#12 'The light, the light, the light' or how to live through 'the severe present'
On Low and Gutai and poetry being on the side of being and not of nothingness
Just over two years ago, Mimi Parker died. I’ve written about her before, because she’s kind of always in my mind, a voice, as NPR’s Stephen Thompson put it two days after her passing, that “let the light in”: “If I stop to breathe deeply and tune out the stray noise, I can still conjure Parker's voice in my head as she holds a single note and lets it wash over the room. That voice is a light that can never be extinguished. But I'll still miss it for as long as I live.”
After Parker died, her husband, Alan Sparkhawk, disbanded Low, the band they’d formed together in 1993, meaning Low existed for just one year shy of three decades. It feels very weird to say that Low was anything. In my daily listening, it very much still is. Sparkhawk seemed strong and fragile long before his soulmate passed, and deeply spiritual. I always think about one gig I saw them play, at the Royal Festival Hall, where he stood on the edge of the stage and kind prayed over the audience, beckoning “the light, the light, the light.”
The last time I saw them was at St John at Hackney on the 2022 Hey What tour. (Reviewing the night for Clash, Nico Franks noted that multiple people fainted during the gig: “Low at full volume in a church will do that to you.”) The band reprised the minimalist strip lighting set design (1 of the images below, counting left to right, top to bottom) that they’d used in 2018 for the Double Negative tour, as brutal and exhilarating and mesmerising and pared back a show of light and dark as the music.
The light, the light, the light. This week I’ve chewed on that repetition. I’ve thought about what it means to wear light and be light-filled, light filtering down as if through a forest canopy, being light or being its absence, letting the light in, holding light, drawing with light and shadow, being in the shade, shadowing, shading, sitting in the shade, shades drawn.
On December 10, in the context of Alexandre da Cunha’s first solo show at James Cohan (48 Walker St) in NYC, musician Audrey Wright and artist Geoff Robertson are performing Luminous Being (2)—a solo violin recital and light art installation combined. Wright is a classical violinist and composer and Robertson, a sculptor who makes often wearable light pieces that respond to sound. The pairing is beautiful.
That instantly brings to mind lots of things.
First, Aoba Ichiko’s forthcoming album, Luminescent Creatures (3; out on February 28, 2025 — preorder here). In an interview in 2018, Aoba was asked about how she felt about light and darkness. “I’ve thought about it a lot,” she replied. “The first place I played today had lighting, but when I moved to the area to have my unplugged session, that place was really dark, almost like a black out. I was worried if there was anyone that would be scared being in the dark reminding them of some sort of trauma. But I also questioned if putting on the light will really make them feel better, so I thought maybe it was best just to keep it all natural. I was hoping I could turn my music into a light that will shine inside of them. But I kept thinking about it over and over during the show. I’m constantly trying new ways to find the best way.”
“I feel a lot more relaxed being in a dim light than a bright light,” she continued. “When I make music, I’m always under that kind of light. I guess that’s what’s natural to me. I don’t really believe in ‘darkness = anxiety’ or ‘brightness = comfort’. Those feelings tend to be expressed that way, but I feel like I’ve worked on eliminating those kinds of stereotypes.” (I routinely have a bath in the dark. I’d rather leave the door open than turn the light on. Which, oh gosh, brings us to night swimming in the inky black waters of a cove off the Corniche in Marseille and REM’s Nightswimming and how much I love Ami Faku and that indelible time I went on a night hike with Melani’s father Anton near Greytown in KwaZulu-Natal to see dry lightning storms rend the dark skies above the wooded hills.)
Second, that anthology of poems I’m always reading, edited by Czesław Miłosz, A Book Of Luminous Things, which you can read in full here on the Internet Archive. (“My intention is not so much to defend poetry in general,” Miłosz writes in his intro, “but, rather, to remind readers that for some very good reasons it may be of importance today. […] Theology, science, philosophy, though they attempt to provide cures, are not very effective ‘in that dark world where gods have lost their way.’ (Roethke). They are able at best to confirm that our affliction is not invented.”)
Third, Rebecca Horn’s many luminous pieces: the White Body Fan (5), the Mechanical Body Fan, the Finger Gloves (6); Feather Prison and the many other works that riff on the notion of wings and flight; the piano she suspended, upside-down, from the ceiling and rigged to open and almost fall apart before folding itself back up and in again like an outsized pop-up book. The sound of all of it. Sharpness and softness constantly collide in Horn’s work.
