Archive - April, 2012

Writer Lewis Hyde : All Creative and Inventive Minds Are Not Simply Solitary

April 24, 2012 in Images, Process, Words with 5 Comments

 

"The Grey Album," a 2004 mash-up by Danger Mouse, is a prime example of the type of copyright dispute Lewis Hyde discusses in his most recent book, "Common as Air." "The Grey Album" combines an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's "The Black Album" with instrumentals created from unauthorized samples from The Beatles' LP "The White Album." "The Grey Album" gained notoriety when EMI attempted to halt its distribution, despite the fact that both Jay-Z and Paul McCartney reportedly were fine with the project.

 

Lewis Hyde is a rare breed of writer—a contemporary poet, philosopher, and essayist in the tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, and Czeslaw Milosz.

Hyde’s first book, The Gift, which attempts to reconcile the value of creative work with the demands of the market economy, is a revered text in the art world and has never been out of print since its publication in 1983. Artists like Michael Chabon, Bill Viola, Margaret Atwood, Jonthan Lethem, and Zadie Smith are fans of Hyde’s work, and David Foster Wallace called Hyde “a national treasure, one of our true superstars of nonfiction.”

Although Hyde received the MacArthur “genius grant” in 1991 and is highly esteemed in literary circles, his name is not as well-known as it should be. But even if you haven’t heard of Hyde before, you have likely encountered his ideas, many of which have been embraced and adapted by mainstream writers like Seth Godin. When Godin says, “Art is a gift. You can sell the souvenir, the canvas, the recording… but the idea itself is free, and the generosity is a critical part of making art,” he is popularizing the philosophical arguments made in Hyde’s work.

 

"Part of the project of my book," says Hyde, "is to make it clear the degree to which any created thing has roots in the commons. Even a genius like Shakespeare relied on books and myths that were available to him from the past...All creative and inventive minds are not simply solitary." (Lewis Hyde photo courtesy the author)

In the late 1990s, Hyde turned his attention to the subject of intellectual property. The resulting book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, took almost a decade to complete. His timing was fortuitous, for disputes and lawsuits over image appropriation, music remixes, file sharing, and copyright infringement were on the rise and emerging as the central debate of the digital era.

We now live in an age when agri-giant Monsanto can sue farmers for patent infringement, even if those farmers are desperate to keep Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds out of their fields. One only need to listen to This American Life‘s program on patent trolls or read about Facebook’s recent attempts to trademark the words “book,” “face,” and “wall” to realize that it’s time to reevaluate our country’s intellectual property laws. Corporations may pretend that their litigious actions are motivated by protecting the work of artists, but let’s not kid ourselves. Money is the real bottom line. We have entered a period of “market triumphalism,” a term Hyde uses to describe a pure free-market, private-property ideology.

Clashes over copyright have given rise to the Copy Left or “free culture movement,” a diverse group of artists, intellectuals, lawyers, and activists, who argue that excessive legal restrictions are detrimental to innovation and creativity. In Daniel Smith’s 2008 profile of Lewis Hyde in The New York Times Magazine, Smith cites the case of Emily Dickinson as a prime case of the “corporate ‘land grab’ of information” that has “put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways”:

“Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an ‘official’ volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. ‘Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,’ Hyde told me…”

 

"For Hyde, as for many legal and political scholars, the C.T.E.A. (the 'Mickey Mouse Protection Act' to its detractors) represents a blatant abrogation of the purpose of intellectual-property law." (Andy Warhol, "Mickey Mouse," 38 x 38 inches. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo courtesy of IKON ltd.)

As Smith’s piece explains, Hyde’s frustrations with such incidents motivated him to become more politically active. In 1994 Hyde supported a unique bill introduced by Democratic senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.

“The ‘Arts Endowing the Arts Act’ was an unusual piece of legislation. It proposed auctioning off 20 additional years of copyright protection for creative works and using the proceeds to build a permanent endowment for the arts and humanities. In essence, Dodd wanted to create a gift economy.

The bill failed to gain any traction. The entertainment industry, led by Disney, which faced the imminent expiration of its massively lucrative copyrights on Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck, lobbied for the expansion of copyright terms without restriction. In 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed, adding 20 years to the length of copyright, both pro- and retroactively, and ensuring that thousands of creative works poised to enter the public domain remained in private hands…

For Hyde, as for many legal and political scholars, the C.T.E.A. (the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” to its detractors) represents a blatant abrogation of the purpose of intellectual-property law…By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice…

The C.T.E.A. spurred Hyde to action. He wrote letters to every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He published an op-ed, the first of his career. In 1999, with the writer Brendan Gill and Archibald Gillies, then the director of the Andy Warhol Foundation, he started the Creative Capital Foundation, a nonprofit that offers financial support to artists in return for a small percentage of any net profits generated by their work, which the foundation uses to finance other projects. He helped organize a low-fee writers’ room in Boston. And in 2004, he became a fellow at Berkman.

