Subterranean Grey Lynn Blues
1
Anne Kennedy, ‘I tell you solemnly’, in Sing-Song. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003, pp. 125–28.
I tell you solemnly
when children sing they go
da-da, descending minor third,
plaintive but lovely…1
Photograph: Patrick Reynolds
2
ibid.
3
John Reynolds, blackboard lecture, Gus Fisher Gallery, November 17, 2007.
It is probably no coincidence that John Reynolds’ I Tell You Solemnly was presented in the Kenneth Myers Centre, a building The University of Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery shares with schools of Music and Dance, and which was previously home to TVNZ and originally 1YA as New Zealand’s first purpose-built broadcasting facility. Traversing a staircase to span several floors, I Tell You Solemnly comprises a loose, sprawling grid of 838 individual 100 x 100 mm canvases, mostly black, with silver writing phosphorescently twinkling from the shifting light that filters through the gallery’s remarkable glass dome. Ever-present throughout the piece is the text of Anne Kennedy’s poem I Tell You Solemnly, the epilogue to her book Sing-Song,2 which Reynolds describes as a plain-spoken prose journey of domesticity and an evocation of place firmly rooted in Auckland suburb Grey Lynn.3
4
It is worth noting that John Reynolds is credited with photography for the Salty sleeve, and that the album features a re-recording of McGlashan’s earlier Blam Blam Blam song ‘Don’t Fight it Marsha, It’s Bigger than
Both of us’.
Reynolds, who often speaks of his work in regard to its performance, must relish contesting this lively environment. This is a site that for 70 years has been soaking in music and performance, where the sound of a University big band’s weekly rehearsal now wafts through every Friday afternoon; where guitarists, singers and other musicians can be found practicing on the lower steps or in other nooks and crannies around the building including the carpeted lift; where Uncle Tom’s 1YA children’s show and the television music programme C’mon was broadcast live in the late 1960s. And, for a period after TVNZ moved out, Shortland Street’s disused studios were adopted by bands for a range of music recording projects, including Don McGlashan’s second Muttonbirds album, Salty (1994).4
5
John Reynolds, interview with the author, July 17 2006, portions first published in ‘Time is of the Essence’, New Zealand Herald, 29 July 2006, Canvas section, pp. 21-22.
When Reynolds discusses the performance of his work, an important factor is the energy it acquires from its context; staged in a dealer gallery, a public gallery, as part of a retrospective, or in cohabitation and competition with the work of other artists, be it his usual peers or more unlikely groupings. Reflecting on being a nominee for the 2002 inaugural Walters Prize, he recalls the pleasure of having his work scrutinised in the company of the other nominees and the connections that could be made between their works.5 In this case, I Tell You Solemnly performs alongside the elaborate architecture of the Gus Fisher Gallery’s foyer, with its multi-coloured lead-light ceiling dome above and a sweeping staircase below, as well as the surrounding idiosyncratic acoustics, which embellish all the building’s comings and goings.
6
The overall form of I Tell You Solemnly is intended to resemble a speech bubble emanating from the stairwell like the variety of sounds that routinely waft up from the building’s lower levels.
Much activity in the Gus Fisher Gallery is the transit of people in and out of the foyer, whether they’re visiting the gallery or funnelling further into the building’s depths via the all-important staircase that provides I Tell You Solemnly with its extended canvas. So the work needs to perform with traffic that moves in all directions — towards the work, across the work, and even in a vertical direction — creating a dance between artist and viewer. On walking into the gallery, visitors are confronted with a growth-like sprawl that disappears from view, obscured by the stair’s balustrade. Getting closer for a better look, one finds the work continuing lower and lower, disappearing into the depths of the building to defy a clear view from any single vantage point. From some approaches, it is as if the audience have inadvertently arrived with the poem, travelling from the adjacent corridor and descending the stairs, only to find blocks of text travelling with them. Or to climb the stairs from the bottom and encounter a slow trickle of words that burst into the upper level like an escaping gas.6 Whether directly attending to the work or being caught in passing by peripheral vision, the recurring effect is an absorption into the lyrical snatches that snare browsers as they waft in and out of the space, and in and out of the text.
