the Weight of Dust

Gérard Paris-Clavel has long been one of my heroes. I first became aware of him as a member of the legendary studio Grapus. I’m inspired by his unwillingness to compromise his values as a citizen and human while working in the graphic design industry, unarguably a vile cesspool of exploitation and social abuse. He’s one of a handful of designers who’s practice engages critically as well as formally, seamlessly creating an exchange between content, author, audience, history, and society. He’s constructed a thorough body of criticism that challenges the mechanisms of image/meaning/signs in contemporary society. I strive to emulate this approach to making in my own life. Basically, I love this man’s design and I love his brain even more.

This transcription of one of his lectures is from the long out of print book Design Beyond Design, edited by the also great (and destined to be discussed on this site) Jan VanToorn. I post it completely without permission. If you are an agent of the VanEyck Academie, Mr. VanToorn, or Mr. Paris-Clavel and you’d rather not have people read this, please let me know and I’ll remove the post. If you ever find a copy of this book, please send it to me as I don’t have one myself.

And finally, thank you Santiago for letting me photograph these spreads so many years ago. Hope I didn’t hurt your book.

Spread 1

spread 2

spread 3

spread 4

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Throbbing Gristle are performing in New York tonight. I’m too excited to think about anything else.

Its hard to explain my love of this group.

I don’t think there are many casual Throbbing Gristle fans, I’ve never heard someone say “oh yeah, my friend put one of their songs on a mix. I kind of liked it.” I can’t recall ever hearing a Throbbing Gristle track played in public.

They are role models for me, examples of how people can live (not just perform, but actually live) creatively and uncompromisingly in the face of mainstream/mass culture. Most musicians fall into one of two categories: Performers who are just pretending on stage, and performers who have made enough money to pretend wherever they are. This isn’t the case with TG. They’re just people, but they have made it ok to not be “ordinary” people.

I find it telling that their music hasn’t been successfully co-opted like virtually every one of their contemporaries. I can’t imagine “Hamburger Lady” being used in a commercial or as the stirring soundtrack to a movie. Even though its thirty years old, their music isn’t nostalgic for me, its the music that I want to hear today. Its intellectual, its visceral, its primitive and complex, its smart, vulgar, brutal, and caressing all at once. And I’ll bear witness tonight.

Hot on the Heels of Love

Discipline

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I used to be fixated on an idea of making a kind of music that would explore ultraviolence, at a social level rather than an individual level (which is another topic). I thought of it as a conceptual exploration that could obviate any sort of “angry young man” music, my rationale being that a teenager flipping the bird or even a serial killer was absurd in the face of German tanks rolling into Poland. Now I’ve returned to an interest in subversion, but more in the subversion of personal identity specifically as we create spaces for ourselves within some sort of social/cultural/historical context. I don’t care about subverting “the Man”, I’m interested in art that subverts the self, (because, after all, aren’t we our own “the Man”?) Martin Denny encapsulates this very nicely for me.

I was first introduced to Martin Denny and “Exotic” music not in the context of the late nineties lounge kitsch revival (blech), but through Industrial culture. I remember seeing a book about his music in the local occult shop, sitting amid a shelf full of photocopied zines about radical body modification and BDSM. It couldn’t have been a starker contrast, and I guess that’s why I remember it specifically and the other publications on the shelf have been generalized into a slurried memory of pale emaciated people in leather exposing themselves.

Martin Denny’s music is of course the prototype for most of what we call lounge music. Judged by that context alone, it might strike you as comically banal. In fact, I’m not sure if his music is legitimately creepy or if its creepy because of my own introduction to it, which is the thing that interests me. The placid calmness of it is in such diametric opposition to the most brutally aggressive music that demands submission (see: Whitehouse, for example). Denny’s music is hypnotic, familiar and peculiar at the same time. Where aggression fails to intimidate me into submission, Denny coerces me, which is just as much about surrender of will.

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I really hope today is the last day cold enough to wear a Harris tweed jacket (for a few months at least). It looks like Scotland from my window, but the peat bogs and rocks have been replaced with broken glass and shoddy scaffolding. Here’s a video about how they make my favorite cloth. I stole it from UKtv.

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As a kid I loved the muppet show. I watched them as re-runs with my family. The Liberace episode first aired the year I was born, and for some reason it really resonated with me as a toddler. I think it might be my first memory of abjection. I remember being transfixed by the elegant Rococo bird dancers, but also horrified by their too-close-to-humanness—like muppets, but also like people. They are perfectly grotesque.

As if that wasn’t enough, the whole affair was conducted by a gay icon who effortlessly moved between high and low culture, but without the sort of sneering condescension of so much camp. I find it ironic that this phenomenally talented lover of all music has become a camp icon for people who have a very crude notion of what camp is. Regardless, Liberace is a hero of mine.

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