tat eve

Ausstellungsbeitrag: PETER BLEGVAD


The Lace (Die Spitze) aus der Serie Imagined - Observed - Remembered
(weiters ausgestellt : The Louris; und eine Seite aus der Comicstripsammlung Leviathan), Interview.



PETER BLEGVAD / BLEGVAD TRIO MIT CHRIS CUTLER UND JOHN GREAVES
(Blegvad textet, singt und ist Gitarrist)

Interview via E-Mail: Peter Blegvad - Edda Strobl, 20.4.2009

ES:
Is there, generally, any connex between your musical and your visual (put on paper) art? If yes, where do you locate this connection, lets say, where is the bridge for you?

PB:
As you say in your notes about this show, the experiences of reading comics and listening to music both require duration. If architecture can be frozen music then comics can be compared to petrified pop songs. I‘m not sure how similar the experiences of composing them are. These days I don‘t play much, but 20 years ago when I was gigging and recording and doing Leviathan every week I think I was more conscious of the differences than the affinities. After working on a strip for a while I often got a hankering to play some music, and vice-versa. Maybe because drawing is such a private occupation, usually done alone for long periods in relative quiet. And I made music with bands, traveling around and performing to people. It was social.

But let me answer this by quoting an interview I did in 1990:

In terms of the mental flexibility required it used to be easier to flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. Writing, drawing & music all exercise essentially the same psychic muscles (the Imagination) & working in one medium refreshes my appetite for the others. The goal of all my work is essentially the same - demonstrating that magic is real or that reality is magic by paying attention, (compensation/consolation for what is essentially a tragic take on existence) something like that...

Writing/drawing a Leviathan strip, say, isn‘t all that different from composing a song. They both involve a text imbedded in another medium. This symbiosis seems perfectly natural to me. My father‘s an illustrator (Erik Blegvad, currently at work on his 104th title); my mother, Lenore, is an author/illustrator/painter. My favourite artists, (Marcel Duchamp is perhaps the paradigm), deliberately flaunted the decree that art must not be ‚literary.‘ Musical heroes in my youth were John Lennon, Bob Dylan, & Captain Beefheart all of whom drew/wrote/painted when they weren‘t composing/performing/recording.

A question I‘m sometimes asked: „By working in different media aren‘t you avoiding commitment?“ I don‘t deny it. I‘ve always had an immature horror of being „defined“ - so that‘s part of it too. Would I have made more progress/been more successful if I‘d devoted myself to just one form of expression? Who knows? I‘m not thus constituted. I‘m a dilettante, „polymorphously perverse,“ a perpetual amateur. But leave us not forget that ‚amateur‘ derives from ‚amor‘ - the miracle is that I‘m still being paid (a bit) to do something I love doing & no one‘s telling me to change it to fit some target audience, etc.

ES:
Talking about the Amateur website: you obviously do a lot of research. (Putting the collected information in drawings and furtheron in a form, that reminds me a little bit of Luhmann - the method of the so called „Zettelkasten“ (~ card index) -, a little bit of Jorge Luis Borges,
concerning categories...scientific approach...)

PB:
I‘m a member of the London Institute of ‚Pataphysics. Alfred Jarry‘s „science of imaginary solutions“ is mother‘s milk to me. Even more than Borges, Flann O‘Brien Borges subverted the techniques, the tone and vocabulary of scholarship to create surreal humour, humour noir. The ravings of De Selby in „The Third Policeman“ were a big influence.
The mission for me is partly to undermine certainty, to confuse genres, to escape defintion. I have to take my subject and myself by surprise (mainly because I trust my unconscious more than my conscious).
By masquerading as a scientist I can better approach my true goal which might be described, loosely, as „poetry.“

ES:
Regarding the method of research, is there any similar method that leads
to your musical output (writing songs)?

PB:
Not so much on the pop side of my musical production, but some of the lyrics I wrote for music by John Greaves required research. The songs for „Smell of a Friend“ by the Lodge, for instance. Words to several of the songs were collaged together out of a store of quotes I‘d collected about milk.
And a few of the songs on „Kew. Rhone.“ use constraints, à la Oulipo, which is a kind of „research“ I suppose.

Here‘s an excerpt from another old interview I did which might contain something relevant for your show:

Writing, art and music are the three fields I dabble in. Working in one stimulates my appetite for the others, (sometimes fruitfully, sometimes merely as displacement activity). Songs have inspired strips, and vice-versa. There‘s a degree of overlap between them. They all exercise the imagination in a similar way. In each I‘m trying to create alternative worlds, waking dreams.


An example: I wrote a rhyme called „God Detector“ which begins:

A stranger pays a visit
to a house of ill-repute.
He takes an object from the pocket
of his sandpaper suit.
It’s a battery connected
to a tin-can on a string.
Someone says “hey mister,
careful where you point that thing.”

He got his god-detector out
& he began to shout.
Nobody was sure what he was on about.
“There’s a divinity among us -
altho we are not fit
to tie her shoes
a goddess who’s
too modest to admit
that there’s a Higher Power
& She is It.”

If I have a concert coming up, my first impulse is to set what I‘ve written to music. But if there‘s a deadline for a strip, I translate it into that medium. (In fact, in this instance, I did both).

On at least one record, „Kew. Rhone.“ (which I made with John Greaves and Lisa Herman in 1976), a kind of synthesis was achieved of all three fields (writing, music, art). Several of the lyrics refer to illustrations printed on the sleeve. An attempt at ‚interactivity‘ avant le lettre. The lyrics are locked in tension with both audial (the music) and visual data. The whole song becomes, in a sense, a 3D construct. I was aiming to create a mental object with the presence of a physical thing.

I occasionally do concerts in which a few songs are illustrated with slide-projections. Bringing the visual, audio and literary together in one gesamtkunstwerk is still a dream I hope to realize more fully one day. The illustrated lecture is a great vehicle in this regard. I can read, perform songs, show slides. It‘s my favorite form of performance art.

Writers of fiction and poetry work to engage all the senses, but vision, in our optic-centric culture, tends to be the one most lavishly (slavishly?) catered to. (How do readers, blind from birth, experience visual description in literature, I wonder...) As a writer I certainly try and evoke images in the reader/listener‘s mind. Hallucination is the paradigm. But it‘s misleading to think of this evocation in purely visual terms. It‘s curious how description can become more effective the more you leave out, or the more oblique you are. On the Amateur Enterprises web site (www.amateur.org.uk) a reporter visits our headquarters in London and witnesses our pseudo-scientific (‚pataphysical) attempts to fabricate „for real“ images from poetry like „death‘s electric moccassin“ (Emily Dickinson). Reading those three words evokes something like an „image“ in the mind, but it isn‘t purely visual, all sorts of data flow in to inform it. In this sense literature, poetry especially, is more intimately and mysteriously „visual“ than what Duchamp called „retinal“ art, art which merely serves the eye not the mind.

In terms of the music, I‘m aware of the structure of a song in time as a kind of architecture. Verses, choruses, middle eight, etc. have to be arranged to create a whole that is „shapely“, unless of course the aim is to subvert that expectation.

With sequential strip cartoons there‘s a definite analogy to be made with music, in that both involve organized duration. No question that I hone the text, too, in a manner analogous to lyrics. I often dream of being a real writer, but I‘m most drawn to hybrid forms in which texts are married to another medium (music/drawing).