Pieces of Reality: Philip Corner in London

Here is my piece about Philip Corner at Cafe Oto published in Litro, January 25, 2017. 

Philip Corner performing his Homage to Ben Patterson, Café Oto in London
October, 2016

The silence in Café Oto is the silence of a church. On the dozen or so tables, tea lights flicker. We sit very still not daring to take a sip of our drinks for fear we might make a sound. This silence is immersive despite the fact we have all been handed a sheet of paper, which gives us permission to participate by 

“buying something 

to eat or drink 

and then sometime during …… 

make 

consciously & explicitly 

a sound with it. 

Thus adding to the music …” 

No one seems willing to enact their right to participate given to them by Philip Corner, one of the founding members of the Fluxus group. A tall and imposing 83-year-old, Corner appears under a dim spotlight and walks to the piano. Café Oto doesn’t have a raised stage or sloped floors—it is an intimate room with large windows looking onto a narrow East London street. In a Javanese batik shirt, cotton trousers and sandals, Corner’s white hair and mutton chops are the only evidence of his age. His movements are powerful and focused. He introduces his “collaborator, wife and muse”, Phoebe Neville, who is sheathed in a hand-painted silk tunic and a pair of sparkly rubber toe shoes—the kind where each toe has its own ‘finger’. Her hair is green and her face wears an expression of worship.

Corner announces a “reverence to the piano”. While Phœbe performs the traditional namaste, he bows until his head touches the keys. This is the first note we hear. He then says, “Piano Work, a movement”, and he and Neville turn the instrument around so the keys face the audience. At this moment an alchemy begins to take place: the transformation of one element into another. A piano is not simply a means to make music but a kinetic object, a sculpture that creates sound or allows for silence. We are entering a new kind of space. Neville moves with grace. She practically floats. 

In the first sounded piece, ‘Petali Pianissimo’, the performers drop petals onto the keys. Where a petal falls, a note is played. They are conversing silently through the means of flowers and chance, physics and aesthetics. We are reminded of our very physicality, our relation to each other, and how it is so much more than the exchange of data via our mobile devices. And this is why we need this kind of performative work more than ever: It is not only a reminder of the power of art and a community of minds, however fleeting, but it is a corrective to lives in which experience is continuously being subsumed and replaced by mediation. There is no algorithm for the chance falling of petals. Corner’s work is an inoculation against the tyranny of ‘if you liked that, then you might like this’.  It is real and human and immediate. 

Some Javanese masks come out for a piece called ‘Understanding’ in which Neville and Corner blindly play a small Yamaha keyboard—the only electronic sound of the evening. 

“The masks will make sure I don’t know what I am doing,” Corner says. Then adds, “Not that I ever understand what I am doing.” 

He touches the keyboard with the nose of his mask, riffing on the first reverence. Neville switches between timbres confusing their dialogue. They are playful, respectful and above all totally alive to each other’s bodies and movement. Neville seems to revel in being the ghost in the machine, switching it on and off while Corner stabs at the keys. Undermining the purpose of an object is pure Dada, pure Surrealist, pure Fluxus. Ceci n’est pas un piano when it is under their command—it is a living sculpture, a means of communication.

It is noticeable that no one is taking photos. There would be no point because no recording of this performance would be able to capture the atmosphere in this room. We are watching a rare thing: an experience that defies mediation. A moment we will remember, or not, but it will add to the sum of our parts whether we like it or not.

When the concert ends, the clapping erupts. 

Corner says, “And here’s our encore.” 

The audience laughs. 

“Why are you all laughing?” He asks, genuinely confused.  

We are laughing, I think, because we’ve interpreted his comment to mean that our clapping is the encore. We are finally providing the audience participation asked of us. 

Then he surprises us by beginning the real encore: a piece dedicated to his friend and collaborator, the Fluxus artist Ben Patterson who died this past June at the age of 82. One of Patterson’s best-known performances was his 1960 ‘Paper Piece’ in which the audience was asked to make sound with paper. 