Although Hyde is focused on a new book project now, he remains an essential voice on the subject of intellectual property, art, and the marketplace. I’ve heard Hyde speak on multiple occasions over the years–at the Peterborough Lyceum, at a small gathering at NYU, and also during multiple residencies at The MacDowell Colony. He is sharp, humorous, and erudite–far from a starry-eyed idealist.

It was during Hyde’s most recent residency at MacDowell that the author met Ana Pečar, a video and intermedia artist from Slovenia. Over the course of their stay at the Colony, a series of conversations ensued. The following interview is the serendipitous result of their face-to-face discussions, and a fine example of the types of spontaneous collaborations that can happen when artists of different disciplines have the opportunity to mingle and consider big ideas. As Hyde himself has said, genius needs to “tinker in a collective shop.”

 

Ana Pecar performing at "Live Performers Meeting" in Rome, Italy, 2011 (Photo courtesy Ana Pecar)

 

 

Artist Ana Pecar (Photo courtesy the artist)

There is much here to ponder about free speech, the ownership of ideas, and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Hyde’s interview makes one fact clear: the system as it exists today—one that treats corporations as individuals and forces our congressmen to spend two-thirds of their time raising money—isn’t working.

Hyde suggests that we are asking the wrong questions about intellectual property, the free market, and art. Perhaps it’s time we reframe the debate? After all, aren’t all artists borrowing from their predecessors to a certain extent? Art isn’t created in a vacuum–it’s a dialogue with the larger culture, with the art, music, films, and books that are already in existence. ”Creativity is subtraction,” as Austin Kleon has said.

It is original thinkers like Lewis Hyde—visionary artists with the ability to imagine a different paradigm—who can help us reinvent our broken system.

A special thanks to Lewis and Ana for sharing this interview with Gwarlingo.

 

Copyrights and Copyduties: Ana Pečar Interviews Writer Lewis Hyde

 

Ana Pečar: Can you tell us about the area of friction between private property and the scope of things best held in common?


Lewis Hyde: To talk about the tension between private property and common property it might help to think about what we mean by property. One old definition of property is the right to exclude other people, so you know you own your house, because you can exclude people from it, you can keep them out. Or you know you own your car because you can loan it to a friend but you don’t let other people use it.

And in fact in the USA one of our Supreme Court justices said that the hallmark of the constitutionally protected property right is the right to exclude. But this then raises a puzzle, particularly about cultural things, because things like songs and inventions are famously thought of as non-excludable. Once you’ve invented the idea of making bifocal eyeglasses or once you’ve come up with a Pythagorean Theorem, it’s hard to keep people from not knowing it.

Ideas are not only unexcludable but also unrivalrous, which is to say we can share them without anybody loosing them. If I share a bicycle with you, then I don’t have that bicycle, but if I share an idea with you I have an idea and you do too. So ancient people thought that the fruits of human intelligence and imagination were by nature common property.

 

In the early 1980s, David Byrne & Brian Eno recorded "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," which was influenced by African-style percussion and Afro-American funk rhythms. It is also notable as one of the first rock albums to make extensive use of the then novel technology of sampling.

 

Ana: When and in what context did the law start to regulate the public and the private?

 

Lewis: Particularly with the rise of printing…you begin to have methods of making ideas excludable and rivalrous, even though they aren’t by nature so. The first copyright law came out in the context of publishers enjoying a state-sanctioned monopoly over what appeared in print. It was enacted by the British Parliament in 1710 and named the Statute of Anne.

Things we call “copyright” and “patent” are ways in which the state comes in and takes something which is by nature common and makes it possible to privatize it. A copyright gives you a state-sanctioned monopoly to exclude other people from reproducing your books. I should say that I’m not against this–it is a useful tool of public policy to have these devices– but you really have to think about why you have them and what the ends are to which you dedicate them. And right now we are having serious arguments internationally about this because the balance between private property and common property is out of line.

 

"I think a lot of American artists struggle with this problem of making ephemeral work versus work that can be commodified. A lot of my friends don’t make sellable work and some of the artists that we’ve been having dinner with here, at MacDowell, do not create work that is clearly one or the other. But you may be right that if you did a study of how the weight falls, maybe Americans are more focused on art they can buy and sell." ("200 One Dollar Bills" by Andy Warhol. Photo by Sang Tan courtesy the AP)

 

Ana: Why did it fall out of balance?