Photograph: Andrew Clifford
7
A. A. Milne, ‘Halfway Down’ in When We Were Very Young. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1924 (new edition London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1989), p. 81.
8
This work featured in the exhibition I gotta use words when I talk to you, Sue Crockford Gallery, 23 August–10 September 2005. Reynolds is interviewed about this exhibition for my story, ‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’, New Zealand Herald, 7 September 2005, p. B4.
9
John Reynolds, interview with the author, August 24 2005, portions first published in ‘Conversation pieces’, New Zealand Herald, 7 September 2005, p. B4.
10
In reference to his contemplation of the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection for his 4 Walls, 3 Layers, 2 Marks, 1 Light in the exhibition 54321 Auckland Artist Project, Reynolds commented, ‘I was just singing them all up, dead and alive’. Deborah Smith, ‘The Shape of a Cloud’, in Home and Entertaining, Dec/Jan 2007. p. 56.
As a transitional space, neither up or down, or really anywhere, as A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin once put it,7 a staircase seems an ideal location for Reynolds’ work to perform from — and for an audience to perform on as they explore the work, following the trajectory laid out by the poem’s narrative and the compositional movements created by its conversion into a painting. Reynolds, whose work often finds ways to prompt a journey across a wall, has engaged with stairs before. A more metaphoric stair, the Poutama (stairs of learning) tukutuku design was the subject of a 2005 Reynolds wall-drawing titled Stairs to Heaven.8 The later stair-piece has a presence in the Kenneth Myer Centre that functions in a similar manner to Reynolds’ description of a tukutuku panel in a marae, ‘[as] a kind of backdrop against which a greater theatre is at play and a living community, as well as a dead community, meet and that transaction is available’.9 Through Kennedy’s text, Reynolds is able to ‘sing up’ people and places,10 sounds and smells, hopes and fears, journeys and memories, all as part of a dialogue created between the viewer, the work, and its site.
11
John Reynolds, interview with the author, August 24 2005, portions first published in ‘Conversation pieces’, New Zealand Herald, 7 September 2005, p. B4.
The performance demanded of the viewer (and of the work) from this combination of constant drift and gravitational pull is a recurring strategy in Reynolds’ work. For example, in I will need words… we find the spiralling work Sundog paired behind the geometric rows of Stairs to Heaven on the reverse of the same wall, drawn with a silvery, tumbling line that forms a constant loop. Reynolds describes this as the flipside of his tukutuku drawing:
There are two versions of a movement — one’s upward and a series of serried rents, a set of straightforward, physical [gestures], and this is a much more tangential meandering through. So they have a conversation too, which may or may not be productive for people, but hopefully they also put pressure on the paintings too.11
In I Tell You Solemnly, Reynolds has combined both sorts of movement: the steady progression of the poem’s text in orderly, horizontal rows, and a disruptive force that atomises the work, causing images and phrases to distract the steady progress of a disciplined gaze.
12
Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki: The Guide. London: Scala, 2001.
This is by no means Reynolds’ first attempt at summoning text into a space. There have been the one-liner acronyms; the exhuming of details from the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection guide12 in his layered tribute 4 Walls, 3 Layers, 2 Marks, 1 Light (2006); and his conflation of Harry Orsman’s The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English for the 2006 Sydney Biennale, to name a few. As a master of linguistic play, Reynolds could probably transform the phone book into a dramatic reading experience.
13
The exhibition that forms a bridge between CLOUD and I Tell You Solemnly is his 2007 show Looking west, late afternoon, low water at the Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, which lines up the same black canvases but in uninterrupted geometric blocks of silver Maori text.
Being wrenched from the page, words take physical form and can respond to light. With 4 Walls… the layers of information were shrouded in a gloom, lit only by a single light bulb placed in the centre of the room. The silver lines of CLOUD’s 7073 white canvases were dispersed across the monolithic white walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, appearing and disappearing in the light like precipitation and denying any systematic reading. Whereas CLOUD seems to evaporate heaven-wards in a scattering of slang, I Tell You Solemnly’s black mass plunges into a dark abyss, following the poem’s text into the building’s subterranean catacombs. These darker canvases are more assertive but avoid becoming too weighty and architectural13 with its ragged edges, as well as the imposition of multi-coloured corona shapes, which provide an additional energy from their placement in binary pairs of black-and-white, much like the work of Gordon Walters. These chromatic highlights fluctuate in response to the changing play of light through the coloured glass dome of the gallery ceiling.
