from “Stille Nacht I”

In addition to their obsession with writing and handwritten artifacts (which was the subject of earlier post and gallery), the Quays use a variety of print materials – advertisements, engraved illustrations, handbills, maps, labels of various types, name plates, posters, signs, etc. – as elements of the décor in their films. These elements are often used denotatively, i.e. as actual advertisements, posters, signs, etc., but they are also frequently used for their graphic qualities alone.

One of the more surprising print artifacts to be featured in their films is the humble yet ubiquitous bar code. It appears briefly in Street of Crocodiles, on the rear wall of a shop window, in Stille Nacht I (Dramolet), as the the table top on which the puppet will take his meal, and, most impressively, in Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, where it covers the walls of the white, Escher-like space in which much of the film’s action takes place.

In this latter film, the bar code serves as a visual leitmotif running through the entire film: it first appears on the title screen, the opening shots and intertitle, then later literally comes to life when its black vertical lines grow to cover the white walls of the décor. It’s alternating black and white bars are echoed visually in the striped wallpaper and fabric found in the black room where two sickly puppets languish. The bar code is also suggested in a number of other ways, not only in this but in other Quay films as well: by dark tree trunks in a forest (This Unnameable Little Broom), the dark and light threads sticking up out of the ground (Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies), the engraved vertical lines on various objects (Anamorphosis), etc.

In each case the bar code serves no functional narrative purpose, were it only to create an Barthesian “effet de réel.” Rather, it seems to be used for purely graphic reasons, i.e. for its simple alternation of black and white lines, much like the calligraphed words and phrases that often cover the walls, tables, and other surfaces of their filmic interiors and which are also often illegible. That said, it’s difficult to consider the bar code as a neutral mark and ignore its role as a symbol of commodification. In subverting its intended use, the Quays could be commenting on its mercantile associations, or on the unavoidable commodification of culture more broadly speaking (“O inevitabile fatum”), as a remark they made about the “Stille Nacht” series suggests: they described these short black and white films, all but one being commissions, as “subtly engaged in selling some useless object as a form of symbolic salesmanship.”

You can see a related selection of the stills in the Brothers Quay gallery of bar codes.

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• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page
• Picturing Writing (internal link)
• Brothers Quay gallery – writing (internal link)
• Hands are complicated thoughts (internal link)
• Brothers Quay gallery – hands (internal link)

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Return to “O inevitabile fatum”

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sktchbook is an on-going project of images created on the iPhone using a variety of image-making and manipulating applications, primarily sktch, a generative drawing app by CreativeApplications.Net, from which the project takes its name.

You can view all of the sktches that have been featured on In an indeterminate place here, or the complete collection on Flickr.

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Michael Praetorius, a composer of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, wrote that an organ with the first modern keyboard arrangement had been built in Halberstadt’s cathedral in 1361. This organ was the first one with a claviature of 12 notes and this claviature is used on our keyboard instruments today. So one can say that the cradle of modern music was in Halberstadt. Subtract 1361 from the millennial year 2000, and the result is 639.

Though the choice of the calculation used to determine the unusual length of the performance may seem somewhat arbitrary (not to mention equating the location of the first organ with a “modern” keyboard with the birthplace of “modern music”), it is certainly not inappropriate given Cage’s predilection for the random. The composition itself is of indeterminate duration and Cage did note that it should be played “as slow as possible,” and this effectively leaves the door open for extended performances, so why not 639 years?

Such an idea certainly has its precedents, one of them being Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893), though its monumental length of 18+ hours seems downright puny when compared to the 600+ years of Organ2/ASLSP. (It’s worth recalling that Cage organized the first complete public performance of Vexations in 1963.) Another antecedent is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7, which consists of just two pitches – the B below middle C and the F# above it – “to be held for a long time,” according to the composer’s instructions. Organ2/ASLSP is actually closer to the former than the latter, though, since Young’s piece is of indefinite duration and could go on, theoretically at least, forever.

What is unprecedented here is that, since the performance will last several lifetimes, if indeed it can actually be completed, no one will ever hear it in its entirety, at least not in real time. Thus, it may well be the first public presentation of a work of art that can only be experienced in part, the intentional impossibility of perceiving a work in its totality being a relatively rare phenomenon. And it certainly gives new meaning to the cliché “ars longa, vita brevis.”

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• John-Cage-Orgelprojekt Halberstadt
• As Slow As Possible – Wikipedia

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A Humument, p. 11

As I’ve written (here and here), the opening pages of A Humument serve primarily to establish its status as a conceptual work of art/literature. Over the course of those pages the nature of the coming narrative is also hinted at: we are given a brief glimpse of the story-line (a love story with strong erotic overtones) and are introduced to the following characters, who are listed on page 11 (TE, TPE, FRE, SRE): “the history viola,” “eve,” “edople,” “stan quent,” “sid,” “the human nature general,” and “operation toge.”