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The Sunday Poem : Noelle Kocot

April 21, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 3 Comments

 

 

Noelle Kocot’s latest book of poetry, The Bigger World, is a collection of  character sketches. Told in a straightforward, surreal style—one that recalls folktales, ancient myths, and fairytales—Kocot has stripped each piece down to its essentials. These short, accessible poems are funny, moving, and sometimes absurd, but always entertaining.

“I wrote these poems in fifty days,” Noelle explained in an interview with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. “It was a grueling process, because I had stopped writing at that point about my husband’s death. It was a purifying experience, in which I was psychologically processing a whole lot of stuff, and letting a whole lot go.”

The original working title was Gnomon, after a concept in James Joyce’s Dubliners, where people were incomplete, like a missing piece of a shape in geometry. “I titled it The Bigger World because it was an exit from Sunny Wednesday, my previous book, which concerned my husband Damon’s death. Frankly, I needed to get out into the bigger world myself, so it is a hope, an expectation.”

Noelle says that she is always writing poetry, “consciously or not, 24/7,” but that her first love is music. “I started out playing musical instruments, listening to all kinds of music, and then I married a great composer/pianist, and had access to so much great music.” Sonic Youth, Xenakis, Beethoven, Debussy, and Coltrane are some of her favorites. “I love music. It flows DIRECTLY into the affective sense. Poetry does not.”

When the Rumpus Poetry Book Club asked her to share some advice for young writers, Noelle offered this guidance:

“Keep writing no matter what. Never let ANYONE push you down. I went to a VIOLENT graduate program, but instead of getting discouraged, I wrote more, and I threw it in their faces. Write out of spite. Write out of love. Just keep going, and don’t let this world system take you down. Get your reading in young, because you are going to be busier as you get older and not have enough time to read. Live without worrying about money—skim the bottom. It’s the best way to be a writer.”

Here are two of my favorite poems from The Bigger World—“Fugue” and “Marie.” Thanks to Wave Books, Matthew Zapruder, and Noelle Kocot for sharing these poems with Gwarlingo. Enjoy your weekend!

 

 

 

Fugue

 

A flash of sudden joy
From the solar plexus
Where fear usually resides,
She knew she’d be okay.
“There is no other life
Apart from this one,” she
Said to no one in particular.
The building gleamed
In the midday rain.  The cats
Ate their turkey dinner.  She
Screened phone call after
Phone call.  A wild loneliness
Descended like a flock of
Robins drained of their red.
Nothing seemed to matter
Anymore, not the past with
Its ax of granite nor the future
With its watery punctuation,
But the moment, yes the moment,
She was forced into it like
So much dough between
The fingers.  “God bless us all,”
She said aloud to everyone and no one.
There is no other life.

 

 

 

Marie

 

She was the one who noticed
The first forsythias bursting
From their sacs outside her house.
Her brown curls were thinner
Than in the pictures
Taken just a few months before
Beside the horses in the shows,
The moss-grown houses
Of her ancestors, the rising
Shoots of their tombstones.
They talked about her chemo,
The nights she spends throwing up
While her husband sleeps
In front of the T.V.
She assures Donna he means well
When he gathers pamphlet
Upon pamphlet on the myths
Of nausea that tell how the sickness
From the treatments can be eased.
She shows Donna more photographs,
This time of her youngest son’s wedding.
The baby is coming in July.
In the pictures it is a small snowdrift
Under his wife’s white dress.
At the end of their talk,
An old deacon comes to the door.
The week before, he gave her
A statue of St. Patrick.  She
Can tell by the chips in the saint’s
Green robe that it is a family heirloom.
She wants to give it back.
But no, he won’t take it.
He has come to give her Communion,
Which she takes daily now.
So Donna tells her they’ll see each other
Again and she smiles.
Fifty years old, kids gone,
Cradling stiff laughter in her arms,
She smiles at her, as if to say,
A mother of death is still a mother.

 

 

 

About Noelle Kocot

Wave BooksNoelle Kocot is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006), Sunny Wednesday (Wave, 2009) and The Bigger World (Wave, 2011). Kocot has also translated a book of poems by the French poet Tristan Corbiere, Poet by Default (Wave, 2011).  She is the recipient of numerous awards, including those from The Academy of American Poets, The National Endowment for the Arts, The American Poetry Review and The Fund for Poetry.  Born and raised in Brooklyn, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches writing in New York.

 

Would you like the Sunday Poem delivered to your email box each week? Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. You can also connect on Twitter or Facebook. You can read Gwarlingo’s entire Sunday Poem series here.

 

 

“Fugue” and  ”Marie” appear in The Bigger World. Copyright © 2011 Noelle Kocot. Used by permission of Wave Books. All rights reserved.


