Let Fury Have the Hour
Page 28
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BEND THE NOTES
A Creative Response Initiation
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
At first I find it hard to look away from the distorted images rendered in cracked paint. The fierce, angular figures communicate agony, but below them is stark whiteness, that quiet moment when the artist first stood silently in front of the stretched canvas with one hand on his hip and the other clutching his brush. His thoughts were filled with suffering; he was trying to communicate something, anything, to capture a moment in human history that needed to be told not just in a new way but also in a way that transmitted truth. I find it hard to look steadily at the painting for too long, it’s so unsettling. The painting as a whole and then its parts, taken piece by piece, scream at the viewer from a past that presides over the present like a specter. This painting whispers something to every person who steps in front of it. The artist emptied himself in this creative moment in an extraordinary mix of animation and anguish. Years later, when German officers appeared at his Paris studio to question the artist, one officer noticed a photograph of the artwork lying on a table. “Did you do that?” the officer asked. “No, you did,” the artist answered.
Picasso’s Guernica is less a painting and more a resolute chapter in the diary of the human race, standing alongside Goya’s The Third of May 1808 as a clarion call. These works were not just reactions against evil, but actions that amplified a truth: there is only one people. Picasso describes art as “the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” Guernica, the 137.4-inch by 305.5-inch oil on canvas, was his response to the strafing and carpet bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, when hundreds of defenseless civilians were slaughtered. Dubbed Operation Rügen, the Italian Aviazione Legionaria and the German Luftwaffe carried out this act of terror, believed to be one of the first air strikes in the history of military aviation on unarmed civilians. Later at the Nuremberg trials Hermann Göring explained, “I urged Adolf Hitler to give support to Franco under all circumstances. First, in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theater and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect.” The clinical tone of this testimony offers us a glimpse into how the Nazis (and the Italian fascists) perceived the Basque: as a different people, separate and disconnected from their own humanity. The lives (and deaths) of Basque people were a necessary part of the fascists’ quest for world domination.
Just before the assault, the Spanish Republican Government had commissioned Picasso to produce an original work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Picasso had no idea what he was going to paint until history intruded. In Guernica Picasso displays our grand talent as human beings—the ability to act imaginatively in challenging the problems that paralyze us. Picasso’s work is a humanist action that I call creative response. Guernica expresses a universal truth about what living in this world could be if we were free from brutality. It made what once seemed inaccessible and closed off to me—art, particularly painting—feel like something I could be a part of.
“What do you think an artist is?” Picasso asked. “He is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” The war is clear: it erupts between those who ask “why” and those who ask “why not.” “Others have seen what is and asked why,” Picasso said. “I have seen what could be and asked why not.” This sentiment is embedded in my film Let Fury Have the Hour and vigorously expressed by a film participant, musician, and founder of Dischord Records Ian MacKaye, who reiterates this idea: “My question is never, ‘Why?’ It’s, ‘Why not?’”
Ian MacKaye, founder of Dischord Records and member of Minor Threat, Fugazi, and the Evens, during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Roaring from different ends of history, Picasso and MacKaye illuminate our current trial: what happens when we don’t ask, What if? Over history this has led to the erosion of liberty and compassion and the suppression of imagination. I spent twelve interminable years in Catholic schools where three things were force-fed: (1) be quiet, (2) stand in line, and (3) never ask questions. This dogma is demoralizing; it holds down the human spirit and harms the community it is meant to help. Throughout history this fact has been borne out—from the Spanish Inquisition in which the novel was banned for three hundred years to the English civil war, when Puritans shut down all theaters including the Globe, which showcased Shakespeare’s many works. Silencing expression and banning the interrogation of ideas has consistently brought about the destruction of freedom. As Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa put it, “The Spanish understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.”
Picasso’s Guernica speaks directly to the roots of creative response and the core of creativity. He knew that if we fail to question the status quo, there is no hope of progress. “Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination,” filmmaker Luis Buñuel said. “That is the only thing that protects our freedom. Despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.” Guernica places at the center of any political or cultural debate the understanding that systematic brutality must not be treated as exceptional but rather witnessed as paradigmatic—at the heart of the problems that confront us.