One of the interesting things about this list is its sketchiness: a couple of the characters named here (eve and edople) appear only in passing on the coming pages while others (the history viola, stan quent, sid, and the human nature general) do not appear at all. The protagonist of A Humument comes at the end of the list: “operation toge,” though to my knowledge this is the only time he is so named. His “real” name is “bill toge,” though he is often simply called by his surname “toge.” As Phillips has noted in his introduction to A Humunent, that particular combination of letters only appears in English in the words “together” and “altogether,” hence he can only be named on pages on which those words appear. Otherwise, different monikers are used to indicate him (such as “myster t,” or simply “T,” as he is called on p. 6 [AE]), when he is not simply referred to by the pronouns “he” and “him.”

Also interesting is the fact that the other two main characters – Irma and Grenville – do not appear on the list, though Irma may be the woman referred to on p. 2 (AE) as she who is perhaps “over her ankles in the storm and fire and desire of art; and the art of art, and would have given us a humument or two.” (And if we consider her role in both the present book and in Phillips’ opera Irma [on which more later], she has given us a humument or two.) The latter two characters were in fact the main characters of Mallock’s A Human Document, the source of A Humument, but they have withdrawn slightly to leave the center stage to toge, whose story will unfold over the pages of Phillips’ book.

It is tempting, given the nature of A Humument, to read the textual elements of the work as so many unrelated oracular or aphoristic statements. To do so, however, is to deny the narrative qualities of the work and ignore the fact that a story is being told. On the surface, it is the story of toge, Irma, and Grenville. Beneath the surface, it is the story – in the form of a demonstration or in places an anatomy – of literary and artistic creation. The dual narrative reflects the dual nature of the book, a work of both the visual and language arts.

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As A Humument varies from edition to edition, it is necessary to indicate the edition to which I’m referring at any given point. To do so I have adopted the following key:

TPE = Tetrad Press Edition
TE = Trade Edition
FRE = First Revised Edition
SRE/TE = Second Revised Edition / Third Edition
FE = Fourth Edition
AE = All editions

As I hope these pages will demonstrate, A Humument could and should be read both synchronically and diachronically.

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• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

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sktchbook is an on-going project of images created on the iPhone using a variety of image-making and manipulating applications, primarily sktch, a generative drawing app by CreativeApplications.Net, from which the project takes its name.

You can view all of the sktches that have been featured on In an indeterminate place here, or the complete collection on Flickr.

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This paradoxical statement has always puzzled me, especially coming from Borges, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. If ever there was a writer whose work could be considered an “intellectual exercise” it would be him. And of his writings, “Pierre Menard” perhaps more than any other deserves that label – how better to describe a story that, in the midst of an otherwise straightforward parody on literary culture, poses probing questions about the nature of language and meaning, about the respective roles of writers and readers and the ways in which socio-cultural contexts inflect their activities, and finally, about the status of authorship and the necessity, in fact, the very possibility of being “original”? In this heady context, what are we to make of this statement that, on the surface at least, seems to deride the utility of intellectual enquiry?

Well, one way to take the statement is literally, i.e. as a claim that intellectual activity is pointless, though admittedly such an interpretation seems to fly in the face of the story, written in praise of a particularly cerebral exercise: the creation of a work of conceptual literature. Another way to take the statement is, well, also literally, i.e. that intellectual activity is not necessarily useful. This would certainly be the case of Menard’s undertaking (that of Borges’ as well): literary writing serves no practical purpose. As Auden said of poetry, it makes nothing happen.

It’s interesting to consider this latter idea through the prism of a statement made by Darwish. “J’ai longtemps cru que la poésie était une arme,” he wrote. “Et puis j’ai compris qu’un poème ne changeait rien. Rien que la poésie.” [“For a long time I believed that poetry was a weapon. And then I understood that a poem didn’t change anything. Anything other than poetry.”] A literary text may “change nothing” in practical terms, though it can inspire and inform change in aesthetic, artistic, and/or conceptual domains that could ultimately have “real-world” consequences. Such, I believe, is the case of Borges’ “Pierre Menard” (and “The Garden of Forking Paths” and…): it anticipates some of the fundamental questions that underlie postmodern and post-structuralist theories about literature and art, and literary and artistic creation, and offers a re-imagining of the respective roles of authors and readers, that is, of makers and consumers, that is currently being played out in a variety of socio-cultural contexts, not least of all on the “Web 2.0” Internet with its wikis, blogs, mashups, et al.