The Illusionist: The Mind-Bending Installations of Artist Felice Varini

April 10, 2012 in Images, Spaces with 7 Comments

 

Felice Varini, "Orangerie du cha‰teau de Versailles," 2006 (Photo by André Morin)

 

 

"Orangerie du cha‰teau de Versailles" from a different perspective (Photo by André Morin)

Note: This is a guest post by Riley MacPhee, a regular contributor to the Johnston Architects Blog. Johnston Architects PLLC is a small architectural firm focusing on creative, innovative, and sustainable design throughout the West. You can see their designs and learn more about their work at the Johnston Architects website.

 

To walk into a space exhibiting the art of Felice Varini is to be confused. You’ll immediately notice vaguely geometric, monocolor shapes stretching and sprawling across the room, but you won’t be able to determine any kind of method to the apparent madness. Varini’s work looks like interesting, abstract art superimposed on an architectural space.

But if you walk around and explore the space a little more, you’ll start to notice that the shapes change as you move.  The more you move, and the more you stare at them, the more you’ll start to realize that there’s something you aren’t getting. But then, suddenly you’ll arrive at a spot where everything comes together with startling clarity, and you’ll realize that you’re looking at a brilliantly composed perspective work that seems to pop out of the scene and hover eerily in front of it.
 

Felice Varini, "Encerclement à dix," Chapelle Jeanne d'Arc/Centre d'Art Contemporain, Thouars, France, 1999 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Felice Varini, "Encerclement à dix," Chapelle Jeanne d'Arc/Centre d'Art Contemporain, Thouars, France, 1999 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Felice Varini, "Carré aux seize disques," Commande du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Centre national des arts plastiques, 2011 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Another perspective of "Carré aux seize disques," 2011 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Another perspective of "Carré aux seize disques," 2011 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

Varini’s work is really the opposite of a stereogram: a series of unintelligible figures painted across three dimensions, that when seen in just the right way, flatten themselves into a mind-bending 2D shape.

Varini is a Swiss artist who currently lives in Paris, and has done dozens and dozens of these types of installations. He thinks of his works comprehensively, not just from the single point where they come together:

“The viewer can be present in the work, but as far as I am concerned he may go through it without noticing the painting at all. If he is aware of the work, he might observe it from the vantage point and see the complete shape. But he might look from other points of views where he will not be able to understand the painting because the shapes will be fragmented and the work too abstract. Whichever way, that is ok with me.”

Felice Varini, "Une ligne, mille et une droites," Musée Bourdelle, Paris, France 2008 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Felice Varini, "Tra il Pieno e il Vuoto (In the Fullness and Emptiness)" 2003 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Felice Varini, "Tra il Pieno e il Vuoto (In the Fullness and Emptiness)" 2003 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

 

 

Felice Varini, "Tra il Pieno e il Vuoto (In the Fullness and Emptiness)" 2003 (Photo courtesy varini.org)

“If you draw a circle on a flat canvas it will always look the same. The drawn circle will retain the flatness of the canvas. This kind of working is very limiting to me, so I project a circle onto spaces, onto walls or mountain sides, and then the circle’s shape is altered naturally because the ‘canvas’ is not flat. A mountain side has curves that affect the circle, and change the circle’s geometry. So, I do not need to portray complicated forms in my paintings. I can just use the simplicity of forms, because the reality out there distorts forms in any case, and creates variations on its own accord.”

“The same goes for colours. Usually I use one colour only, and the space takes care of altering the colour’s hue. For example, if I use one type of red colour on a mountain side, the result is many kinds of red, depending on the mountain’s surface and the light conditions. Sunlight will affect the different areas on the surface and the same red colour may become stronger or darker or clearer in certain areas, depending on how the sun rays hit the surface. The sky can be bright or dark. And if the surface has its own colour or a few colours then that will affect the red that I apply on it. So, I do not need to use sophisticated colours.”

 

Felice Varini, "Cinq Ellipses Ouvertes," Exhibition: Constellation, En attendant l'ouverture, du Centre Pompidou, Metz 2009 (Photo by André Morin courtesy varini.org)

 
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The Sunday Poem : Gennady Aygi, Translated by Sarah Valentine

April 7, 2012 in Images, Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

 

Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is widely considered to be one of the great avant-garde poets from the former Soviet Union. He was born in Chuvashia, a territory located in the western part of Russia. In 1958 he was expelled from the Literary Institute in Moscow for his first book of poems, which was condemned by the censors as “hostile poetry” because it was written in Chuvash. Being an outsider in the Russian empire had a profound impact on his life and poetry. His poems are infused with an elemental sense of life, mortality, and humanity.