I was prepared to open my eyes wide to Picasso’s triumph with Guernica by first experiencing creative response through punk, skateboarding, street art, hip-hop, and reading. The spirit behind each helped me recalibrate my ideas about what reality is. Each experience allowed me to voice feelings that otherwise would have found no outlet. “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas,” Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño said. “Like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” With skateboarding, I reorganized the physical environment around me. A pool was not just for swimming, a sidewalk was not just for walking, and a street was not just for driving. So every time I went down my block, I looked at it slightly differently, as a possibility of what the future could be opened up. “So you’re never going to think the same again about that curve or that bench or that rail or about fucking anything,” film participant skateboard pioneer Tommy Guerrero tells me. “Skateboarding saved my life.”
Squeezed out by the active collusion of the political elite and institutions of money and power, creative activists create space by launching transformative ideas that leave huge aftershocks in the wider popular culture. Creative response is the celebration of the unconventional and the rejection of hopelessness. By embracing the odd idea, the idiosyncratic thought, the impossible strategy, creative response twists and refashions Herbert Marcuse’s concept of the “great refusal,” which is the only fitting act of confrontation to sweeping structures of rule. “If you look back at the arc of human history, and whether it’s the invention of the city or the printing press, the most important ideas have been things that connect us and bring us together,” film participant and scientist Jonah Lehrer explains. As an example, Lehrer cites nineteenth-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who went to chemistry lectures every day. “Coleridge said ‘I go to the chemistry lectures to renew my stock of metaphors,’” Lehrer tells me. “That’s always been this wonderful remark about how the cultures can benefit from each other, that here’s this poet going to watch chemists in a theater set shit on fire, and yet he realizes it’s not just chemistry, it’s not just some foreign language; ‘I can use this and make my poetry better. I can steal their metaphors.’”
Street art from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
In the wake of the global economic crisis and the seemingly omniscient rule of pop cul
ture—a culture that generates the illusion that we are participating and connecting always—digging for new metaphors is more crucial than ever. Creative response helps us to establish a dynamic counternarrative. The more corporate technocrats try to program pop culture down to the last detail and manipulate it, the more people are held under its sway as they dizzily consume it. In contrast, creative response is the art of the unforeseeable and spontaneous, a process that through self-generated channels resists the power of technocracy and money, and triggers new ideas and actions. “New technology can never be a substitute for human values,” humanist Neil Postman wrote in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Creative response places the emphasis on humanity because technology is not a panacea to what ails us in the modern world.
“They rule us with guns and machines,” Algerian independence leader Ferhat Abbas said when France and Algeria met on the soccer field in the 1960s. “On a man-to-man basis, on the field of football, we can show them who is really superior.” In using sport as a metaphor in understanding our complex human existence, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano elaborated on Abbas’s statement that creative response opens up democratic possibilities where true equality and fairness are forged: “When you least it expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bowlegged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.”
The David in Galeano’s David versus Goliath anecdote is legendary Brazilian soccer star Garrincha, who played alongside Pelé, Vavá, and Didi on two World Cup championship clubs. Garrincha’s trademark was his ingenious dribbling ability and uncanny vision to discover any and every way to get by the defender with the ball. He was known as Anjo de Pernas Tortas (Angel with Bent Legs). Garrincha’s story is a thrilling example of creative response: crass, lumbering brute force is no match when opposed by the vast power found in the imaginative, the resourceful, the spontaneous spirit.
Garrincha and his fellow Brazilian football players from that era—the 1950s and 1960s—saw sport as something more. “Football as art, as drama, as ballet, or orchestral music,” David Goldblatt writes. Football was life; it was living in the moment, being present to all the possibilities available on the field and thereby the world. It was creative response shredding the exclusionary conditions of how the game is played and smashing biased perceptions of who can play it. And that’s why Garrincha, dead at age fifty nearly thirty years ago, remains beloved by the Brazilian people, who called him, alternatively, Alegria do Povo (Joy of the People).
When you look at something familiar from a new perspective, whether soccer or traditional music, a fresh awareness arises. We understand that the “elsewhere” and the “here,” the “then” and the “now” are the same. Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók understood that the then and the now are critical to shaping a future filled with promise and delight. “In art there are only fast or slow developments,” Bartók explained. “Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.” Bartók, by protecting and reviving disappearing histories, rejected the dual curses of modernity—alienation and cynicism—and brought forward the idea that everything that is imagined is real in some way. “It is impossible to imagine a more complete fusion with nature than that of the Gypsy,” Bartók explained. Bartók’s passion for folk and Gypsy music helped lead to the founding of ethnomusicology. More importantly, Bartók revived a particular kind of storytelling and cultural tradition threatened with extinction and considered unworthy of being protected. “Bartók remained loyal to the landscape of his dreams,” Alex Ross writes. “That hidden empire of peasant music, which stretched as far as Turkey and North Africa.” Bartók’s unique creative response involved the merger of the local and the universal. He disregarded the finely drawn boundaries between musical genres, denouncing separation, to borrow Joe Strummer’s phrase, as “demographic fascism.” As Ross explains, Bartók countered the rise of “genocidal racism by extolling racial impurity—the migration of styles, the intermingling of cultures.”
