The "gentlemen" of ethnology

 

Jaap Kunst/Robert von Heine-Geldern

Jaap Kunst (1891-1960) was an official of the Dutch colonial government in Indonesia. Kunst had a law degree, was a musician, and an ethnographer. Robert von Heine-Geldern (1886-1968) an Austrian nobleman carrying the title of Freiherr, a leftover title from the Holy Roman Empire. He was a grandnephew of the poet Heinrich Heine, and a noted archaeologist and ethnographer. Both specialized in Southeast Asian culture. Von Heine-Geldern introduced Southeast Asian studies as an academic field while Kunst coined the term ethnomusicology in 1955 (to this day underlined in red—misspelled—by Google.) Kunst was the first one to record Indonesian gamelan music. The natural companion to Jaap Kunst in this painting would have been a certain Mr. Hobbel, a Dutch army official serving in Indonesia who recorded (or collected) the music of the Moluccas that is featured in the top 100. Kunst, in the liner notes to an album in the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series dedicated to Indonesia, suggest to the Barbar song in question, an "extremely ancient cultural connexion [sic]." In the same paragraph he mentions von Heine-Geldern as having demonstrated similar conclusions. Mr. Hobbel's identity remains unsure to me (a photo doesn't seem to exist, not on-line at least.) Jaap Kunst became interested in folk music while, as a young man, vacationing in Terschelling, an island in the North of the Netherlands. He recorded an album for Moses Asch's Folkways label dedicated to the music of the Netherlands. Several tunes I can sing-a-long with including my shower classic Drie Schuintamboers.

Into the Black (The story of Johnny Spud)

Mark Mothersbaugh/Neil Young

Neil Young is forever linked with the state of Ohio because of his song Ohio (four dead in Ohio) in response to the Kent State shootings in 1970. This was years before he hooked up with Kent State alumni band DEVO (Jerry Casale was in the midst of the chaos in 1970.) DEVO performs with Neil Young in the film Human Highway. Mark Mothersbaugh (as Booji Boy) sings Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), he substitutes Johnny Rotten in the lyrics for Johnny Spud. He also introduced Neil Young to the term "rust never sleeps" which became the title of the album that featured Hey Hey, My My.
 

The Problem with the Avant-Garde

Edgard Varèse/Le Corbusier

The concept for the current series of 100 paintings disallows me to paint individuals twice. Iannis Xenakis has with five works a huge presence in the list and I'm finding ways to reflect this presence in the paintings as well. There are two "Polytopes" in the list so I made myself familiar with the concept of polythopes in order to select two appropriate individuals to illustrate the the polytopes by Iannes Xenakis. The first, and highest ranked polytope, is the Polytope de Cluny while the second one is called Polytope de Montreal. The latter is a work for four orchestras spread throughout the audience. Each of Xenakis' Polytopes (meaning many/place) is linked to a site. Each work is a site specific installation and is a so-called gesamtkunstwerk (a term borrowed from German, used by Wagner to mean a total-work of art.) The fist of Xenakis' polytopes (although not named yet that way) was the installation for the Phillips Pavilion at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels. Xenakis worked for the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) at the time. Xenakis is credited with the architecture of the site while Le Corbusier collaborated with the composer Edgard Varèse on the sound and engineering of the work. The title: Poeme électronique. The musical part (by Varèse) was once early on in a top 100 of mine. The three, Varèse, Le Corbusier, and Xenakis, are truly heavyweights of the avant-garde, and the three combined nothing short of an experimental/intellectual supergroup. When I started painting Varèse and Le Corbusier, the weight of importance made itself felt immediately. But then, especially in the right half (Le Corbusier), something started to manifest itself that was different from awe. I started to dislike the character of the face I was painting, in a similar way as a painting last year (that of Jean Rouch, also a super-important white-middle-aged-French-male) the face spoke to me in an authoritarian way. I sorta knew there was some controversy surrounding Le Corbusier but I didn't know what, or how. The last time I wondered about Le Corbusier was in art history class in the 1980s. So I Googled Le Corbusier and read about his (early) flirtations with Fascism and eugenics. (To his credit, later on he did not engage in any of such rhetoric anymore, but he didn't atone either.) When, in the process of painting, his image started to remind me of Rudy Guliani (the disgraced former major of New York), the case was settled: I was painting someone I couldn't feel sympathy for. (Now my critique of Le Corbusier is only in the field of eugenics, because I could not possibly criticize him for his work. To be completely honest with you: the concepts I have been reading about mostly go straight over my head. I'm not smart enough to understand their philosophies in the same way I can't understand quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity. I still find it interesting though.) There is a lot of antisemitism and nationalism in the avant-garde of pre-WWII. It's a little scary to consider how those, mostly left-wing, cultural pace-setters, subscribe to visions so much at odd with ideals of equality and justice. What the avant-garde needed was diversity.

