and debate goes on... part2

-- Primary Sources on the
International Performing Arts,
September-October,1979

Words: Igor (Steve Wright) + editing by Green. PART 2 of 3. Article continues from...| Part 1 | to | Part 3 |

Igor:

 How do you deal with the aspects of things like 'songwriting', especially since you now have a lot more to cope with than when you first started?

Green:

 I don't know. I think we always play down that side of things--'the moment of the creation of product'--in favour of admitting that some of the other features are very, very important...admitting that they are as big and as such need dealing with as much as attending to the way product sounds.

Igor:

 What are those other features?

Green:

 Those other features are getting to grips with what puts the constraints on the meaning of that product, basically the ideology of the music business; the economic relations that hold between groups and companies and the rock papers, the ideological relations there--the whole ensemble of relations out of which the meaning of songs is constituted. And so you have to address yourself to those problems as much as you do to the actual construction of a 'tune', another 'good' or 'bad' song that will or will not offend taste.

Nial:

 Interestingly enough, at the moment I'm finding the going so difficult on the theoretical level that it's placing a great deal of strain on my wish to play at all, things are pretty heavy for us at present and one of the products of that is that we're not doing much playing or writing...so given how important we think it is to sort out some of our theoretical problems at the moment--it's right that that should be the case.

Igor:

 Do you think that's always going to be a problem?

Green:

 I don't see it as a problem, I see it as a healthy feature of our practice that might make it distinct from other people's and it definitely will always be there.

Igor:

 Do you think we could talk about the meaning of what is actually on record?

Nial:

 I think it's important to say that there are definite limitations placed upon your ability to communicate things by using the 'song' as a means of saying them. In some ways all that's presentable in songs apart from slogans, which are tips of icebergs, and slightly less defined tips of icebergs.

Green:

 I've been working on this recently. What's previously seemed pretty unproblematic about y'know, 'the meaning of the song' and the uses of language--is up for re-evaluation--re-thinking. Suffice to say there are problems in strategies that deal with them. What's said about Kristeva in 'Language And Materialism' is relevant here and some of the Ideology and Consciousness stuff and Working Papers from Birmingham. Anyway I'd disagree with Nial's iceberg business. There's an incredible impoverishment with sensible language--the lowest common denominator.

Igor:

 But how should people look at music, on singles, at gigs and so on--I'm not suggesting that you say a particular 'should'...

Green:

 Yeah, I think at this stage there's nothing that we could say, other than specific to the rest of the discussion, that surrounds it in some discourses...our production, and talks about different aspects of it. But when it's shifted to 'OK then, what should the putative audience, the person who will possibly take it home and slap it on the record player, what should they treat it as?' Then that's too problematic to deal with in a big lump like that. It's like biting off too much of a problematic to chew. I think it's important that it should not be seen as entertaiNMEnt, that it could be seen as a measure, a strategy, a way of dealing with certain problems of living, if you like. Music could be seen in those terms.

Igor:

 As an agent of cultural change, being the theoretical side of it, perhaps. Not necessarily having to do with its appreciation.

Nial:

 I think you can say that there is an interface between sorts of social change at various times and the production of music, for instance, but I'm not so sure to what extent that is instrumental or causative in either direction. I think it's very difficult to talk about.

Green:

 Let's take the current interest in things 'arty', and the way in which the word 'Art' as being introduced into the rock 'n roll discussion as a fair bit. I would preface it by saying as far as we're concerned, I think the history of what's passed as 'art', various forms of activity that have been called 'art', meaning predominantly painting and sculpture are well and truly dead. They began at some earlier point in history as a formal investigation into the properties of certain activities, e.g. of the application of paint to canvas, experimenting with colours and shapes; and within the past century, as is imaginable, just about every possible permutation of the construction and display of these objects has been realised--what was never properly realised, I don't think, was that the concern of aesthetics was never one of production, but a concern of consumption, of appreciation if you like. You can stand in front of a Reinhardt canvas which is black...he's got say, five black canvases on a white wall, and an enormous amount of discussion can go on about the significance of those, with reference to other paintings, the history of painting--what it means for painting, and you can actually stand round and say how beautiful they look. Doubtless, we could go out of here and find a wall with five windows in it and apply ourselves to looking at them int the same way. You could spend 20 minutes looking at the way the light catches them and feeling wistful in front of them. Basically, aesthetics is an act that individuals perform--it's when they stop for five minutes, take a deep breath and run their eyes over the colours; but aside from that, the significance of a painting was what it meant with reference to earlier paintings, and what it meant to put them in a gallery. That conversation is neatly tied up, bundled away and put in a dustbin as far as we're concerned, and it was done so with the work of Art Language in the late 60's--which we had some brush with a short while ago. So the introduction of the word 'art' upon beat production seems to me to be completely pointless, very mystificatory, and irrelevant.