Often the genesis for creative response is a candid attempt to begin a dialogue where once there wasn’t one. “Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music,” pianist and composer Herbie Hancock explains. Hancock alludes to the most basic and important right that creative response uplifts: freedom of expression. “Our freedom of speech is the freedom of death,” film participant Chuck D raps. “We got to fight the powers that be.” Buoyed by this stance, creative response is an action, a democratic contribution that an open free society cannot do without.
Art cannot exist without the melding and migration of styles. In order to be an artist, one must be a global citizen—someone who actively participates in shaping the community and the world. Embedded within this idea is the recognition of the complexity and power of human connections, the belief that living in this world means being aware of our interconnected and interdependent nature. It reinforces our shared humanity as we sift through the lies to uncover what is true. “The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda,” photographer Robert Capa said. Creative response is advanced by cultural activists who create work that can breach sideline spaces and transform the popular culture and consciousness. Playwright Harold Pinter summed up the efforts of creative responders in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds, which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation, which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us—the dignity of man.” Creative response is a worldview that reflects our dreams and struggles. “That idea of having an international consciousness, being driven by something more than self-interest, I think that idea grew” in the last four decades, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer tells me. “There were people before me, Woody Guthrie, it goes back generations and generations. This is the business of civilization building.” It’s Odetta singing “Oh Freedom” at the civil rights march, Nina Simone spontaneously singing “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall to protest the Medgar Evers assassination in 1963, and exiled South African Miriam Makeba singing out against apartheid.
The glow coming from Picasso’s Guernica is not from the shock of the images but from the spirit that permeates the painting. It arises out of an artist’s history and experience of engaging in the oldest social network: collaboration and exchange with thinkers across every cultural spectrum. From the beginning of his time in Paris, Picasso associated with writers Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, artist Georges Braque, and composer Erik Satie. It was all about exchange and communication. In 1917, working with the Ballets Russes, Picasso joined with Satie, Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire (who invented the term surrealism), Léonide Massine, and Sergei Diaghilev to produce the circus-like theater piece Parade. An iconoclast of the fin de siècle, Satie found a daring new voice in the world of classical music by composing the three piano pieces Gymnopédies. Satie’s stripped down compositions rebuked centuries of highbrow pretension. “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again,” conductor Reinbert de Leeuw has written. Similar to Claude Debussy before him, Satie was creating an alternative modernism that did not have the “smell of the lamp” but that “of the sun.”
Following the respected tradition of artists who refuse to accept the artificially constructed world imposed on us, creative response wipes away a false idea and replaces it with the best idea. Satie reminds me of another iconoclast, the sixteenth-century European Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, who answered the religious strife around him by creating a new form, the essay, in which general topics—friendship, love, the new world, intolerance—are treate
d from a personal perspective. Equally, Satie’s work moved from the grand orchestrations to a bare, intimate sound that resonated beyond his time influencing artists in unimaginable places. Later, avant-garde composer John Cage, who was inspired by Satie’s nerve, offered his own manifesto: “Art is a sort of experimental station where one tries out living.” Cage then took inspiration from Satie and applied it to his relationships with choreographer Merce Cunningham and the new artists exploding the borders of European classical art: Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jasper Johns.
Likewise, Picasso’s friend and sometimes rival—artist Amodeo Modigliani—turned to poets Charles Baudelaire, Giosuè Carducci, and Comte de Lautréamont to help shape his central ethos that the only route to authentic creativity is through rebelliousness and anarchism. Modigliani looked back at Dante and forward with Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the latter teaching the artist that “the work of art requires great patience, and above all determined struggle against medium.” For this reason, whether it’s cubism, surrealism, Dada, neorealism, French new wave, punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, or street art, each art form is a counternarrative offering an inscrutable way to ask limitless questions. The significance is not contained in the answers people find to these questions but in the celebration of the many constantly asking more questions. “What kind of a question could an artist or human ask that has the capacity to have an enormous range?” film participant and choreographer Elizabeth Streb asks me. “The question’s the thing, not how it gets answered. If it’s a great question, it’s going to be answered in a diverse number of ways by maybe hundreds and thousands of people.” Creative response is another way of collecting these questions.