The Red Krayola with Art & Language and, briefly, Kathryn Bigelow

The most con­spicu­ous writ­ing on Oscar-winning dir­ect­or Kathryn Bigelow’s art-world past went up on the Huffington Post last week; Bettina Korek  briefly chron­ic­ling Bigelow’s “life in art,” and quot­ing from an inter­view Bigelow did with Artforum in 1995: “I worked with Art & Language, an artist’s group who were cri­tiquing the com­modi­fic­a­tion of cul­ture. So I was very influ­enced by them, and my con­cerns moved from the plastic arts to Conceptual art and a more politi­cized frame­work.” Indeed. My own feel­ings about Bigelow’s Oscar win, for dir­ect­ing The Hurt Locker, were that I was­n’t so much impressed to see a woman win the Best Directing trophy as I was to see such a com­mit­ted aes­thet­ic rad­ic­al do so. Not that The Hurt Locker was one of her more aes­thet­ic­ally rad­ic­al pic­tures. But to look at stuff such as Blue Steel, Strange Days, and par­tic­u­larly Point Break again through a con­cep­tu­al art refrac­tion is to see, well, almost com­pletely dif­fer­ent films, almost lit­er­ally inver­ted action “block­busters” cri­tiquing not just com­modi­fic­a­tion of cul­ture but gender roles and cap­it­al as well. 

Like most art collectives/movements of this and any oth­er time, Art & Language exten­ded its tendrils out­side of the visu­al arts, most not­ably into the area of music. In the early ’70s the group formed an alli­ance with Mayo Thompson, a Texan who was a co-founder of the putat­ively “psy­che­del­ic” (Thompson fairly bristles at the term, point­ing to his then-labelmates The Thirteenth Floor Elevators as a more per­tin­ent example of the genre) trio The Red Crayola (oth­er ori­gin­al mem­bers were Steve Cunningham and Rick [later Fredrick] Barthelme). At this time the Crayola (soon to be spelled with a “K” at the request of a cor­por­ate entity) was in a fal­low peri­od, and Thompson had been work­ing as an assist­ant to Robert Rauschenberg. 

Teaming up with young drum­mer Jesse Chamberlain to reform the Crayola, Thompson worked with the then-New-York-based Art & Language—which by the late ’70s would con­sist of  Mel Ramsden, Michael Baldwin, and Charles Hamilton Harrison—on a num­ber of pro­jects, one doc­u­mented by film­maker Zoran Popovic for the ultra-obscure 1975 doc Struggle in New York. The above photo is from that film; that’s Thompson at far left; Bigelow is the brown-haired woman in the middle, and Chamberlain is of course behind the drum kit. Like all sub­sequent Crayola/A&L col­labs, the early songs com­bined Thompson’s music with collective-penned lyr­ics that were low on con­ven­tion­al scan­sion but high on political/philosophical con­tent that often split the dif­fer­ence between deadly ser­i­ous­ness and will­ful prank­ish­ness. But the sound of the group in this peri­od was neither like that of the ’60s Crayola or the group’s sub­sequent British-based per­muta­tions. Perverse aper­çus such as “And we will be fed/with break­fast in bed/and served by a fat mil­lion­aire” were sung to what seems to be delib­er­ately ama­teur­ish, folky accom­pani­ment. The LP of this peri­od’s work, Corrected Slogans, is, truth to tell, one of the tough­er listens in the Crayola body of work. 

Bigelow’s involve­ment with the group had nev­er been much bruited. In an obit­u­ary for the artist Christine Kozlov, who worked with Art & Language at the same time as Bigelow, Suzanne Neuberger bemoans the lar­ger tend­ency behind this neg­lect: “Kozlov was a mem­ber of
Provisional Art and Language, worked in 1974 on the Corrected Slogans (Art
and Language and the Red Crayola LP), on Zoran Popovic’s A Struggle in New
York in 1976 and on the Music-Language video in the same year. What back then
was per­ceived as egal­it­ari­an in the joint, col­lect­ive ambi­tions of the group
seems today to be to the dis­ad­vant­age of the women, whose share in the work
barely received crit­ic­al notice. For example, to take just one instance, the
three women involved in A Struggle in New York, Paula Ramsden, Kathryn
Bigelow and Christine Kozlov, are giv­en only a mar­gin­al men­tion in Charles
Harrison’s Essays on Art and Language.”