14
Anne Kennedy, ‘I tell you solemnly’, in Sing-Song. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003, p. 126.
Cars take off from outside the house
in a shower of gravel leaving a scattering like a poem.14
Photograph: Patrick Reynolds
In translating the poem from the page to the gallery wall, new conventions of form and typography are needed if the text isn’t to be a simple facsimile. As a guide, Reynolds has used the pacing, punctuation and page layout of Kennedy’s original text as it appears in Sing-Song to guide his configuration of the canvases. To achieve this, he distilled bits of the text into the smallest components of the work — the individual canvases — which have an atom-like relationship to the greater work. As the original text is transferred from the continuous flow of the page to the more molecular canvases, a sense of rhythm is established and reinforced through the spread of different lengths, quantities and placement of words and syllables on each, giving some words more sustain or emphasis. The additional pause required by a line-break is then created by the white-black corona pairs.
There are other visual dynamics that arise as a result of the poem’s translation into a set of real-space objects: in typographical terms, the coronas create what is known as rivers in the text. That is, when a block of type is justified with a straight edge on both margins, it can create gaps between words that run together from one line to the next in a distracting way. In this case, through the translation of the poem into real space, new shapes are formed by the negative spaces of the coronas, especially when one row aligns with the next, disrupting the horizontal flow and encouraging the eye to travel vertically through the grid, resulting in a crossword effect of rows and columns, accentuated by the combined vertical blocks and allowing for a lateral, non-linear reading. This roller-coaster presentation matches the giddy highs and lows of Kennedy’s text, which swoops and dives with weight and levity between big and little things, from dead kittens to domestic ecstasies, library books to lunchwrap.
15
Allan Smith, ‘John Reynolds: A Multitude of Dreams’, Mary Barr, editor, Distance Looks Our Way: 10 Artists from New Zealand. Wellington: Distance Looks Our Way Trust, 1992.
By creating this spatial experience of a poem, Reynolds allows the text — and the viewer — to escape and travel in space. In discussing his earlier work, Allan Smith has described a characteristic of much of Reynolds’ art, which can be equally applied to the text explorations of his signpost works or any other text works already mentioned. Smith notes a dialectic in Reynolds’ work between the ephemeral and the fixed; between floating and standing, balloons and anchors, smoke and scaffolds — torturing the viewer with an incessant, shape-shifting movement of metaphors wrestling with the claustrophobic rootedness of stones and signposts. Smith quotes Roland Barthes, who explains his idea of imaginative drift within a work by stating that ‘Drifting occurs when I do not respect the whole...’ This description of Barthes, floating like a cork on the waves, blissfully immersed and floating in a text, describes the dematerialisation effect of many of Reynolds’ drawings, but also perfectly anticipates his more recent text work.15
16
John Reynolds, interview with the author, July 17 2006, portions first published in ‘Time is of the Essence’, New Zealand Herald, 29 July 2006, Canvas section, pp. 21-22.
17
Anne Kennedy, ‘Her first archive’, in Sing-Song. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003, p. 126.