Nial:

 I think the point that it's mystificatory is the most important one, because obviously it's going to become a grid that is in general use in talking about rock 'n roll, then it's not irrelevant at all--it's talked about. I think our basic feeling is that it gets in the way--it's whizzing in a set of ideas and a frame for looking at things into beat music that just clouds everything.

Igor:

 Do your criticisms of the art world stand also for this magazine, or does the magazine transcend that in any way?

Green:

 It doesn't appear to, the idea that performance art got away from all the problems of object production and art galleries was shown to be a load of cobblers with the first happenings in New York in '59...we know too much about it to have any time for it.

Igor:

 Do you think this term 'Performing Art' brings the whole thing dangerously close to what you're doing and makes the language surrounding performance art more likely to impinge on your practice?

Green:

 Well in the context of the paper we'd be circumscribed within a certain set of articles and discussions and stuff, but I think we still have the attitude that better us be in there talking, than another toss-pot from Leeds of four years ago. It's very much a battle for space. The context won't be able to deal us many blows, I don't think, or inhibit us very much, do you?

We've got a vested interest in sorting out the mess of beat music, because we want to survive, and we want to survive hard. One of the problems in surviving is the fact that all the talk surrounding beat music (from the NME to Dangerous Logic, to whatever) is hideously confused, conflated, overblown and...it's just a fucking mess-nobody's talking any sense. When 'art' walks through the door, it's got 15 suitcases full of very smelly washing (ideas of 'geniuses', 'creativity', 'individualism', and the rest of it)...which as far as we're concerned is the kind of crap that just clutters up your back garden, and gets in the way when you want to go out of the front door...or your back door, if it's in your back garden!

Tom:

 I think the upsetting thing about that for us particularly, knowing how venal all these ideas of 'individual talent', 'gifts' and 'creativity' are, and a lot of that was displaced, or chucked out of the window by the new wave when it cropped up, and for it to be pushed or dragged back in the window now, and for that democratisation, which is so contra art ideology, to be broken is fucking awful.

Igor:

 The new wave blew a lot of myths but it created a whole lot more.

Green:

 Oh sure. Well what was one of the initial big attractions was the fact that all that rubbishy language of art was not to be found, and all of a sudden, what have we got? We've got the Pop Group and we've got the Monochrome Set...the whole language...David Bowie talking about writing songs like Paintings, the language of art is chucked at us...we got mentioned twice in this Gang Of Four thing in the 'Melody Maker' as being an 'art group'.

Bob:

 ...if someone asked me about art, I'd say 'I'm not going to talk to you about it'--if you're not interested in someone you don't fucking talk to them...

Green:

 I've got to talk to them--we need to talk about it, because it's clogging up our practice, the way talk of art is dragged into the conversation around beat music all the time--as much as I don't want to talk about art, it is a language which is being imported wholesale, and it's got to be got out of the way.

Bob:

 How will it be got out of the way? I don't think they were shut up by Art Language--there's still a lot of noise...

Green:

 I don't know what kind of condition you're espousing--other than a kind of endless recipe for inertia--Art's brought to bear on us in the reviews and interviews we have to face; it's bound up with a whole ideology that acts against our interests, it's something I feel equipped to talk about, it's something that has to be replaced--and conversation do change. There is an art-based conversation that is swamping our neighbourhood, right? it's detrimental to our practice.

Bob:

 Swamping?

Green:

 Yes it is! It very much is! There's a whole language of 'artiness'--you look back on a 50's copy of 'Melody Maker' or the NME--you'd scarcely see the word 'creativity' mentioned once! When they're talking about Bobby Vee, The Crickets, Elvis and the rest of it, you won't get any of that language. It's been imported wholesale to engender and cope with a certain set of phenomena, it is perfectly displaceable. The whole business of aesthetic appraisals: 'the richness of tone', 'the scratchy guitar', 'the individual gift', 'skill', 'talent'--this is high-culturally derived hogwash, and it's dragging us down...there's a big cross-over between art and beat music. Half the groups that are around at the moment are ex-art-college groups--they have been since before the Beatles, from your David Bowie and your Roxy Musics through to the Clashes and Throbbing Gristles, that's some index of how much it's a mainstream problem...

Bob:

 In a journal that isn't about music at all?...or a journal about 'art' and 'art for art's sake'?

Green:

 It's important space--and art itself continually purports to have claims on what we're doing...There will be a lot of people in Art Colleges up and down the land who will think that they connect very much in some way with Throbbing Gristle, The Pop Group, Patti Smith, and maybe even us. They certainly begin to dominate the conversation. When you're given (for instance in this magazine) a space that will probably be read by people like that, it's nice to be able to turn around and say...'there are absolutely no claims--you are on board a sinking ship--you're one hulk of a rotting carcass, whose language...y'know...don't chuck it over us, chum, because it's redolent of all things tedious, repressive and slimy.

article continues in...| Part 3 |