Fourth, one of my favourite biblical verses, Isaiah 54 v 2, which I particularly love in French: “élargis l'espace de ta tente et déploie largement les toiles qui t'abritent. Ne les ménage pas, allonge tes cordages, assure tes piquets”. From the Hebrew Bible: “Widen the place of your tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of your habitations, do not spare; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.” As a principle by which to both live and make work, I’ve always held on to that idea of widening the space of your tent.
Fifth, Shade Art Review ’s Lou Mensah’s thinking around the title, Shade, that she chose first for her podcast back in 2019. When I interviewed her in January 2021 she said “shade” was a metaphorical respite for black communities (a safe space of quiet contemplation before heading back out into the bright light of the world. “And I think we need a lot of that,” she said.) And a reference to the veil behind which American sociologist and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois saw the black experience relegated, in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois described a societal divide that separated out black culture from white, one that insisted on black people's fluency in both, while all the while coddling white people's ignorance of what is not theirs. If 2020's summer of protest did anything, one hopes, it was to set fire to that veil: to bring things out of the shadows. Everything Mensah has produced since speaks to the conviction that art has a crucial role to play in this. (Incidentally, look at these amazing hand-drawn infographics Dubois made in 1900.)
Last, one of my favourite artworks, 電気服 (Denkifuku; Electric Dress) by Tanaka Atsuko, from 1956 (3,4,5): a 60kg wearable piece, that took Tanaka about a year to make. She used 100 tube lights and 90 light bulbs left either white or painted in one of nine different colours. The lights would simply shine or pulsate. In an excellent piece, Graham Thomas quotes Tanaka saying that what interested her most during the creative process was “the switching on and off of the electric light bulbs”: “When I turn the switch and the motor starts the electric bulbs that I have installed take on an unreal beauty as if they were not made by human hands.”
Tanaka was a salient member of the Gutai Art Association, the Japanese avant-garde group formed in 1954, which insisted on radical experimentation, pure creativity and finding unknown beauty. “What matters most to us,” founder Yoshihara Jirō wrote in 1956, “is to ensure that contemporary art provides a site enabling the people living through the severe present to be set free. We firmly believe that the creations accomplished in that free site can contribute to the progress of mankind. We hope to present concrete proof that our spirits are free. We never cease to pursue fresh emotions in all types of plastic arts. We look forward to finding friends in all visual arts.”
I love that juxtaposition of “the severe present” and “finding friends”.
In my head I’m also juxtaposing Tanaka’s dress with Jeff Wall’s After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, from 1999-2000, an image currently on show at White Cube Bermondsey in London, which I can never see without hearing it. Wall depicts Ellison’s protagonist, of course, playing records. But what I hear is the buzzing of all those electrical connections and also what it would sound like if you shook the Man’s room like you might the image, how those 1,369 lightbulbs might chime with each other, in something like beauty, before crashing to the floor in an event altogether more dangerous and destructive.
I interviewed Wall the other day, for a piece that I think will be out in Saturday’s Guardian. I asked him if he ever heard his images. No, he said, he purposefully excludes sound.
But, he said, “if works of art are good enough to make you like them, then there's a certain kind of life that flows into them. It kind of hovers there, and you can't quite put your finger on it, and that's why you go back to seeing them. I think all good works of art do that, no matter the form.”
This chimes with Adam Bradley writing of Ellison that with Invisible Man, he “set out to write a novel that would be impossible simply to file and forget.” Works of art that arrest your thoughts and still your mind. Pieces that render the world truthfully, that make you see, but without crushing you. Things that let the light in. The thing about light of course is that we don’t always like what we see. But, man, we really do have to see it. “Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general,” writes Milosz, “it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colourful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity, poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.”
Both Tanaka’s Electric Dress and Wall’s After "Invisible Man" were massively present in my mind for a piece I did a long while ago during a residency at the JCVA in Israel. Ahead of the residency I commissioned an amazing designer and artist called Blandine Bardeau to make a dress out of scoobydoo plastic cable to which I then attached fishing bells, toy parts and a bunch of other stuff. I bought a chef’s apron and similarly bejewelled it with stuff that would sound as it moved. And I used this to perform a spoken-word poem, entitled The Narrator’s Prologue (For Révérien), in Tel Aviv.