As scholar and translator Sarah Valentine explains in the introduction of her new book of Aygi translations, Into the Snow, “much of Aygi’s poetry is written against darkness, against institutionalized evil, against our tendency to constantly undermine our own humanity and the humanity of our fellows through violence, nationalism, propaganda, and war.”

“I came into contact with Aygi’s poetry in a contemporary poetry course in my PhD study program in Russian Literature at Princeton,” Valentine told me this week via email. “I was so enamored of his work – but also somewhat baffled by it – that I decided to write my dissertation on him and began translating many of his poems in the process.”

“He has a very unique aesthetic among 20th century Russian poets (and among Russian poets in general) and part of the challenge for me has been to articulate exactly how/why it is different and what implications that has for Russian and world poetry/literature.”

Aygi is “an important voice in the poetry of witness of the twentieth century,” says Valentine. ”His status as a Chuvash writer writing in the Russian/European traditions, his blend of avant-gardism and spirituality, and his dedication to confronting institutionalized evil while refusing to play into easy dissident politics make him a critical and fascinating voice at the confluence of many traditions.”

 

Scholar, poet, and translator Sarah Valentine

Valentine’s artful translations are an excellent introduction to the Russian poet, and her informative preface sheds light on Aygi’s role as a writer within the larger Soviet culture. I found Valentine’s analysis of poetry written in America versus poetry produced in totalitarian societies particularly insightful:

“Though Aygi was a committed experimentalist in his relationship to language, canon, and convention, he was deeply connected to a fully humanist understanding of the purpose and value of poetry. His work bears the mark of deep spirituality in which the poetic process becomes a space for meditation and worship—of our human capacity for creation as much as for otherworldly divinities. Thus the creative force of language is always linked in his work to creation on a cosmic scale.

I think many poets in the United States today struggle with a feeling of irrelevance, of impotence in the face of global-scale crisis. Sidelined in a mass-media, technology-driven culture, the American poet seems to have a slim chance of connecting with an audience, and even less of a chance to effect large-scale change through poetry. But elsewhere in the world many poets, like Aygi in the Soviet Union, wrote and continue to write poetry at the risk of losing their lives and livelihoods. For them poetry is an ethical act, an act of humanity, regardless of the cost. Many of Aygi’s poems confront the political and social crises of his age, but many others are small poems about the beauty of fields and flowers,the birth of a child. Some consist of only a few lines,  few words, or a single word, or a single letter.

Why bother? What difference could jotting down a few lines about flowers possibly make? The answer, I think, for Aygi was that each word of each poem was part of a grander project, and exploration of the nature of existence, of our place in this universe—whatever that is—of what lies beyond the limits of our knowing, and of how, through a humane art, we can maintain our connection with all of it. Also, and perhaps most importantly, each poem is a celebration of mystery, of the fact that, though we pursue these questions, life in all its forms is a mysterious gift.”

I have two of Valentine’s translations to share with you this Sunday. Both poems appear in Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi, now available from Wave Books. Happy Easter!

 

 

 

 

Silence

 

1

in the invisible glow

of pulverized melancholy

I know uselessness like the poor know their last piece of clothing

and old utensils

and I know that this uselessness

is what the country needs from me

reliable like a secret pact:

muteness as life

indeed for my whole life

 

2

Muteness is a tribute—but silence is for myself

 

3

to grow accustomed to silence

like the beating of one’s heart

like life

as if a well-known place there

and is this I am—as Poetry is

and I know

that my work is both hard and for itself alone

like the sleeplessness of the night watchman

at the city graveyard

 

 

 

 

from Twenty-Eight Variations on
Chuvash and Udmurt Folk Songs

 

XIX

And in the fog

the green oak

has nothing stronger than a branch

to sing with

 

XX

These hands and this head

will remain with those who died in a foreign land—

smoke from the locomotive hits us in the face,

to rob us of memory once and for all.

 

XXI

And suddenly—peace, as if

I were alone in the world,

and the blizzard out the window, blizzard in the garden,

blizzard in the fields.

 

XXII

And the day fell silent, like something

meaningful in it had died,

and the fox sleeps in the foothills,

covered by its red tail.

 

XXIII

Between the Kazakh and Chuvash lands

did you see the post that marks the boundary line?

It is not a post; it is I standing there, petrified

from sadness.

 

 

 

About Gennady Aygi

Gennady Aygi was one of the outstanding Russian poets of the 20th century. His most important works remained virtually unpublished in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, by which time he had been published and translated in more than 20 countries and several times nominated for a Nobel prize.