“In memoriam, Ben,” Corner says before unwinding brown packing paper from a large roll and spreading it over the keys. Neville rips some and lets the pieces fall onto the piano, echoing the earlier petals. The piece gets more frenzied as they wrap the instrument, and the sound gets louder. There is the violence of grief to it by the end. The eveninreag ends with the piano sitting silently in its shroud. This is a sane response to the death of a friend. Forget tweets: this is the way to say “I miss you”. We need to re-find our missing rituals and create new ones for our times.

The next morning I meet Corner and Neville at their hotel. The reception area is the size of a phone booth and the breakfast room is cramped. So we walk along London’s juddering, diesel-filled Essex Road in search of a place to talk. The first one we get to is a greasy spoon called My Favourite Café. It smells of sausages and chips. 

“Does it bother you always being referred to as a Fluxus artist?” I ask Corner as we take our seats. 

“I told myself many years ago, ‘don’t fight it, it’s hopeless’.” He pauses. “I had this epiphany about it a few years ago. For my whole life I’ve been saying, ‘I don’t want to be reduced to Fluxus’ with everyone saying, ‘Oh, Philip Corner is a Fluxkunstler’. Is everything I am doing now Fluxus?”  

His food arrives, “Oh God!” he says. The plate is heaving.

“I don’t want to be reduced,” he goes on. “Basically what I am saying is that I am not only Fluxus or somebody’s narrow idea of what Fluxus is. Instead, Fluxus has expanded to everything that I do! I put that in an expression to an Italian collector who asked me to give him a statement. I said, ‘Now let’s accept everything good and call it all Fluxus.’ He loved it! In fact he uses it as his letterhead.” Corner laughs. “At the concert last night, the ‘Petali Pianissimo’ piece, well you could call that Fluxus,” Corner says. “Certainly bowing to the piano, that’s a Fluxus piece, but sitting down and playing François Couperin, well that’s not a Fluxus piece. That’s just so stupid!” 

Corner tells me about a studio visit he had recently with another collector, which seems to sum up the absurdity of our consumer society and its relationship to art—an absurdity he seems to relish. “There was this guy who was supposedly an art collector and he came to my studio. One of the things that I do are these things called ‘Pieces of Reality’. They’re related to the music, obviously, but they’re also a visual thing to do with making things out of natural objects. So anyway, I had these ‘Pieces of Reality’ around and I also had this clear plastic bag with some garbage in it, crumpled paper, a great dried spider, and so on, and it was tacked to the wall. 

“This collector says to me, ‘when did you do that?’ and I say, ‘what do you mean, when did I do that? That’s my garbage!’ And he tells me he wants to buy it. I said, ‘I can’t sell you my garbage!’ But he wouldn’t give up. He says, ‘But I really like it; it’s a work of art.’ I say ‘no it’s not; it’s my garbage,’ and he tells me he knows what a work of art is. So finally he bought it.”

Corner widens his eyes, still mystified by this exchange, and goes on: “Then I said, ‘I don’t understand’. He says, ‘what don’t you understand?’ And I say, ‘the art market. I don’t understand the art market.’ ‘What don’t you understand about the art market?’ he asks. ‘I don’t understand why anybody would want to buy my garbage.’” 

Corner pauses. “So that’s what I think about it all! The world is crazy and they want to buy my garbage. Hey that’s a good slogan!” He repeats it, “The world is crazy and they want to buy my garbage. That sums up everything.”

Philip Corner in London, October 2016.

Art Review: David Lynch, William Burroughs and Andy Warhol at the Photographers' Gallery

January 25, 2014

Empty Factories, Poisonous Cheesecake and American Celebrities: Lynch, Burroughs and Warhol at The Photographers’ Gallery

By Joanna Pocock

ANDY WARHOL   DAVID LYNCH   PHOTOGRAPHY   WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

From left to right, the photography of Andy Warhol, David Lynch and William S. Burroughs. Photos courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery.

