No easy answers - Difficult art and culture
Fancy a drop of the hard stuff?
Last month’s No Easy Answers explored what it means to fall out of love with a previously adored artist. It began with a post that noted how singer Julian Cope had, in the time it took to hear a casually dismissive comment, realised that his feelings for 1960s titan Scott Walker had gone from fanboy adoration to embarrassed rejection. Cope’s not alone in this respect, although his reasons for straying from the Scott fold were different to most: Walker’s evolution from singer of lushly romantic 1960s orchestral epics into an avowed experimentalist and wanderer of really strange paths meant that many, even his biggest champions, found it too difficult to follow his journey into alien(ating) territories. The critical consensus is that Scott’s later output was something to admire from a safe distance rather than love or, you know, actually listen to. Jarvis Cocker, whose band Pulp were produced by Walker, diplomatically highlights how:
He could have just sat back and sung 'Make It Easy On Yourself' for the rest of his life. Instead, he chose to make things that were difficult, beautiful, and sometimes quite terrifying. He sets a standard for all of us on how to grow old as an artist without losing your edge.
The ‘difficult’ holds a fascinating position in art and culture’s history. Music is particularly well served by the gnarly and confrontational. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, an hour of squealing electronic feedback, is a fearsome experience, and not something you’re likely to hear on drive time radio. Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, a dizzyingly relentless shapeshifter that careers wildly from one furious passage to another, refuses the listener any respite and arguably contributed more than most to the cliché of jazz being ‘a bunch of musicians playing a bunch of different things at the same time.’ Noise artist Merzbow’s punishing Pulse Demon is never far from such conversations but, brutal as it is, is not without its fans. There really does appear to be something for everyone, and what’s to be kept at bay with a barge pole by some is a source of delight for others.
In the world of literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho infamously threw down the gauntlet to readers, something that performance art has often champed at the bit to do. Marina Abramovich’s Rhythm 0 invited those gathered to use an array of objects - a knife, a feather, a loaded gun - on her body as they saw fit, GG Allin’s penchant for defecation turned their performances into ordeals for attendees, and Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ - involving submerging a crucifix in his own urine - was probably never intended to be the sort of art you’d hang on your suburban semi’s living room wall.
Narrative film, a medium that’s usually more focused on putting bums on seats than heads down toilets, has also had its moments. Cannibal Holocaust, the apex predator of 1970s exploitation films, features a savage brew of sadism and all-too genuine animal cruelty but is nevertheless highly acclaimed. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò is often cited as the ur-text in this field, and you know that you’re in the presence of something that takes no prisoners when Michael Haneke - himself no stranger to films that cause some to reacquaint themselves with an earlier meal - notes that: ‘I only saw it once, and felt ill for two weeks afterwards. I bought it a couple of years ago and haven’t had the courage to watch it since.’
For certain films, the challenge is less about content than duration. Kevin Jerome Everson’s documentary Park Lanes, depicting a factory that assembles parts for bowling alleys, shows a full 8 hour shift on the shop floor, turning the act of film viewing - usually regarded as a leisure activity - into a kind of labour. But compared to Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson’s Logistics, the undisputed champ of the long-form film, this is a mere hors d’oeuvre. If you’ve got a spare 35 days and 17 hours, you can watch the entire film - the longest ever made - here and see its real time attempt to ‘get to the source of the things we consume’ by following the reverse journey of a product.
A consideration when evaluating the difficult has to focus on who it’s for and where it’s designed to be experienced. All of the above can easily, if a little crudely, be filed under ‘alternative’, meaning that audiences should have some idea of what they’re getting themselves into. The BBC’s devastating 1984 nuclear holocaust drama Threads, by contrast, appears to have traumatised virtually everybody in the huge audience who watched it, including children whose parents regarded the film’s ‘educational value’ as much more consequential than its relentlessly grim and gruelling content, the sort that would normally result in a film being kept several light years from young people’s eyes. Whereas the edges of some ‘difficult’ artworks are smoothed over time, Threads, as anybody who attended its screening in the amphitheatre above Sheffield station in 2014 will testify, is a singularly bleak and uncompromising work whose raw power and capacity to unsettle has remained undiminished over time.
Are there examples of pop culture and art that others find too much that you can’t get enough of? Things that you’ve experienced once and will never go near again? How easy is it to produce difficult art in an educational setting? Is the default starting point to make something ‘beautiful’ that aims to please, is easy to love? Do notions of high and low culture have to come into any discussion of the difficult?
We’ll be nattering about this sort of stuff in the edition #10 of No Easy Answers on Weds 21st October at 6pm. There’ll be a prize for whoever the group decides has the strongest stomach and most outré tastes when it comes to challenging art and culture.
Image: "Pulse Demon Merzbow Relapse Records" by iClassicalCom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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