He was born in the remote village of Shaymurzino in the Chuvash republic, a land with a Turkic language, some 450 miles east of Moscow. His original name was Lisin, which he changed to the older family name of Aygi (meaning “that one”). His father, a teacher of Russian, was killed in action during the second world war. His mother was the daughter of a peasant, one of the last “priests” of the ancient pagan religion.

Showing a precocious gift for poetry, Aygi went to Moscow in 1953 to study at the Literary Institute, and stayed in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, where Boris Pasternak was a neighbour. He became close to Pasternak, who encouraged him to write in Russian and whose love and gratitude for life remained an inspiration to the younger poet.

From 1960, all Aygi’s major poetry was in Russian. His friendship with Pasternak, at that time being harassed by the authorities, and his own innovative poetics made him persona non grata in Chuvashia. Even so, the fields and forests of his native land permeate his work, and he remained deeply attached to his ancestral culture, striving to give it a place among the cultures of the world. He translated poetry from many languages into Chuvash and produced an Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (published in English by Forest Books in 1991). Eventually, after the perestroika of the late 1980s, his work was acclaimed in his homeland and he became the Chuvash national poet.

His main home, however, was in Moscow, where in the 1960s he found a much-needed support system among “underground” writers, artists and musicians, who together were discovering the forbidden fruits of western culture. For 10 years he worked at the Mayakovsky Museum, acquiring a deep knowledge of the Russian avant garde of the early 20th century. Modern French poetry (above all Baudelaire) was another essential influence, but his personal pantheon also included Nietzsche, Kafka, Norwid, Kierkegaard and many religious writers.

Aygi quickly became known abroad. In 1972 he won a prize from the Académie Française for his Chuvash anthology of French poetry. More dangerously, he was published in the émigré journal Kontinent, which made him a target for attacks at home. During the Brezhnev years he led a precarious life, subsisting mainly on his meagre earnings from translation. He lived in a series of small flats in the outskirts of Moscow, close to the fields and woods.

Perestroika brought radical changes. Aygi was now published in Russia and recognised as a key figure in the Russian avant garde. He was also able to travel widely, he was further translated, received many honours and was invited all over the world to poetry festivals and symposia. He made four visits to Britain, feeling a particular affinity for Scotland, where he made a pilgrimage to the grave of Robert Burns, and for London, the city of his beloved Dickens. Six volumes of his poetry have been published in English, the most important being the bilingual Selected Poems 1954-94 (Angel Books, 1997) and Child-and-Rose (New Directions, 2003).

Aygi remained a controversial figure. For some readers his free verse (still unusual in Russian poetry) was too much to take, and there were accusations of cosmopolitanism and wilful obscurity. His work was highly unusual; writing, as he put it, on the borders of sleep and waking, he created a medium full of ambiguities and silences to suggest visions, anxieties and joys that defied direct statement. His poetry was quiet and simple, refusing the rich vocabulary and rhetoric of some of his contemporaries, yet it was also intensely oral – audiences were overwhelmed by his powerful incantatory delivery.

He wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century. Though many of his poems were devoted to victims of oppression, from Raoul Wallenberg to Varlaam Shalamov, the great writer of the Gulag, his work was not political. It was tragic in essence, yet he always resisted the poetry of despair. One of his collections bears an epigraph attributed to Plato, “The night is the best time for believing in light”, and like Pasternak’s (from which it differs in manner) his poetry was a poetry of light, seeking to assert the values of human community and oneness with the rest of creation.

(The above biography was taken from Gennady Aygi’s obituary in The Guardian, which was written by Peter France and published February 24, 2006.)

 

 

About Sarah Valentine

Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi, is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006). Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics. Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University. She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA. Sarah lives and Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.

 

Would you like the Sunday Poem delivered to your email box each week? Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. You can also connect on Twitter or Facebook.

If you enjoyed the work of Gennady Aygi, you may also like this Sunday Poem by Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel. You can read Gwarlingo’s entire Sunday Poem series here.

 

 

“Silence” and  ”from Twenty-Eight Variations on Chuvash and Udmurt Folk Songs” appear in Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi by Gennady Aygi, translated by Sarah Valentine. Copyright © 2011 The Estate of Gennady Aygi and Sarah Valentine. Used by permission of Wave Books. All rights reserved. Sarah Valentine biography also courtesy Wave Books.

 

Flimmaker Peter Hutton : It’s Not About the Pyrotechnics, It’s About Limitations

April 6, 2012 in Events, Images with 3 Comments

 

A still from Peter Hutton's film "At Sea," currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts (Photo © Peter Hutton courtesy the Peabody Essex Museum)

The first time I saw a Peter Hutton film was at a screening at The MacDowell Colony several years ago when Peter was in residence. A small group of us gathered in the Colony library to watch Study of a River. A 16mm projector hummed over our shoulders as we all sat in the dark, mesmerized by this silent, black-and-white film. It was like watching a contemporary version of a Hudson River School painting come to life before my eyes. I’ve never forgotten the experience of seeing that film—of sitting silently watching ice and ships drift over the Hudson River.