Borges’ narrator could be right – there may be no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless. On the other hand, the conscious exploration of that uselessness may well lead to something useful.

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• “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”
• “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (trans. James E. Irby)

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from “The Comb”

After the extreme close-up on the face, one of the most common shots in the Brothers Quay filmic grammar is the close-up on the hands. As these shots remind us, hands can be as expressive as faces, perhaps even more so, when it comes to conveying emotional states or revealing something about the person (or puppet) to whom they belong. Hands are also frequently agents of action in and of themselves and thus function as characters in some of the Quay’s films (cf the writing hands featured in an earlier post and gallery). As if to draw a parallel between the hands of puppets and their makers/masters, in at least one film – Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies – we actually see one of the filmmakers’ hands as it reaches into the frame and sets a ball in motion, momentarily blurring the distinction between the narrative and meta levels of the film.

As if to emphasize their independent status, hands are frequently represented as autonomous entities in the Quays’ movies, moving about and acting on their own. In Stille Nacht III (1993), for example, the leading (actually, the only) roles are played by two disembodied hands. One guides us into and through the action of the film, floating down a dim hallway, pointing to the plaque indicating the locale (the apparently fictitious « Archiv Gottinga »), and then leading us to the place where the action will occur: a room housing an anamorphic deer table one of whose testicles will be grazed by a bullet fired by the other disembodied hand, the film being an illustration of the phenomenon by which the wounded or removed testicle of a deer results in the asymmetric growth of its antlers.

The use of the hand is more complex in The Comb (1990), where it performs several functions. Most noticeably perhaps, it serves as a leitmotif linking the film’s frame and embedded stories: the twitchy finger of the sleeping woman’s hand in the opening sequence foreshadows the wagging finger of the mysterious puppet that seems to reign over the puppet world. Each time the action moves from the frame story to the embedded story, the hand and twitching finger serve as the transition image. Also, within the puppet world, there is a child-like puppet carrying a ladder on “the edge of the forest,” as an intertitle tells us. At certain points, the puppet falls asleep on its feet and when it does so its hands become detached from its body and continue to carry the ladder on their own. Eventually, they bring the ladder into an ornate, wood-paneled, vault-like structure whose walls, decorated with calligraphed letters, are pierced by geometric openings that allow passage from one chamber into another. In one such chamber a woman puppet is sleeping, recalling the sleeping actress in the opening sequence of the film. Her presence suggests that the real and puppet worlds, and thus the frame and embedded narratives, are mirrors of one another, and that perhaps the sleeping woman in the frame story is dreaming of herself, asleep and dreaming in the embedded story.

And here things get complicated, since at one point the disembodied hands carrying the ladder through the vaulted space in which the woman puppet is sleeping push the ladder up and through her body from the inside, as if the space they were traveling through and which she herself inhabits is located within her, or that there is another such space inside her and within which another pair of disembodied hands carries a ladder, and another woman puppet sleeps, and so on, ad infinitum. Once free of her body the hands, still gripping the ladder, fly off and, as if on a magic carpet, sail through the vaulted space whose walls have since sprouted myriad ladders, some straight, some curved, which dangle downward like tree roots. Those hands eventually return to their place at the ends of the arms of the child puppet who awakens and continues on his way, and we eventually leave the puppet world for the “real” world via the transitional image of the hand with the wagging finger/the twitchy finger on the hand of the sleeping woman who finally awakens. She rises from her bed and begins her toilet as the film concludes, running her fingers through her hair, picking up a comb, combing her hair, then stopping to scrape her thumbnail across its teeth.

That comb had been presented in close-up at the beginning of the film, when it seemed to foreshadow the ladders that featured so prominently in the puppet world of the embedded story, its teeth suggesting their rungs. Appearing in close-up again at the end, it not only gives The Comb a strong sense of closure, it also emphasizes a motivic coherence in its suggestion of the ladders.

You can see a selection of the stills in the Brothers Quay gallery of hands.

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• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page
• Claire Kitson, “ANIMATED: On the Quays’ Side – ‘The Comb (from The Museums of Sleep)’”
• Picturing Writing (internal link)
• Brothers Quay gallery – writing (internal link)

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Return to “Hands are complicated thoughts”

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sktchbook is an on-going project of images created on the iPhone using a variety of image-making and manipulating applications, primarily sktch, a generative drawing app by CreativeApplications.Net, from which the project takes its name.

You can view all of the sktches that have been featured on In an indeterminate place here, or the complete collection on Flickr.

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