Reynolds himself uses terms like magic and transubstantiation to describe his process: ‘The simple alchemy of registering some mark, or some moment, or some assertion and moving it to see where it moves to. That’s the process at play,’ he has said, also invoking Camille Paglia’s quote: ‘The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.’ Reynolds adds that ‘the magic of a word; it strikes a huge chord and it’s a tension for me and my work’.16
In the room where the baby had slept for an entire lifetime, every sound was housed a catalogued document of the times.17
Like language, sound and music are also tools that help Reynolds work his charm. As well as providing rhythm and shape, the recurring circular corona forms also punctuate the text with sound. Starting at the top, the composition begins with a sequence of text-less, silvery-white canvases that seem to introduce the piece with a gentle murmur of word-less sounds. Then, placed between the words ‘YOU’ and ‘SOLEMNLY’ of the title, is a black corona on a black canvas, the same as those used for the text but with a subtle, black circle instead. Using the black canvas, already established as a means of delivering text, the dark corona becomes part of the narrative, as a placeholder creating an almost audible (negative) space or breath between words. In successive lines, multi-coloured coronas also feature on white canvases, which recall Reynolds’ previous use of these same white canvases to contain text in works such as CLOUD (2006). The circular forms of the corona resemble the musical notation for a whole note, or semibreve, with layered coronas combining to suggest colour-note chords, within each canvas and with adjacent canvases. So these can be read too, but as a tonal accompaniment that provides an emotive register, like a melody that lingers and surges between vocal lines, indicated by the different colour combinations of each corona. These coloured panels in their chord-like combinations leach into the adjacent texts, making them almost audible, rather than mentally read, as if spoken or sung. So the words are not contained by the wiry lines within the small canvases that resemble writing, but become part of something bigger that occupies the surrounding space with a lyrical musicality.
18
Deborah Smith refers to him as Mr Riff in her article, ‘The Shape of a Cloud’, in Home and Entertaining, Dec/Jan 2007, p. 54.
19
Roger Horrocks, ‘John Reynolds: Painting,
Planting and Performance’, in Art New Zealand 122, Autumn 2007. p. 31.
20
Anne Kennedy, ‘John Reynolds’ in Look This Way. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007, p.22.
Reynolds also likes to riff,18 a provisional process like drawing but more commonly used by musicians and writers to develop ideas or establish a motif. But what Reynolds does here, perhaps, is lyrical riffing: not the riffing done by a singer, bringing form to words through sound and rhythm, but riffing with the lyrics as a visual, written phenomenon. He has previously employed the lyrics of Nirvana, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, to name a few.19 An early example of Reynolds working with musical text is the cover he designed for Don McGlashan’s 1982 Blam Blam Blam album Luxury Length, featuring a full transcription of the lyrics in his trademark scrawl. With I Tell You Solemnly, he brings his own sound and melody to the written word, exploiting or accentuating the poet’s given rhythms. Kennedy herself has remarked on the noises that emanate from Reynolds’ works, evident in his grids, crosses, knots, spirals, and webs.20
21
Anne Kennedy, ‘Da da’, in Sing-Song. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003, p. 2.
22
John Reynolds, interview with the author, August 24 2005, portions first published in ‘Conversation pieces’, New Zealand Herald,
7 September 2005, p. B4.
Reynolds does not work alone in giving the text voice. Kennedy already fills Sing-Song with sonic imagery, beginning the book with her three-and-a-half year old daughter’s first song, ‘a small lark’s descent’21 and littering the subsequent pages with an orchestral palette of sounds from the suburbs. So Reynolds is tapping into energy already present in the work, much in the way he uses musical references or appropriated lyrics as a way to disrupt his own practice and jump-start the emotional fuse in his work.
Every teenager in the world understands this — music is a great vehicle for disassembling received ideas or fast-tracking emotive connectiveness, for declaring personal and independent spaces, and for transgressions, for social cohesions [and] connectiveness.22
23
Roger Horrocks, ‘John Reynolds: Painting, Planting and Performance’, in Art New Zealand 122, Autumn 2007, p. 59.
24
Unknown author, http://mraybould.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/samuel-beckett-biography/, accessed 17 December 2007.
Performance provides other strategies for Reynolds to further destabilise the reception of his work. With a well-known fondness for the absurd plays of Samuel Beckett, his works have been compared to theatrical scripts or cue cards.23 Beckett is considered a leading exponent of the theatre of the absurd, where language has a more dada-esque function, working phonetically, rhythmically, and opening up meaning beyond the literal, so confusion and contradiction are just as articulate as coherence. He has described his best-known play Waiting for Godot, which in turn was inspired by a David Casper Friedrich painting, as being ‘written for small men locked in a big space,’24 a description that would be equally fitting for the way Reynolds enlarges his work through a process of atomisation rather than dilution.
