Beat Generation @ Centre Pompidou

Bruce Baillie, Castro Street, 1966

The real joy of this exhibition, and in my mind, the main reason to go, are the rarely screened films. The exhibition includes lots of photographs of Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Corso and all sorts of other characters, there’s the original typescript of On the Road laid out down the centre of the first rooms, a handful of Burroughs machines, a sampling of Frank’s The Americans, and other treats. But it’s the opportunity to see, for example, two of Bruce Conner’s never screened films, Looking for Mushrooms (1962) and Crossroads (1976) that make the exhibition exciting. Even films that are available such as Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street are so rarely screened, and it’s a treat to see them in large format. Even if they are shown on DVD, as opposed to projected, they are absorbing viewing. I also loved the anonymous footage of Vietnam War protests in New York City for its examples of early video. The colour is unlike anything we would see today. And films by Christopher MacLean, Burroughs, Bruce Baillie make great viewing.

Beat Generation exhibition view
Kerouac's On the Road laid out in the middle

I also have to admit that even though I loved seeing these films, many of them are not Beat Generation films. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), and the collaborations made with Antony Balch for The Cut Ups (1966), and maybe a couple of others can be seen as Beat films-including Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964) and other films, and Harry Smith’s great experiments-- but many of the others screening in Gallery One are not. The late 50s and early 60s was an incredibly furtive moment in American filmmaking, so there were lots of filmmakers and artists making films at the time, experimenting with the medium, doing wild and wacky things. But Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie and Bruce Conner for example are not Beat filmmakers.

 

Kerouac Paraphernalia ... is this really that interesting?

Which leads to what for me was the biggest problem with the exhibition. It uses images of all kinds—photos, films, paintings, graphic art, drawings as documents to exhibit social and cultural and political beliefs. There is no attention to the artistic value of some of these documents. The whole point of the Beat Generation was that they challenged the social and political domain through experimentation in form and aesthetic of their chosen media. Moreover, for the filmmakers such as Smith and Rice, they weren’t just tripping out on drugs and making their experience into films, but their films contain a highly sophisticated philosophy regarding around the use of experimental film (as opposed to other media). The critical ways that these artists manipulated form and aesthetic is completely lost in this exhibition. Similarly, the exquisite use of the camera by Robert Frank in The Americans or even by Burroughs in his never-exhibited photographs is completely lost here. These guys changed art in a way that Duchamp had forty years before them, and because there is no discussion of the aesthetic, there’s no way of knowing the influence and impact they had.

 

Unknown Photographer, Burroughs in the Villa Mouniria Garden, Tangiers. 

I am always irritated by these exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou because of the conventional mainstream vision they offer of a movement such as the Beat Generation. A visitor to this exhibition could well come away with the belief that there were no women, at all, working in this time. From what the exhibition tells us, if women existed in this world, they did so as accessories to the men’s genius. The only relationships that are given significance as having a formative influence on the writers and artists are their gay male lovers. There were in fact a whole host of women who were producing and collaborating and inspiring these works, but they are not shown here.

 

Harry Smith

Lastly, the all-over-the-place nature of the exhibition really dilutes the power of what the Beats were doing. Rather than going for the all out summer exhibition bonanza, I would have liked something that was more sensitive to the relationship between all these different movements, art works, artists, art forms and a much more nuanced placement of the movement vis-à-vis political and historical events. It is true that footage of the Vietnam War, for example, is gorgeous, and yes, it’s going on at the same time as the Beats develop their ideas and work, but more information on their actual engagement with it would have been more satisfying the events as something like background scenery.

Josef Sudek, Le Monde à ma Fenêtre @ Jeu de Paume

Josef Sudek, La dernière Rose, 1956

If Hadjithomas and Joreige’s Two Suns in a Sunset is about shedding light on the trauma of living in a war zone, the Josef Sudek photographs in Le monde à ma Fenêtre, downstairs at the Jeu de Paume rest in the darkness. The tone of these images is bleak. They are very beautiful and somehow reveal a hidden serenity and spirit behind the windows and doors that had to remain closed during the difficult years of Prague’s twentieth century. The condensation collecting on Sudek’s studio window in photograph after photograph, year after year, is very much the theme of the exhibition. It is an exhibition that shows how this Chekoslavakian man hid from the dark presence of history. He repeats the veil behind which he hides in the form of condensation on windows before dark, melancholic gardens and streets.  Standing this side of the photograph, inside his room, we feel safe in Sudek’s world.

 

Josef Sudek, La Fenêtre de mon Atelier, very 1940-1948

An alternative approach to Sudek’s images is to understand their representation of something that cannot be touched. Whether it is the divine light that falls through the window of Winceslas Cathedral, emotions of sadness, the melancholy or other states of being such as comfort, warmth or the security sequestered behind windows in dimly lit rooms, we often sense we are looking at precious and delicate objects in the image that show emotions and spiritual states that have no physicality.

 

Josef Sudek, Sans Titre (Nature Morte sur le rebord de la fenêtre), 1951

There is incredible melancholia infusing the objects. Empty chairs show they have clearly been occupied in the not too distant past. The objects that accompanied the sitter lie by their side. The head of a statue, wrapped and bound in string also tells of the destruction that occurred at some point to an ancient relic. The emptiness of the chair resonates with the cindered dead trees that are the result of industrialization in photographs from the 1950s. They are all images soaked in a nostalgia for the time before, for the pre-industrial, for the natural landscape of a bucolic life. This nostalgia and sadness also comes through the emptiness of landscapes, this idea of a vanished world, a world that we never see. We might see the results of the destruction, but never the events themselves. What we see in the photographs is also the result of Sudek’s carbon process printing which retains the darkness of black or sepia in the pigmented gelatin. 