A grab bag of musicians

Alvin Curran/Giacinto Scelsi

20th Century avant-garde classical music really has a presence this year in the top 100 as it had once before in the late eighties. String quartets #3 and #4 by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) and Canti Illuminati by Alvin Curran (Am. b. 1938, lives in Rome) all scored points in 1987 and again in 2022. Neither of these musicians I had painted before (I started illustrating the top 100 in 1990.) Portraits for both are thus long overdue. Scelsi featured in the Top 100 1987 (Curran did not,) while Curran is in this year's list (Scelsi is not.) The current format of double portraits without duplicates allows me to catch up on painting musicians that should have been painted in the history of the Top 100 but were not. Scelsi was a mentor and friend to Alvin Curran and Canti Illuminati (seen by Scelsi weeks before his death) is a sort of hommage to the old master.

Pat Conte/Andalusian (Rom) guitarist (from a photo c. 1900)

Now Pat Conte, the American multi string-instrument/guitar player, I did paint before, twice, but not as a musician but as a collector of old 78 records. This year Pat Conte returns as collector, and originator of the series The Secret Museum of Mankind, with a 78 called Vlach Longassi, from 1929 of the Andalusian Gypsy guitarist Oudi Jorghi. The track is included on the latest release in the Secret Museum series: Guitars, Vol. 1: Prologue to Modern Styles. I was delighted to find out that the Secret Museum was alive again after silence of more than a decade. I bought the record and a second tune also is listed in this year's 100. Fiesta Mora en Tanger by the, at the time, famous string quartet Cuarteto Aguilar. They were famous enough that there's pictures of them on line. I painted all three of the brothers and the one sister Aguilar.

Cuarteto Aguilar

They're not all new faces I'm painting. Take Cat Power, for example, just like in all of the last twenty years she's in this year's list once again (be it towards the bottom this time.) A brand new record appeared on the market but this new one failed to make the list. Not that I don't like it, but hey, times change. The song in the list is an old one: Metal Heart appeared first on Moon Pix [1998, Matador] and then again on Juke Box. [Matador, 2008] The song is one of her classics and a continuous (as far as I can tell) presence in her live sets. These live sets, by the way, for the last 15 years or so, feature Erik Paparazzi, who also played bass on Moon Pix.

Erik Paparazzi/Cat Power

Another familiar face, who was painted numerous times over the years is Michael Hurley. Like Cat Power, I'm a longtime fan of this musician who debuted on Folkways in 1964, the year I was born. In his eighties now he is still recording and performing. The track in the Top 100 was recorded in 2016 and is called O My Stars, a song that features the Swedish folk duo My Bubba. I painted the blond one from the duo but I took me a while to figure out who was the blond one and who the brunette was. I figured it out: The blonde one is My, while the brunette is Bubba.

Michael Hurley/My Larsdotter

Alright, I'll do one more before I let you go. Unrelated to any of the five above is a track by Piaroa Indians recorded by Pierre Gaisseau in 1949 in Colombia during the Orinoco-Amazon expedition of 1948/50. Some of the recording I've had for a long time on an album called The Columbia World Library of Folk & Primitive Music, Volume 9: Venezuela, but did find the original release Musique Primitive Indienne that not only has longer versions of some on the Columbia LP, but also uses a different set of titles. Bark Music of the Piaroa has been in the Top 100 several times but this time it listens to Rituel Saisonnier & D'initiation : Musique De Nuit (1). Gaisseau was part of the famous Ogooue-Congo expedition of 1946, who were the first to record the Pygmy people of the rain forests of Central Africa. As important as that expedition was, Gaisseau is even more famous for the film Sky Above and Mud Beneath, filmed in 1959 in previously unexplored areas of Papua New Guinea. The film had an enormous impact on the "Western mind."

Pierre Gaisseau/Piaroa bark horn player