The Red Krayola with Art & Language and, briefly, Kathryn Bigelow

The most conspicuous writing on Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow's art-world past went up on the Huffington Post last week; Bettina Korek  briefly chronicling Bigelow's "life in art," and quoting from an interview Bigelow did with Artforum in 1995: "I worked with Art & Language, an artist's group who were critiquing the commodification of culture. So I was very influenced by them, and my concerns moved from the plastic arts to Conceptual art and a more politicized framework." Indeed. My own feelings about Bigelow's Oscar win, for directing The Hurt Locker, were that I wasn't so much impressed to see a woman win the Best Directing trophy as I was to see such a committed aesthetic radical do so. Not that The Hurt Locker was one of her more aesthetically radical pictures. But to look at stuff such as Blue Steel, Strange Days, and particularly Point Break again through a conceptual art refraction is to see, well, almost completely different films, almost literally inverted action "blockbusters" critiquing not just commodification of culture but gender roles and capital as well. 

Like most art collectives/movements of this and any other time, Art & Language extended its tendrils outside of the visual arts, most notably into the area of music. In the early '70s the group formed an alliance with Mayo Thompson, a Texan who was a co-founder of the putatively "psychedelic" (Thompson fairly bristles at the term, pointing to his then-labelmates The Thirteenth Floor Elevators as a more pertinent example of the genre) trio The Red Crayola (other original members were Steve Cunningham and Rick [later Fredrick] Barthelme). At this time the Crayola (soon to be spelled with a "K" at the request of a corporate entity) was in a fallow period, and Thompson had been working as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. 

Teaming up with young drummer Jesse Chamberlain to reform the Crayola, Thompson worked with the then-New-York-based Art & Language—which by the late '70s would consist of  Mel Ramsden, Michael Baldwin, and Charles Hamilton Harrison—on a number of projects, one documented by filmmaker Zoran Popovic for the ultra-obscure 1975 doc Struggle in New York. The above photo is from that film; that's Thompson at far left; Bigelow is the brown-haired woman in the middle, and Chamberlain is of course behind the drum kit. Like all subsequent Crayola/A&L collabs, the early songs combined Thompson's music with collective-penned lyrics that were low on conventional scansion but high on political/philosophical content that often split the difference between deadly seriousness and willful prankishness. But the sound of the group in this period was neither like that of the '60s Crayola or the group's subsequent British-based permutations. Perverse aperçus such as "And we will be fed/with breakfast in bed/and served by a fat millionaire" were sung to what seems to be deliberately amateurish, folky accompaniment. The LP of this period's work, Corrected Slogans, is, truth to tell, one of the tougher listens in the Crayola body of work. 

Bigelow's involvement with the group had never been much bruited. In an obituary for the artist Christine Kozlov, who worked with Art & Language at the same time as Bigelow, Suzanne Neuberger bemoans the larger tendency behind this neglect: "Kozlov was a member of Provisional Art and Language, worked in 1974 on the Corrected Slogans (Art and Language and the Red Crayola LP), on Zoran Popovic’s A Struggle in New York in 1976 and on the Music-Language video in the same year. What back then was perceived as egalitarian in the joint, collective ambitions of the group seems today to be to the disadvantage of the women, whose share in the work barely received critical notice. For example, to take just one instance, the three women involved in A Struggle in New York, Paula Ramsden, Kathryn Bigelow and Christine Kozlov, are given only a marginal mention in Charles Harrison’s Essays on Art and Language."

Bigelow subsequently attended Columbia, where she made her first short, The Set-Up, in 1978. Thompson and a few A&L members relocated to London, where Thompson became a seminal part of the post-punk scene. After creating the idiosyncratic, blistering hard-art-rock juggernaut Soldier Talk as The Red Crayola, he reteamed with Art & Language to make some attempts at, well, pop records, or at least post-punk pop records, one of the most exciting of which was Kangaroo?, which, like Slogans, made extensive use of female vocalists, in this case X Ray Spex/Essential Logic's Lora Logic and The Raincoats' Gina Birch. Song titles included "Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock (Parts I and II)" and "The Principles of Party Organization." One song tackles gestalt therapy, and concludes "The transactional list/of questions for winners/this analysis to abolish loser/is the mythical gist/blut und eisen severe/ the geisesgesichte of California." And it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. Okay, not so much. Still. As Robert Christgau implied in his review of the record in 1981, this is art-rock for the John Berger reader, and why the hell not?