25
Jesus Christ repeatedly prefaced his proclamations with these words for added emphasis. This is probably no coincidence given that both Reynolds and Kennedy have a Catholic background.
Performance provides other strategies for Reynolds to further destabilise the reception of his work. With a well-known fondness for the absurd plays of Samuel Beckett, his works have been compared to theatrical scripts or cue cards.23 Beckett is considered a leading exponent of the theatre of the absurd, where language has a more dada-esque function, working phonetically, rhythmically, and opening up meaning beyond the literal, so confusion and contradiction are just as articulate as coherence. He has described his best-known play Waiting for Godot, which in turn was inspired by a David Casper Friedrich painting, as being ‘written for small men locked in a big space,’24 a description that would be equally fitting for the way Reynolds enlarges his work through a process of atomisation rather than dilution.
26
Reynolds’ 2007 exhibition Known knowns, known unknowns & unknown unknowns included a wall-drawing executed like a child (Bart?) writing out lines on a blackboard.
27
John Reynolds, blackboard lecture, Gus Fisher Gallery, November 17, 2007.
Whether referencing Joseph Beuys, John Baldessari, Beckett or Bart Simpson,26 Reynolds’ practice of performing on blackboards gives a fittingly ephemeral presentation that suggests a state of flux or impermanence in the mark-making. But Reynolds’ texts have more resemblance to the witty slogans of protest placards that perform in city streets than the much-romanticised road-side produce signs that loom large in the landscape of New Zealand art history. Reynolds states that he works both with and against the New Zealand tradition of portentous, black text paintings, bringing a provisionality to Kennedy’s text (and to painting) to create a playful, visceral experience of both making and reading the work.27
28
D. A. Pennebaker, Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker Hegedus Films, Inc., 1967, re-issued Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2006.
Musician Bob Dylan has a placard performance of his own. Comparable to a Beckett piece, it was executed in 1965 as the opening sequence of D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 film Don’t Look Back.28 Considered one of the first music videos, Dylan visually re-imagines the text of his song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ as a rapid-fire sequence of written fragments on cards, which he flicks through, accompanied by the track. Talking in the background are Dylan’s road manager, Bob Neuwirth, and poet Allen Ginsberg, who both helped draw-up the cards, along with other people such as Joan Baez and Donovan, who happened to be there on the day. At times Dylan falls out of time with flipping his cards. And some cards intentionally stray from the lyric with intentional mis-spellings and puns (‘SUCKCESS’ … ‘PAWKING METAWS’ … ‘MAN-WHOLE’), which visually interpret and paraphrase the original text, while isolating key words from each line as a signifier for the rest of the recorded line, but also forming a new text and creating compositions with each text, such as ‘BED, BUT’... ‘PLEASE HER, PL-EASE HIM’. These discrepancies between the cards and lyrics create a rupture between the enactment of the lyrics and the original recorded song as distinct performances.
29
These additional versions are included in the deluxe DVD re-issue of Don’t Look Back, which also includes a flipbook of the back-alley Subterranean Homesick Blues sequence. D. A. Pennebaker, Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker Hegedus Films, Inc., 1967, re-issued Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2006.
This well-known footage was filmed alongside scaffolding in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel, London. Fortuitously, for the sake of this essay, there are also two alternative versions, one of which takes place in a park with Ginsberg and Neuwirth once more standing around in the background.29 The opening shot is a close-up of an already-present permanent sign (not too dissimilar to those mimicked by Reynolds for I Tell You Solemnly) pointing to a ‘Display of Paintings’. As the song begins, the camera zooms out to reveal Dylan standing alongside this sign, which is then co-opted into the piece so the arrow indicates his succession of cue card compositions.
There is also a video element for I Tell You Solemnly, which provides a sort of ongoing redrawing of an infrastructure similar to his earlier use of armatures, which anchor the work in a space. Contractors are shown in a continuous loop, assembling the scaffolding from which Reynolds was able to install his work above the stairs. Although the scaffolding is gone before the exhibition is officially opened, it is permanently captured (along with other gallery staff and visitors) in a perpetual state of construction by the artist’s video camera. Screening on a monitor opposite the main wall, it provides additional clues to the construction of his drawn poem and adds an additional performance component.
