Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts

By Erik Wennermark

A response to some comments and emails I received following the publication of a review I wrote for the blog Art Talk Chicago

This review I wrote that you dislike so much: I had the best of intentions when I set to writing it, I really did. I did not mean to come off like a prig, or an ass, or a twit. Any of those things. I meant to position the painter within a construct that I had recently identified as a clever means of framing the artist while serving my own writerly agenda. It was a glorious idea. I assure you of its glory. I would make a name for myself with my cleverness and wit. I did not mean to cause such a fuss (yes I did).

I had to get up at 6 AM this morning. Quite a bit earlier than I usually get up on a Friday, to ensure I met a deadline for a piece I was writing for a company that pays me a nice wage to put words together in sentences that build meaningful paragraphs. It’s unusual that I have to do that—get up 3 hours before deadline to finish something—because I am a professional and I know my work is going to be better if I have a little time to consider my options and get a little separation from the piece. Maybe even do a quick edit. I take this seriously because it is a contract in which I think I am compensated equitably. I should have done the piece earlier but I was having a hard time working because I was obsessively checking for your new comments on the blog. If I am fired from my only form of gainful employ I will blame you. They say, “God loves a working man.” God may punish you.

 

Dance me to the end of love

I paid 150 bucks to go see Leonard Cohen last night. Leonard Cohen is worth 150 bucks so I was okay with that, but I damn sure was going to be fully devoted to the show and completely present for each song by a guy I respect tremendously, not only as a musician but also as a writer. So imagine my surprise and dissatisfaction when I’m Your Man kicked up and my mind was elsewhere, spinning and resentful. This is your fault. I am blaming this on you.

Now I realize I could be taken to task just as directly; that is to say that I, during I’m Your Man, allowed for your most unwelcome invasion. You might even say I invited it upon myself with an “astounding naïvety” and a “myopic perspective,” as you so succinctly put it. First, let me tell you I disagree. I did not set out to write a critical essay with the thought that I, in turn, would be criticized. No, no, that is not my game. I must say I expected, at the very least, your grudging respect for my rare intellect. You are the only critic of criticism here my friend. It is you alone.

The review, nay essay, nay musing—yes, musing I think is appropriate—was not an essay at all. I merely called it an essay in order to avoid having to use the word musing and sounding like an ass, but there it is, I did it. I’m sure you’re happy. My musing was just that—the muses taking me where they ought.

I draw your attention to a key phrase in the second paragraph of my essay referring to the supposed conditions that contribute to the supposed shabbiness of Chicago’s art scene, “…and the unfortunate demise of professionalization [italics mine] of media in general and criticism in particular.” See? Now, I ask you, please: Do you now see the outright hilarity of taking me so harshly to task? I bet you feel silly.

 

Wasn’t it a long way down

When I was a student at New York University, I interned and then worked at a magazine—now defunct—called MIXER. MIXER was kind of a crappy magazine but it was “cool” to work there and I was getting good clips and it was big magazine work in New York. Part of my job at MIXER was writing the short music reviews that composed the last 10 or so pages of the magazine. For some reason I earned a reputation as “the industrial guy,” so anything gothy or vaguely machine-like or cacophonous was assigned to me [i]. Problem was, with a few exceptions, I’m not all that into industrial music. Most of what I reviewed wasn’t very good, and I would run out of intelligent stuff to say pretty quickly [ii]. Then one day I was introduced to the concept of snark. By poking fun at the music, I was able to avoid any substantial interaction. It made things so much easier.

One day at MIXER I got a CD in my inbox and I listened to it and thought it was horrible. Like really, really bad. Plus, one of the guys in the band had been surgically altered to look like a demon or a troll or some other creature from Lord of the Rings. Needless to say my review was scathing and made glorious amounts of fun of the life choices that had resulted in fangs and horns for this particular gentleman. The article went to print and I thought it was funny and clever but for some reason I also had this weird sense of foreboding. Some weeks later I discovered that the guy I had brutalized in print was a committed warlock with some real-deal warlock cred to boot. I checked my ass in the mirror for weeks to make sure I hadn’t sprouted a tail.

 

Just paying my rent everyday in the tower of song

I remember the first time The New York Times critic Roberta Smith came into the gallery where I worked. I was scared shitless, but stoked. My boss and I hid in the back room: “You think she’ll write something?” she said. “I dunno,” I said. “You think she’ll pan us?” she said. “I dunno,” I said. “She’s mean, she pans everybody,” she said. I nodded. “Who gives a shit, it’s Roberta Smith!” she said. We both nodded. Roberta Smith didn’t write anything.

A couple years later I was working in a sort of clerical purgatory at the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a major worldwide art fair. I was handing out nametags. Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith strolled up to the table (I also saw Matthew Barney walking around with Björk.) I handed them their nametags. I find power couples serve to enhance my melancholy.

