosphere of paranoia, psychosis and hate – and this is the basic aim of the perpetrators, not the number of victims they kill.”

The Soundtrack

The importance of music in Bego’s art cannot be underestimated. The first two thirds of the painting were executed with Crooklyn Dub Consortium – booming, subterranean, seismic - playing on continuous loop, even when Bego slept. The music of Crooklyn Dub Consortium put Bego in touch with a fierce elemental power and transported him psychologically to the subterranean caverns of New York. When it came to painting the realistic landscape, Bego felt the need to return to his native land and so the gentler, happy-sad tones of Djivan Gasparyan were played continuously for the last third.

Volcano also appeared in Sweet Noise’s Nie Było video. Sweet Noise are an increasingly experimental metal-hardcore-electro band that Bego has been collaborating and performing with for the past four years. The band’s uncompromising approach welds seamlessly with Bego’s total commitment to his art.

Old School Hardcore

“Artistic creation... is an affirmation of Existence in its metaphysical horror, and not just a justification of this horror through the creation of a system of soothing concepts, as is the case with religion, or a system of concepts showing rationally the necessity of this and not any other state of affairs for the totality of Existence, as is the case with philosophy.” S.I. Witkiewicz, New Forms in Painting (1919)

Bego's painting is an unsettling and bewildering work, but not in the 'shocking' sheep in formaldehyde and My Bed manner. Bego is no stranger to extreme public performance...

Protest Against Maniacal TV Watching, 1996, Lubomierz, with Plawna 9

We Cleanse Our City of Sin, 1997, Lwówek Sl.

Erecting a Statue during the intro to a Sweet Noise concert, Poland, Woodstock 2002

Vahan's Mask, Sweet Noise, Poland, Poznan 2005.

... but his art, whether it takes the form of painting, sculpture, or performance, is a deliberate and principled application of hard-earned technique. It is not unusual for a sketch to take seven years to reach fruition on his easel. His approach to art is closer to that of Witkacy, who saw art as the sole source of mystery and stimulus for metaphysical feelings after the collapse of religion. Real art does not entertain, titillate, inform or educate – it is a wake-up call.

6. Genesis

The first, inspirational sketch for Volcano, 1997, 14 x 21cm, ink.

Sketch on Canvas, September 2001

The first stage, laying the foundations, oil on canvas, October 2001.

The second stage, sculpting the figures, end of October 2001.

Into the last stages, end of November 2001.

Volcano Finished, 19.12.2001

[Thanks to Bartek Rogalewicz for some of the photos.]

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