So today I leave you with this Low live, which I’ve just listened to in full, while writing, and that poem of mine. I’m glad I’ve found you, my friends.
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The Narrator’s Prologue (for Révérien)
For grace, at its most absurd. The passing, the ephemeral, the reckoning with what is inside, what you can see, what you would not accept, what you cannot deny. I am forgetful. I am an emergency vehicle. I am, and my hand makes the sign of your interrupted shoulder. Red powder falls as my fingers trace the contours of ten thousand scars, Honour’s face etched with the living memory of the very death of humanity, with every inch of our absolute coming short. For we do come short, at every turn. We walk on glass until it pierces boot and sock and calloused foot, red and bulbous, ripped to bitter shreds.
I am forgetful.
And so, to ever not.
This is a song of shaking. The murmurs of my shaking heart, the thudding that your presence prompts, the beats it always skips. (Don’t touch, she whispered, holding open the book at that page, the page of his cross-bound dying, the page my mother had always sought to hide from her young, unknowing eyes, the page she found by herself and couldn’t look away from. Don’t touch him, she told her mother, he’s hurt. )
A marching song, an anthem of sorts.
To stare down any rebel. To cut away at death.
To ward off the heat. To pin down your vacant look.
To counter their boldest move.
To waive my only privilege.
To weave in blood-red wool.
To picture on a cool, spring morning, grass and gravel underfoot as cloud and blue tease the sun out from behind its keeper.
A wall of fear.
A blanket of anguish.
A bed of iron will.
A grim resolution. And not a care in the world, save for the burden of the whole world on your fragile shoulders.
Reaper, come, now reaper, do, please comfort me with poppies red, my hand held high in protest.
(They’re coming now, I see them clearly, two and three, through eyes tightly shut, fluttering lids in a steely dawn, sky and lark and peony on the side.)
One step, two step, four step, three /
<3 divvy baby, can’t you see /
brakes, bar and skidding /
moon is on the rise /
windows shatter cold you always count to three and promise that you’ll never walk on by and so it’s
(repeat, to the beat of the schoolgirl’s clapping, as often as it takes until the playground skipping stops. Two ropes are swung in opposite directions, but parallel and overlapping, so their rotations describe a shifting tunnel. A girl – skinny red jeans with white t-shirt with red belt with black ballet pumps with twisted golden hoops with two hair clips, one gold, one red, on her left temple, side-parting marked with a flattened curl above her right eye, back hair divided in two parts, pulled into a tight ball to the side just behind her right ear and held by two pairs of red plastic baubles on black elastic and teased out into a stiff fan to the left of the nape of her neck – she studies the swirling movement, letting it flow to her shoulders then her knees then her ankles then her feet. Then she jumps.)
He fell. An underground room, furnished with scraps and puzzles, forgotten in a basement. A chance encounter brings this invisible man and one thousand three hundred and sixty-nine light bulbs to a standstill. Connected, they flood the shadows with uncanny brightness and the man is rendered in unmistakable form on photographic paper as silver halides give way to silver, flat white to tones of grey.
Two rooms, one light, one dark, and the sound of a thousand glass baubles crashing into the concrete floor of an empty high-rise corridor.
If thrown at just the right angle, they hit the wall exactly where peeling green paint meets blackened brick, and explode in every direction. Ten thousand tiny shards of broken light and sharpness. Water furious on ice and frozen steel.
Cluster, waft, trickle, purr, every tiny step is made of singing.
And I do sing.
If I could shake that light-bulb room, it might just sound like heaven. It might just rain with an everlasting song, be it only for a moment, before the splintering and the fear. And I would have you by my side, but please don’t come too close. Please watch your step and shield your face, please wait until the music fades, these pieces are such wretched bells. Please hold my hand behind me that your eyes might stay intact. For you saw it all so clearly, and now your sleep is awake with seeing. You must talk of what you saw, and I must sing. My hands held out towards you, red with songs of trust, red for her white piping on red cotton dress.
It takes forever never to forget.
Jerusalem, 2009
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The Narrator’s Prologue 🥹 stopped me in my tracks....and ty for bringing light Shade's origins, I'll share if I may....
Always x