Zero Books launched last night at Daunt on Marylebone High Street in central London. Upon arrival I was greeted by Zero editor Tariq Goddard. I hadn’t realised he’d moved out of London, but then I hadn’t seen him around for a while, so I wasn’t too surprised when he told me he was living in the country. Shortly after arrival I found myself chatting to sci-fi novelist China Miéville who brought up the extremely ugly subject of David Tibet (real name David Bunting) of Current 93 and his utterly ridiculous sub-musical collaborations with hardcore fascists. Our anti-fascist exchange was interrupted when the evening’s formal speeches began. I didn’t catch the name of the first speaker who was passionate on the subject of how neo-liberalism had collapsed but we still needed to clear away the ruins.
Next up was journalist David Stubbs who gave a short talk based on his book Fear Of Music. The blurb for this runs as follows: “Modern art is a mass phenomenon… However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant-garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant-garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances… This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?”
My impression is the tabloid press devotes more space to deriding modern art than it does to attacking modern music. That said, the (post)-modern art the ‘red tops’ have derided in recent years is largely a waste of space anyway; i.e. the yBa bores who put the con back into neo-conceptual art by jettisoning any overt political content and instead concentrating on selling over-priced luxury items to the rich. As a consequence, it has been rather amusing to witness the response of complete bafflement to the Ray Johnson retrospective currently on at Raven Row; most of the London art world simply cannot grasp a visual practice that is so obviously hostile to the commodification of culture. As for Rothko and Stockhausen, for me there is nothing to choose between them, and the bourgeoisie can stick them both up its arse!
In his talk Stubbs appeared to be defending everything about Stockhausen, which I found more than a little odd. There have certainly been reactionary attacks on Stockhausen, but by focusing on these Stubbs seemed to be saying sock it to the critics to my right and ignore my own problematic positions. Personally I agree with the critique of Stockhausen made by Henry Flynt and Action Against Cultural Imperialism back in the 1960s; among other things they pointed out that Stockhausen’s criticisms of jazz were racist. I also find Flynt’s radical avant-garde hillbilly far more of a groove sensation than Stockhausen. And while I can dig much of what Cornelius Cardew did musically from the Scratch Orchestra through to his reworkings of folk melodies, his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism lacks the edge of Flynt’s critique of this bourgeois hack. I have no problem with listening to modern music, but everything from Luigi Nono to grime is just so much better than Stockhausen. The positions Stubbs defended in his talk were both simplistic and wrong-headed.
As a speaker, Owen Hatherley was a lot more impressive than Stubbs. His book Militant Modernism was billed as a defence of modernism against its defenders. Hatherley was arguing in favour of post-war modernism, not just its early twentieth-century manifestations, and for its entanglement with revolutionary politics. I was with him on that, although I suspect we may well have differences on specific figures such as Bertolt Brecht and what is revolutionary. For me, defending the gains of modernism also means going beyond it, and this necessitates abolishing the capitalist social relations modernism emerged from. Of course, I haven’t read Hatherley’s book yet, because as a proletarian post-modernist, I’m blogging the launch and not the texts. Moving on, after Hatherley there was a quick word from publisher John Hunt. I then spoke to Hales Gallery artists Laura Oldfield Ford and Richard Galpin about the antagonism towards criticism on the gallery circuit. In the spirit of immaterial friendship I got to say hi and little else to Nina Power… and a few others. Then the booze ran out so most people moved on to the pub….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!