30
Laurence Simmons, editor, Speaking Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals Rethink New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007.
31
John Reynolds, ‘Artist of the Month’, in Citymix October, 2007, p. 53.
As Smith has noted, Reynolds likes to have a fixed structure, be it architectural supports or pre-configured text, against which to generate a sense of free-fall. These are the armatures, the scaffolds, the floorplans, the signposts, the gallery staff and contractors, which become supports for more metaphysical constructs. In his illustrations for the book Speaking Truth to Power30 (also exhibited in the Gus Fisher Gallery at the same time as I Tell You Solemnly) a range of elaborate and make-shift signposts, placards, and hustings were used as literal ‘street furniture’ to prop up the words, as an analogy for the way textual concepts such as ‘critical thinking’ or ‘nation builders’ can physically occupy the landscape.31 This is consistent with his mapping of Orsman’s taxonomy of a local lexicon.
32
I am indebted to Nick Bollinger for making the Dylan-Beckett connection in his Don’t Look Back review, ‘Always carry a light bulb’, in New Zealand Listener, June 2-8, 2007, pp. 46-8.
Shot in a single take from a static camera, Reynolds’ scaffold video is comparable to Pennebaker’s cinema verité style, in which the ‘action’ is allowed to happen and the support structure (Neuwirth) is given a walk-on cameo. In fact, Beckett is said to have liked Don’t Look Back so much that he requested the script.32 The stage of this filmed performance is established through framing such that the space resembles a discrete, self-contained set with no external reference. Although entirely impromptu and un-directed, every arrival looks choreographed, with workers, gallery staff and visitors entering and exiting perfectly from stage left or right, or appearing and vanishing into or from the concealed void of the stairs. Filming took place from the far side of the gallery, on the exact spot in the gallery’s ‘phone booth’ recess that a television monitor was later placed to show the footage. The monitor’s screen was positioned on the same plane the camera’s lens had previously filmed from, replaying the earlier scene like a jet-lagged mirror, prismatically reflecting the gallery’s infrastructure back into the room long after it has departed. This additional filmic space becomes a portal into another temporal zone, haunted by ghostly traces of those people working in the space at the time of the work’s installation. This fixes the work in the moment before installation begins but also leaves it in a permanent state of flux, echoing the half-constructed struts of Colin McCahon’s On Building Bridges (1952) with its cubist splintering of background forms into faceted components.
33
Leigh Davis, Country And Western. Auckland: Jack Books, 2002. p. 8 sourced from http://www.jackbooks.com/Leigh/artknowledge/artknowledge.htm on 20 January 2007.
34
This quote has uncertain origins, usually attributed to Elvis Costello but also regularly credited to Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson or Thelonius Monk.
When is a painting not a painting? It is this dichotomy that defines the territory Reynolds has wrestled with for much of his career, continually working around the edges of his discipline in search of ways to turn it around.33 An oft-repeated quote dismissively states that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’34 as if this would be a futile exercise. But it is exactly this contradictory approach that is at the heart of what Reynolds does. The riffs provide a point of departure, a sure path to the border. But Reynolds does not take shortcuts and is not so interested in the destination. Rather than go for the easy pay-off, he prefers to be set adrift on a contradictory tangent, taking the long road, but just for the music on the way. Like Christopher Robin, Reynolds seems content being neither here nor there.
John Reynolds Critical Thinking 2007
oilstick on paper
320 x 245 mm
courtesy of the artist
John Reynolds Speaking Truth to Power 2007
oilstick on paper
320 x 245 mm
courtesy of the artist
John Reynolds Doing Theory 2007
oilstick on paper
320 x 245 mm
courtesy of the artist
John Reynolds Knowledge Economy 2007
oilstick on paper
320 x 245 mm
courtesy of the artist
35
Anne Kennedy, ‘I tell you solemnly’, in Sing-Song. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003, p. 128.
A child couldn’t carry
a chafing backpack or plastic bucket of briny sea or a tune
but it’s almost worth it
worth if for the sing-song afterwards.35
Andrew Clifford