Bigelow sub­sequently atten­ded Columbia, where she made her first short, The Set-Up, in 1978. Thompson and a few A&L mem­bers relo­cated to London, where Thompson became a sem­in­al part of the post-punk scene. After cre­at­ing the idio­syn­crat­ic, blis­ter­ing hard-art-rock jug­ger­naut Soldier Talk as The Red Crayola, he reteamed with Art & Language to make some attempts at, well, pop records, or at least post-punk pop records, one of the most excit­ing of which was Kangaroo?, which, like Slogans, made extens­ive use of female vocal­ists, in this case X Ray Spex/Essential Logic’s Lora Logic and The Raincoats’ Gina Birch. Song titles included “Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock (Parts I and II)” and “The Principles of Party Organization.” One song tackles gestalt ther­apy, and con­cludes “The trans­ac­tion­al list/of ques­tions for winners/this ana­lys­is to abol­ish loser/is the myth­ic­al gist/blut und eis­en severe/ the geises­gesichte of California.” And it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. Okay, not so much. Still. As Robert Christgau implied in his review of the record in 1981, this is art-rock for the John Berger read­er, and why the hell not?

The Krayola’s col­lab­or­a­tion with Art & Language con­tin­ues apace, and the latest one, Five American Portraits, is per­haps its most auda­cious yet. Advertising itself on the front cov­er of con­sist­ing of “por­traits” of Wile E. Coyote, President George W. Bush, President Jimmy Carter, John Wayne, and Ad Reinhardt, it per­haps sets the poten­tial listen­er up for a round of sar­don­ic com­ment­ary on these fig­ures. But, no.   These are all por­traits in the sense of being pre­cise descrip­tions of the ele­ments of a visu­al por­tray­al, e.g., “The for­ward prominence/Of the left cheek/The chin below the lower lip/Of President George W. Bush.” And so on, and so on, some­times for fif­teen minutes or so, accom­pan­ied by adap­ted music­al motifs Thompson found appro­pri­ate and/or amus­ing, as in “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” for Bush and “Paint It, Black” for Reinhardt. The kick­er is that Thompson and Birch (work­ing togeth­er again for the first time in about 25 years) sing the excep­tion­ally dry lyr­ics with what sounds like genu­ine emotion—an angry-seeming Birch actu­ally screams at one point. The over­all concept, I believe, derives from an older Krayola/A&L song, “A Portrait of You,” in which a wal­let snap­shot of a loved one is lost, found, coded and decoded until a “graph­ic­al carnage…it looks like a couple of Boy Scouts in a soggy tent” is accep­ted as The Thing Itself. 

I recently con­tac­ted Thompson, a won­der­ful fel­low with whom I’ve been friendly since the mid-’80s, to ask a little about the cur­rent con­fig­ur­a­tion of Art & Language, and about the Bigelow con­nec­tion. He informed me that Charles Hamilton Harrison died last August, and the col­lect­ive is now down to Ramsden and Baldwin.“Apropos of Kathryn,” he says, “neither A&L nor I’ve been in con­tact with her for sev­er­al years now. We’re all pleased for her suc­cess of course.” He also informs me that a DVD is in the works for release this year which will include the Art & Language sec­tions from Struggle In New York, a sub­sequent ’76 music-and-video pro­ject Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors, and more mater­i­al from the peri­od. “We won’t be advert­ising it as fea­tur­ing Kathryn,” Thompson says, “though [we] nat­ur­ally wel­come any­one who reads the fine print and gets inter­ested because of her.” Myself, I’ve always been inter­ested, and I’ll cer­tainly check out and write about the disc when it appears.