from my email/Johannes Goransson

 

Quick Takes: The Relentless Volatility of Art in Interpol, Eva K Olsson, and Leia Penina Wilson Johannes Göransson Aug 1   READ IN APP   I haven’t listened to any Interpol records since the classic Turn On the Bright Lights but the other day, by some strange algorithmic chance, I listened to the new song, “See Out Loud”; I liked it a lot and it made me think about this and that, mostly about the poetic and ideas of “late style.” In the song these two topics are definintely intertwined. The song that would not sonically have been out of place on its predecessor from 20 yrs ago, but lyrically it seems in the midst of trying to figure out what art is, and whether to be immersed in it - to return to some kind of iconic site of art that may have been Bright Lights. The song begins with an invocation of Art: 5 AM, teeth-marked skin I can see out loud, and I know I start to feel pixelated As we get buried in the sound Dive right in, a kiss glistens In a neon cloud, and I know I'm not here to contain you I'm just here to let you out All the hallmarks of profoundly artistic experience: intensity, artifice, violence, bodily transformation. Maybe more than anything the synesthesia of the title tells me this zone of art is Keatsian: A space of saturation, of letting go of morality and certainties (very hard in our current time of redemptive art of morality). A space of intensity and doubt. What follows is a vaccillation about letting something out, containing something, diving into it etc. It’s as if the song is about the foundational ambivalence of art itself - not knowing if he wants to be “buried” in the art or get out, to bury someone else or let them out. Some lines that stick out to me are: “Say something magical” (but save some for me) “I need some poetry” These aren’t the best lines or anything but they suggest to me the need to say something “magical” - which is another word for say something “poetic” - in order to bring the singer back into the poem. * Another thing that interests me is that it’s 5 am - ie it’s LATE, almost morning. Maybe not the time we associate with the most poetic, most immersive artistic moments. It’s a late song about diving back into the poetic. But also, if you know your Dylan you know that it’s in the morning that the fishtrucks unload and the conscience explodes (in “Visions of Johanna”). I think this work fits in with Edward Said’s famous ideas of “late work” not as something harmonious or wise, but - almost the opposite - one of unresolved tensions, friction and apart-ness: Adorno is describing the way that Beethoven seems to inhabit the late works as a lamenting personality, and then to leave the work or phrases in it incomplete, suddenly, abruptly jettisoned, as in the opening of the F major Quartet or the A minor – all this in marked contrast to the relentless quality of second-period works such as the Fifth Symphony, where the composer cannot seem to tear himself away from the piece. Adorno concludes that the style of the late works is both objective, by virtue of its ‘fractured landscape’, and subjective, by virtue of ‘the light in which – alone – it glows into life’. Beethoven does not bring about a ‘harmonious synthesis’, but ‘tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophe.’ And also: “Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality.” Say something poetic/magical. * When I think about this kind of immersion and re-immersion, it’s hard for me not to think about another “late” work - Eva Kristina Olsson’s The Angelgreen Sacrament, which I translated a few years ago. The neon, the pixelated, the glistening synethesia reminds me of this poem, which has been so important to me for many years (especially when I translated it): they are white and abandoned they are inscribed and white they are nothing other than greenwings which are abandoned and white I am abandoned when I come to you I come to you to abandon me I will never abandon you you will never abandon me in this room which is a step of a word you know existed but which you did not want to say and will not say which I said to you when I wound it in my green wings this slit in the opened breast pair of wings in the doubling’s doubled doubling Everything is doubled in art - mimetic excess. Writing about that book a few years ago, I quoted Michael Taussig on the sacredness of color: “Color vision becomes less a retinal and more a total bodily activity to the fairytale extent that looking at something, we may even pass into the image.” The key for me is that saturated art is a space one enters “into.” As in the Interpol song, this angelgreen space has “negative capability” - an experience so strong (“ecstatic” means “out of one’s sense” or out of oneself) that it’s unclear who the “I” is and who the “you” is. Olsson’s speaker is constantly asking questions: are you afraid? It’s a book dedicated to “to the angels and my first 12 years.” There’s a “late” quality to this book as well. While it may be engaging in a very present-tense quality of an experience, it’s at the same time dedicated to her childhood years. This was reinforced when she told me that it was not only about encountering an angel, but also about a green dress she had worn as a teenager. The poem feels so intensive, so present tense, is in some way a reimagining of a dress, or the feeling of wearing a dress. And at the same time as it is immersive, it is also fundamentally fractured in terms of speaker/addressee. * Right now I’m also reading Leia Penina Wilson’s excellent third book This Red Metropolis (from Omnidawn, 2020) which weirdly fits into this mix as well. This books is definitely not a “late work.” You definitely don’t get a sense of return, but of someone just diving headfirst into art - and really the history of western culture, going back to (in time for Odysseus summer) the Greeks. But the title announces that the book will have a color - it is “red” - and that it will be an immersion. Though not a late work, Wilson’s model of poetry/art is bodily, hallucinatory, overwhelming. To go back to Said, there’s a “relentless” - non-”late” - quality to this book. The bright lights are on. This is the first poem: in no certain terms we assassinate/ then we love my own body an enchantment no one really believes in/ the middle of the room there’s an apocalypse/ it’s carnival themed/ one woman decked out in turquoise glitter bells hula hoops hula hoops another body dances knives/ who knows how it will end it’s hot here/ no cloud coverage no moist heat coming beneath/ any moment might gulp us mean desert flowers thistle & cunt/ has my life been intellectually thrilling i wonder if it matters the thirst bodies all slick of blood dance whatever of course/ there’s a fire breather a lion taming/ there’s no more wilding/ mirrors mirrors or it’s so bright everything seems reflected/ or we’re under water with four suns more suns than i remember going to sleep with/ everyone is having fun/ everyone is winning winning nothing/ it seems/ surviving yet roar roar roar this prize is yours everyone is going to die/ can you feel it/ the recognition of what she is in other people’s eyes It’s an invocation of “glitter” and the body, that is also aware of the violence and even “assassination” of entering Art. The books is marked by this voracious and relentless creativity: the speaker falls in love, kills, is murdered, poisoned, infiltrates and is infiltrated by, is doubled/twinned, shot full of arrows. The hula hoops becomes a verb. The things move, the movement things. It strikes me reading it that of course it’s also full of the refractions and volatile ambivalences of the other two pieces here. And that Olsson’s book definitely has a relentless quality. Maybe it’s only the Interpol song that is “late work” afterall. Or maybe all three just describe some fundamental quality of art’s volatile and immersive ambivalences.