The Krayola's collaboration with Art & Language continues apace, and the latest one, Five American Portraits, is perhaps its most audacious yet. Advertising itself on the front cover of consisting of "portraits" of Wile E. Coyote, President George W. Bush, President Jimmy Carter, John Wayne, and Ad Reinhardt, it perhaps sets the potential listener up for a round of sardonic commentary on these figures. But, no.   These are all portraits in the sense of being precise descriptions of the elements of a visual portrayal, e.g., "The forward prominence/Of the left cheek/The chin below the lower lip/Of President George W. Bush." And so on, and so on, sometimes for fifteen minutes or so, accompanied by adapted musical motifs Thompson found appropriate and/or amusing, as in "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You" for Bush and "Paint It, Black" for Reinhardt. The kicker is that Thompson and Birch (working together again for the first time in about 25 years) sing the exceptionally dry lyrics with what sounds like genuine emotion—an angry-seeming Birch actually screams at one point. The overall concept, I believe, derives from an older Krayola/A&L song, "A Portrait of You," in which a wallet snapshot of a loved one is lost, found, coded and decoded until a "graphical carnage...it looks like a couple of Boy Scouts in a soggy tent" is accepted as The Thing Itself. 

I recently contacted Thompson, a wonderful fellow with whom I've been friendly since the mid-'80s, to ask a little about the current configuration of Art & Language, and about the Bigelow connection. He informed me that Charles Hamilton Harrison died last August, and the collective is now down to Ramsden and Baldwin."Apropos of Kathryn," he says, "neither A&L nor I've been in contact with her for several years now. We're all pleased for her success of course." He also informs me that a DVD is in the works for release this year which will include the Art & Language sections from Struggle In New York, a subsequent '76 music-and-video project Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors, and more material from the period. "We won't be advertising it as featuring Kathryn," Thompson says, "though [we] naturally welcome anyone who reads the fine print and gets interested because of her." Myself, I've always been interested, and I'll certainly check out and write about the disc when it appears. 

Comments

[Paul]

This is why I read your blog - who else is making these connections? However, I'll always slightly hold it against Thompson that he destroyed one of my favourite bands, Pere Ubu (well, destroyed is a bit strong, but 'rendered them unlistenable during his tenure' is more precisely what I think).

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Paul: I don't dislike the Thompson-era Ubu stuff at all, but aside from that, you could be misplacing some of the "blame." For sure "The Art of Walking" has Mayo wielding considerable influence. There are different stories about the seemingly tectonic shift of "Song of the Bailing Man;" citing very different influences and tensions. It was, in any event, a pretty fractious period for the group, but I also think that record is good, and I think that the solo record Thomas did in Britain, with Anton Fier on drums and Richard Thompson on guitar ("The Sound of the Sand...") is an out-and-out classic.

One thing's for sure: the Thompson/Ubu mix second time around didn't go as well as it did when the group guested on "Soldier Talk." In the aftermath Allen Ravenstine continued to make vital contributions to Krayola recordings.

[Jimmy]

I echo Paul's sentiments of why I visit SCR. I had no idea about this chapter in KB's life. Thanks Glenn.

[Paul]

I'll be a Modern Dance/Dub Housing man for life, but there's no Ubu that's without merit.

[Phil G]

Nice article. I was not aware of this side of Bigelow. While I still think THE HURT LOCKER is a a good movie that is overrated, I have always been a big fan of STRANGE DAYS. In that latter film, the chaotic, almost anarchic style fit the story. It is rare film where the choppy, lightning fast editing pattern fit the story. Plus, the complex sound design is pretty amazing.

[Tim Lucas]

Consider my eyebrows raised!

[Stephanie]

What Phil G said. I hope the success of 'The Hurt Locker' will enable Bigelow to do better and more interesting projects in the future.

Great OP, thank you.

[msic]

Citing Bigelow's time as a painter has been a kind of shorthand for those wanting to praise her as an auteur, and I've always been a bit annoyed by the rather shallow way that information is bandied about. The precision with which you outline Bigelow's aesthetic milieu in her formative years is invaluable, and the necessarily specific place from which valid arguments can begin.

So thank you very much.

[Joseph B.]

My first job at the age of 14 or 15 was in a record shop. The owner purchased a large collection of albums and mixed in the bunch was an album from Thirteenth Floor Elevators. We listened to it, and yea, definitely trippy late 60's pysch rock. I'd forgotten about this band until now!

That album sold for bunches by the way... and more than made up for what he bought everything with.

[JD]

About that precision: the member of Art-Language you refer to is Charles Harrison (among other things, the editor of Art in Theory) not 'Hamilton.' He died in 2007. Best.

[JD]

Here's what I get for correcting you: Harrison died last year, not in 2007. Apologies.

[Franklin Bruno]

Lovely piece - I have to guess that (conceptual artist/later RK confederate) Stephen Prina knew all this when he taught his infamous "Films of Keanu Reeves" course, which must have included Point Break, at Pasadena Art Center in the 90s (where Mayo T. also landed for a time).

I've interviewed Mayo as well, and have always enjoyed his conversation.