Experience is central to Hutton’s creative approach. There are no special effects or dramatic story arcs in a Peter Hutton work. Whatever your expectations are of cinema, set them aside. Hutton’s sublimely nuanced creations are everything commercial movies are not—subtle, completely silent, thoughtful, and devoid of narrative. Hutton’s films are more like meditations or visual poems—they linger over landscapes and scenes, capturing both dramatic and mundane moments that would otherwise be lost.

I was not surprised to learn that Hutton began his art career as a painter. He has a painter’s eye—a contemplative style that is completely radical in today’s culture. He uses old movie cameras not for nostalgic effect, but as a vehicle to focus the viewer’s attention. There are no sounds, special effects, or fancy tracking shots to distract us. Hutton’s camera is like an extension of his own body. We see what he sees. We experience what he experiences.

Hutton's film "At Sea" chronicles the birth, life, and death of a colossal container ship. It begins with a container ship being built in one of the world's largest shipyards in South Korea. (Photo © Peter Hutton)

 

 

"At Sea" is showing every hour in the Nancy and George Putnam Gallery of Maritime Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

This still from "At Sea" shows the contruction of the ship. (Photo © Peter Hutton)

 

 

Sunset over the Atlantic Ocean (From "At Sea" Photo © Peter Hutton)

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to watch Hutton’s film At Sea, which is currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The piece was named the best avant-garde film of the decade by Film Comment magazine and is part of the museum’s FreePort series, which invites contemporary artists to explore the roles of trade, exchange and translation in relation to the museum’s collection.

Hutton’s film chronicles the birth, life, and death of a colossal container ship. It begins with a container ship being built in one of the world’s largest shipyards in South Korea. Hutton then records the ship’s journey across the Atlantic from Montreal to Hamburg. His film ends in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where he captures the dangerous and mesmerizing process of ship breaking at a maritime graveyard on the shores of the Bay of Bengal.

 

"At Sea" ends in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where he captures the dangerous and mesmerizing process of ship breaking at a maritime graveyard on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. (Photo © Peter Hutton)

 

 

The effect is very different from watching a traditional documentary. We aren't pelted with shocking statistics or heart-wrenching stories. We simply find ourselves glimpsing the everyday reality of these men. This is hard work. Dangerous. Slow and tedious. (Photo © Peter Hutton)

 

 

There are no heavy-handed diatribes or talking heads in At Sea. As viewers, we simply observe these men working, posing and smiling in front of the camera, and risking their lives in this surreal, post-industrial landscape. (Photo © Peter Hutton courtesy the Peabody Essex Museum)

Ship breaking allows materials from the ship, especially steel, to be reused. Most ships have a lifespan of just a few decades before repairs become uneconomical and the ship is scrapped. Today, most ship breaking yards are in developing countries because labor costs are lower and environmental and labor regulations virtually non-existent. According to eye-witness accounts, waste from the scrapped ships is drained and dumped directly into the Bay of Bengal. The prevalence of highly toxic materials in the ship breaking yard is causing serious health problems in the local population and in local wildlife.

But these are facts I discovered in my own research, not through Hutton’s film. He is not a journalist or a traditional documentary filmmaker. There are no heavy-handed diatribes or talking heads in At Sea. As viewers, we simply observe these men working, posing and smiling in front of the camera, and risking their lives in this surreal, post-industrial landscape. The effect is very different from watching a traditional documentary. We aren’t pelted with shocking statistics or heart-wrenching stories. We simply find ourselves glimpsing the everyday reality of these men. This is hard work. Dangerous. Slow and tedious.

 

Today, most ship breaking yards are in developing countries because labor costs are lower and environmental and labor regulations virtually non-existent. (Photo © Peter Hutton courtesy the artist)

 

 

For the first time in PEM's history, a highly detailed model depicting the ship-breaking of an industrial tanker has been created. Commissioned specifically for this exhibition, it may be the only such model of its kind in existence. (Photo courtesy the Peabody Essex Museum)

The Peabody Essex has a exquisite collection of ship models. For the first time in the museum’s history, a highly detailed model depicting the ship-breaking of an industrial tanker has been created by Michael Wall and Peter Hutton. Commissioned specifically for this exhibition, it may be the only such model of its kind in existence.

This short video produced by the Peabody Essex Museum shows scenes from the film and discusses the process of creating this unique model.