David Lynch, William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol have all used images and language to encapsulate massive cultural moments in American art and literature. They have all fertilized and fed on American life and culture: Lynch with his films of dystopian suburbia, replete with severed ears embedded in perfectly manicured Day-Glo lawns; Burroughs for his altered states which enabled a new way of writing in which meaning flowed as much from the process as the content; and Warhol for his death-of-the-artist approach to making art that embraced mass production and reproduction. In a coup for the small venue, London’s Photographers’ Gallery is displaying the work of each cultural icon in separate but parallel exhibitions.

On the fifth floor is the work of the only living photographer of the three: David Lynch. In tandem with his career as a filmmaker, Lynch has always taken photographs, often as part of his location scouting. His subject matter consists of abandoned factories and post-industrial landscapes. His palette is made up of shades of grey which is at odds with his more recent films in which colour is an important formal component. Who can forget the saturated hues of Blue Velvetor Mulholland Drive? The landscapes here are more akin to those of the earlierEraserhead and The Elephant Man.

The smudgy charcoal textures in the silver gelatin prints embody a sense of nostalgia by recalling classical photography of the pre-digital era — these are the same silvery tones as W. Eugene Smith’s miners, Bruce Davidson’s Lower East Side and Walker Evans’s shop signs. There is also something of Bernd and Hilla Becher in these imposing structures, though I sense Lynch is more interested in atmosphere than he is in any kind of systematic documentation. Although there is a formal beauty and elegance in these photos, they feel anachronistic and backward-looking: I have wandered these barren landscapes before.

This body of eighty photos taken in Poland, Germany, the UK and the US span the decades from 1980 to 2000. When Lynch photographed these empty cathedrals, mines in the UK were closing and in the US car plants were shutting down. Maybe Lynch is lamenting — for there is melancholia attached to these decaying spaces — the end of a certain kind of production, when we stopped making actual physical things and replaced reality with a virtual one of noughts and ones. I was trying to peer beyond the empty shapes and textures, and the eerie atmospheres of these images, and yet ultimately what I came up with was more emptiness and not much else.

Down one flight from Lynch are dozens of photos by the Beat novelist, essayist and spoken-word performer William S. Burroughs. Abstract shots from his window in Tangier are the size of calling cards, printed on thick, creamy photo paper with decaled edges. They are romantic, fetishistic objects that conjure an era long gone. There is a range of subject matter here: flowers stuck unceremoniously in Coke bottles (made in honour of his flower-arranger mother); fellow writers and collaborators Jack Kerouac and Brion Gysin; self-portraits where he appears more shadow or fragment than whole person.

Beyond the creation of these objects themselves, lies an approach to image-making that is based on cutting up, arranging, assembling and collaging. You can see the fragmented and yet focused mind of the artist working perhaps in the same way it would have in his cut-up novels which approached narrative and story as something circular and random. Images are collaged and sometimes rephotographed creating echoes through form and time as he grapples with the time-space continuum. In his search for altered realities, he created work at the edges of logic and narrative.

The scope and variety of Burroughs’s subject matter is striking. The abstract shots from windows and through ripped fences have a dream-like surrealist feel to them, whereas his documenting of a car accident in New York City seems to foreshadow the Instagram generation.  There is an almost forensic quality at work here as the form drains the images of any drama. And there is humour, as seen in his series of photos of the Moka Bar on Frith Street in London. He wrote to the owners of this café complaining of rudeness and a “poisonous cheesecake”. He then photo-bombed the place by turning up every day for weeks with his camera and audio equipment, driving the customers away. The final photo in this series shows the same café but with a sign that reads “Queens Snack Bar”.  Burroughs saw photography as something that could enact change. His camera was like a gun at times, and we all know what happened when he played William Tell with his second wife: she died.