 

Josef Sudek, Dans le Jardin, 1954-1959

Darkness prevails in a world that we assume is Sudek’s technology, but it has also to be his vision. The heartbreaking loss which permeates these images is his. It must be because we meet with it over and over again, throughout the oeuvre. The Royal Garden in Prague for example would /could be life giving for a different photographer. Here for Sudek, the garden is the stage for a funeral march. What I saw everywhere in these photographs, even when they were not taken in the war years and even though we never saw Germans, was the darkness and death of Nazi occupied Prague. And we see the devastation that Nazism has on individual lives. The way that it shaped destinies and identities. The world outside Sudek’s window has been reduced to a shadow, where buildings and streets are desolate, ethereal. There is no escape from the darkness, this is how he sees.

 

Josef Sudek, Labyrinthe de verre, vers 1968-1972

In the final years of his life it seems as though Sudek had a renewed energy. The still lives of the 1950s onwards, the post-Nazi years are just that, still lives. Ordinary everyday objects are transformed into shapes, forms, densities, patterns, repetitions, surface textures, reflections, tones, again rendered immaterial through Sudek’s viewfinder. And then in the very final works on display at the Jeu de Paume, such as Glass Labyrinth (1968-72) glass is transformed from a material into something that can be seen through, something that reflects (like the windows) and changes the world seen on its other side. The intimacy, mystery and delicacy of his world continues until the very end, as it can be found through his camera. However, the vision becomes more complicated, multifarious and although filled with more light and hope, the spaces it creates are just as closed.

All Images courtesy Jeu de Paume

Eugen Gabritschevsky @ La Maison Rouge

Eugene Gabritschevsky, Untitled, 1947

I know very little about Art Brut, other than that it is usually identified as being outside the trends and movements of the professional market. It is also meant to possess a purity and an innocence that derives from the isolation of its artist: people in prison, with mental health disabilities, and those who have “never grown up.” This imprisonment of the artist is what isolates him or her and gives the work a purity and freedom from the forces of culture that weigh on the socially integrated as opposed to excluded. And as I wandered through the more than 250 works of art by Eugen Gabritschevsky at the Maison Rouge, I was convinced that today, this man’s art would probably not be Art Brut. Hospitalized at 39 years of age with schizophrenia, and thus imprisoned by his own mind, he was effectively locked up for the rest of his life. In France today, he would be treated differently, and given a place within a community. As a result, I imagine his art would have looked very different. So given all this, I wonder if this genre of Art Brut is in fact a historical phenomenon?

Eugen Gabritschevsky, Untitled, 

The Maison Rouge exhibits Gabritschevsky’s work thematically as opposed to chronologically. This is somewhat disappointing because although similar themes and motifs preoccupy Gabritschevsky across forty years, other critics have noted the transformation of the work together with the deterioration of his health. This is not visible in the current exhibition because of the thematic organization. The thematic organization also underlines repetition. It is then only a small step to looking for the obsessions and fixations that lead to his label as a mad man. I kept looking for the the wisdom in the madness, but I was no doubt looking in the wrong places. A different organization of the work might make for a very different response.

Eugene Gabritschevsky, Untitled, 1947

It is a body of work that is very close to nature -- the understanding of the emotions and movements and rhythms of nature is keen. The works are consistently and repeatedly filled with dramatic evil forces, storms brewing and at times in full force. When scenes unfold, they often do so in what might be an underwater setting, where things are unpredictable and uncertain. Or perhaps the scene in the painting is being washed over by a tidal wave. Figures also proliferate: there are animals and ghosts and ghouls, humans, fairies, devils, Christ and a whole host of other unidentifiable creatures. It’s as if Gabritschevsky sees creatures that we don’t, as if he finds life and meaning in the monsters and malformed beings that live in his painted worlds, often either alone or made anonymous through their substance as one of a crowd.

Eugen Gabritschevsky, Untitled, 1942

The images themselves are usually flat, played out on the horizontal surface of the paper or  cardboard, composed without depth. And as a result, we never get a sense of any human emotion. For example, the human and non-human figures are never connected, they are isolated even when they are in a crowd. They can be precise, motivated by raw energy and uncontained, but they never relate to the world around them.

What I loved most about the abundance of works, in addition to the child like innocence, and the fact that everything is always in a perpetual state of transformation, is that nothing is precious. The works are made in paint, charcoal, pencil, on note paper, tracing paper, newspaper, effectively, whatever Gabritschevsky can lay his hands on. And though the figures and scenes can be very precise and deliberate, they typically are not dwelt on after execution. It seemed as though we see Gabritschevsky’s mind moving directly through his hand onto the page. The instantaneity is both charming and unusual. For Gabritschevsky, painting comes as a life force, something he has to do in order to maintain his subjectivity in the world. And there’s no singularity of purpose, no tortuous looking things over and over and over again to follow an intellectual preoccupation as was the tendency of those painting in the twentieth century. In spite of the curatorial choices, this is a rare opportunity to see painting at its most primary: these works are what they are, and say what they say, there’s absolutely nothing compromising about them.