(If you’re reading this in an email, click here to watch the video)
 


 
A former merchant seaman, Hutton has spent nearly forty years traveling around the world, often by cargo ship, to create his remarkable films. I was interested to learn more about Hutton’s experiences at sea and his approach to film-making. Peter kindly supplied me with still images for this article, and Mike Plante, the editor and publisher of Cinemad, graciously agreed to share his interview with this highly acclaimed filmmaker.

 
As Mike points out in his introduction on the Cinemad website, what may be most remarkable about Peter Hutton is that his films manage to be avant-garde without being pretentious. (Not an easy task.)

In the following interview with Plante, Hutton discusses how traveling and being at sea trained his eye as an artist how  painting and Eastern art have influenced his filmmaking. He also explains the importance of craft and practice and describes why his films are more like sketchbooks than highly polished artworks.

“I wanted to keep everything very simple,” Hutton says. “Cinema tends to be this additive thing, it gets more complicated technologically…It’s very expensive and complicated logistically. I wanted to do it alone, keep it personal and private. Almost like making sketchbooks. The more I kept it simple the more I could work…It’s not about the pyrotechnics, it’s about something else—being inventive with limitations.”

 

 
The following interview is courtesy of Mike Plante, editor and publisher of Cinemad and founder of Cinemad Presents, a film dis­trib­u­tor for inde­pen­dent, for­eign, avant-garde, cult and under­ground films.

CINEMAD: Was there a flashpoint where you became interested in art film?

PETER HUTTON: For the first 10 years of my creative life I wasn’t making films, I was a painter as a teenager, then a sculptor. I was in L.A. for a summer in the mid-60s. I went to see one of Kenneth Anger’s experimental films on La Cienega. I then moved to San Francisco to go to the San Francisco Art Institute. I started seeing Harry Smith and Bruce Conner at the Straight Ashbury Film Society that Freuda Bartlett ran. I thought this was going to be huge! Everybody did! In some way a rival to commercial film culture, because the parameters were so blown open from traditional cinema. It’s interesting watching it over the last 40 years collapse into a pretty delicate little culture. It’s kind of kept alive by young people who are just discovering this work, who get really excited about it, and fortunately start writing about it. But it’s also kept alive by those who teach, the art schools who are, for the most part, employing a lot of people who are propagating it through showing their own and other people’s work. It’s a relatively modest yet a wonderful alternative to commercial film culture.

If you want to see it, you’re going to have to become involved with it.
I think that’s good though. One of the things that is important to me is the contrast between the accessibility of TV and commercial media that are being pushed at you…You have to be curious, go out of your way. Like going to flea markets and finding great old books, photographs, paintings. You have to have that curiosity. There’s an element of satisfaction that comes with discovering something that wasn’t publicized or in front of commercial culture. I like the fact that there’s an obscurity to the culture. Maybe that’s good…

Did you study still photography?
No. Painting was my big deal. My uncle was an artist, Edward Plunkett, he knew a lot of New York artists, including Marcel Duchamp and collected pop art. He was a great influence on me. My mother was also an amateur painter.

When I was a kid, my father had kept a photo album as a merchant seaman. I loved looking at these photo albums filled with images of places he had gone when working on ships; India, China, Indonesia. They were just snapshots. Landscapes, seascapes, very amateur casual photographs. This was before TV, so it was a very cool place to zone out and imagine these places. When I started working on ships, I was so happy to be going to these places. It built up my appreciation for this sort of traveling.

I took photographs when I went to India, then after that I eventually learned film…there was a 10-year period from ’64 – ’74 where I intensely worked on ships. I paid my way through art school by working on ships. I went to sea for a semester, then to school for a semester, back and forth from sea to school…

 

"I think a lot of Western art is more like shouting at you saying ‘Hey! I’m over here, look at me! I’m funny! I’m weird…’ Pop art, contemporary art, it’s trying to get your attention because there’s so much wacky shit going on. Eastern art is much more quiet, subtle. It’s about you carving out some space to interact with that thing. That had a much bigger influence on me and how I make films." A Still of "At Sea" (Photo © Peter Hutton)

What were your duties?
In the days when I worked on ships, they were smaller. I almost always worked on the Deck gang. This is pre-containerization. I spent a summer on the Great lakes working on Ore boats then I saved money and moved to Honolulu from Detroit to catch real ocean going ships.

The first salt water ship I worked on was a freighter that was contracted to haul grain to India. We were giving the Indian government grain. This is about 1964…The ship was leased from a company in Singapore, Liberty Navigation, by USAID to carry wheat to India during a famine. But the wheat had been held in the ship so long…[that] by the time we got to India, a lot of the wheat had rotted inside the ship. They popped open the hatches to unload it and there was this huge stench. It was Conradian in a way. A deed of good will gone very bad.

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