A softer side of Burroughs can be seen in his What Was, What Isn’t series from 1972 in which he photographed the bed he sometimes shared with his on-off lover John Brady. The only proof of their relationship — or love or neediness — consists of a few stains on the messed up sheets. Like words, Burroughs used photographs as part of a larger project and not as ends in themselves. They are components to be rearranged and reassembled as a means to examine time and space, subject and form. In this Burroughs was and remains a true modern.

The revelation for me of these three distinct yet overlapping shows was Andy Warhol: Photographs 1976-1987. I felt I was seeing afresh an artist I thought I knew. The works in this show are black and white, and most of them are small, lending them a rare intimacy . There is some shared language between Warhol and Burroughs: abstract views from windows, humour (a school bus captured by Warhol reads “Gay Head”), a need to document the mundane and a shared back-and-forth trajectory between celebrity and the gutter. But the scale and the power of Warhol’s work hit me with a force - not the force of a LichtensteinianWHAAM! but the force of a soft, insistent whisper.

There are no larger-than-life Marilyns, Elizabeth Taylors or Elvises here. The curator at the Photographers’ Gallery, Karen McQuaid, has instead decided to show us his much less well-known work, and in doing so she has shown us Warhol the artist rather than Warhol the celebrity-obsessed icon we thought we knew.

His People on the Street series, in which he documented his life obsessively with a point-and-shoot Minox, shows us a 1970s and ‘80s in which the American dream has gone sour: filthy manhole covers, decaying suburban houses, gleaming chrome bathrooms in empty show homes, bin bags, newspaper boxes telling us what to do if there are problems with our subscriptions, hospital signs exhorting us not to stand and a slightly straggly looking gay pride march. One senses a crack in the usual Warholian façade in these photos: a black man lies face down on a bench. He may be sleeping or he may be passed out. His tiny shorts and sneakers show off a pair of long, shapely legs, which appear fragile and vulnerable. He has the body and the beauty of a Roman or Renaissance sculpture, which Warhol depicts with a strange almost elegiac beauty.

The three celebrity pieces shown here are not the usual graphic, colourized silk-screens; they are black and white. Liza Minnelli is doing a manic back bend à la Studio 54 while next to her Jean-Michel Basquiat crams what appears to be a very expensive meal into his mouth and Jerry Hall reclines vacantly on a sofa, glass of champagne in hand. This is not really the good life; it is more of a sneaky glance at the good life during a moment when the subjects have let their guard down. There is something oddly mortal about Liza, Jerry and Jean-Michel. It is as if Warhol is trying to tell us that they — like us — will also turn to dust one day. Perhaps it is the fact the images are stitched together with very fine thread, that hints at the human hand, and heart, at work here.

Warhol’s photos of his cupboards with their Hellman’s mayonnaise and packages of fig cookies have a satisfyingly banal quality. He perversely worships the faceless packaging in these photos the way he did with his Brillo Boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, and inherent in this worship is a conflating or flattening of aesthetics, meaning and class. He famously loved the fact that when the president drank a bottle of Coca Cola, he was drinking the same beverage as the junkie on the street. By examining the superficial, he shines a light into the depths of everyday objects and rarefied glamour. I could hear Warhol speaking Karl Kraus’s words: “There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.” Warhol saw it as his job to get inside this ugly beauty and throw it back at us.

Warhol’s usual ironic distance has been broached and breached here. In this group of photos we are seeing Warhol as an American original. There is more here than his desire to be “plastic”, to be “famous for 15 minutes” or to be a “machine”. In these photos we see him doing something rare: being human. To allow us access to this version of Andy Warhol is an achievement indeed.

The Lynch, Burroughs and Warhol exhibitions continue at the Photographers’ Gallery until March 30. Tickets are £4 (£2.50 concessions). See here for more information.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/01/empty-factories-poisonous-cheesecake-and-american-celebrities-lynch-burroughs-and-warhol-at-the-photographers-gallery/