When I first moved to Chicago I was hanging out at this bar near my apartment. It’s something like a faux dive bar, or a clean punk rock bar, which is admittedly bullshit, but the music’s good and they have Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap (as all self-respecting faux dive bars do). When I first moved to Chicago I would go there every night, spend all my money on booze, and chat with the bartender. At some point one of the requisite punk rock waitresses took an interest in me. She had a platinum mohawk and a tattoo on the side of her head. We hit it off, though I knew it wasn’t likely to last long. My blood had become equal measures PBR and treacle—I could not be trusted. I momentarily wondered about the wisdom of hanging out with a woman who worked at a bar I frequented due to its proximity to my apartment. These fears proved to be well founded.

Remember that great scene from Blue Velvet? You know, the one when Dennis Hopper’s character chastises Kyle MacLachlan’s character for his choice of beer? I quote that scene as often as I can. If you don’t remember, Kyle MacLachlan’s character, schoolboy Jeffrey Beaumont, is asked by Dennis Hopper’s character, incarnation-of-evil-on-earth Frank Booth, what type of beer he likes. Kyle MacLachlan’s character somewhat feebly replies, “Heineken.” Dennis Hopper’s character then says incredulously, “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” That last bit is usually the part I quote.

[i] Were one to take the time to do so, one might categorize industrial music hierarchically. At the top I would put what I consider to be authentically industrial music; that is, music having to do with industry. Einstürzende Neubauten would probably be the exemplar here. The category would be broadly defined by bands banging on garbage cans, using drills and circular saws as instruments, and expressing powerful discontent with pre-reunification era Germany through the use of nihilistic, or even nonsensical (read: absurd, as in existential) lyrical content and pronounced cacophony. The bands in this category don’t necessarily have to be German; working-class English is acceptable as well, from like Sheffield or Manchester. American bands in this category would have to be from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or Detroit, and have done the majority of their critically relevant work between 1975 and 1985. (I’m going to leave out Swans, whose Body to Body, Job to Job really ought to be included or at least discussed, in order to maintain the argument. Though, really, they are probably more properly defined as No Wave and their inclusion could open up a whole can of worms I’m not sure we want opened. Do you want Sonic Youth in there as well? I didn’t think so. Furthermore, how would we then navigate Swans’ influence on a band like Godflesh, who could easily be considered authentically industrial and working-class English, though unfortunately outside our rather limiting time frame? Anyway, you get the idea. Below the Einstürzende Neubauten category—this is a completely personal distillation of the industrial genre, mind you—I would include a category broadly defined as “camp,” with the standard bearer being Rammstein. At this point we’re not really in the category of truly “industrial” music at all. This is a rock-based genre that is heavy on electronic beats with characteristics of “metal”, which is widely attributed to Black Sabbath, a band not coincidentally birthed in working-class England. It always comes full circle doesn’t it? Ideally, as in Rammstein, the “camp” band’s lyrics will be sung in German for an audience that doesn’t speak German, allowing for a sort of goofy osmotic internalizing of a sturm und drang thing to happen. If pressed, I might put the American band Ministry’s nineties catalog into this category, though their early work belongs in our third and final category of industrial music, which is not industrial at all and is really a broader genre of goth, of which “industrial” is an oft-cited representative. We are skipping over more ambient industrial music, everything “classical”, e.g. John Cage and Philip Glass, a score of post-punk that would really make things difficult to keep organized, e.g. Joy Division, and the previously mentioned New York scene of the early eighties. Goth is not really a musical genre, and the term is actually too contemporary to describe the vast majority of music that belongs in this category, which predates the term “goth” and which we should instead call “club” or “dance” and give over to Depeche Mode. The primary characteristic of “club” is an exclusive reliance on electronic production—hence the “industrial” tag—though with none of the abrasiveness of bands in the Einstürzende Neubauten category. “Club” bands would not beat garbage cans with baseball bats for example, though of course neither would truly industrial bands, as they would not be American and would not be aware of the utility of baseball bats or have any interest in the game of baseball at all. ”Club” music, while still generally melancholic, allows for the possibility of celebration, though most likely celebration of the black variety, as in Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, a slightly later work that saw the band moving out of “club” or “dance” to something else altogether and possibly completely out of our rubric. [ii] Let me be frank: even had the majority of the music not sucked, I would have run into the same problem eventually. How much can you really say about the same tired records, tirelessly recycled? With visual art at least there is some sense of history, some aesthetic philosophy to cite. With popular music the range is what, 40-50 years? That’s what I have to work with? Maybe it’s enough. The Village Voice seems to do all right, though I can’t stand that stuff.

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