“Peace is
like a rare flower. The soil that it grows in must contain
special ingredients: freedom is one of the essential ones as
well as creative courage.” Joe Kagle, RGHF Peace
coordinator.
The
Ant Track
(Abstract Art, Jazz and… Destalinization)
Ketevan Kinsurashvili, art historian, Georgian State
University of Theatre and Film, Tbilisi, Georgia
 An
American artist, who arrived in Tbilisi under a Fulbright
Program, Mr. Roger Colombik demonstrated to his Georgian
students at one lecture a work created by the Japanese
artist, Yukinori Yanagi. This is a large size assemblage,
entitled “America,” representing flags of different
countries. The flags are made of color sand and are placed
in a plastic cover. In between the flags ants are moving
freely. In accord with the flags they are drifting
unhampered from, say, Canada to Hungary, from Peru to
Sweden, from Morocco to China, etc. The artist emphasized
that the more we move about and migrate, the more we
resemble one another. On the one hand, this is dangerous,
for while moving from one place to another we lose our
cultural identity. On the other hand, this is useful if we
consider that while moving about we enrich one another. My
article relates to the enrichment rather than the opposite.
What
could relate, for instance, abstract compositions, created
by the off-springs of different continents – a European Pit
Mondrian and an American Jackson Pollock to Afro-American
tradition? At one glance there seems to be
no relation, but from decoding these lines and in-wrought
rhythms, or, as a culturologist would say, during
deconstruction, the ant track will bring us to jazz,
which was created by black Americans.
Mondrian
was an externally and internally strictly organized northern
Protestant. In his studio everything was as clear and
rigorously organized, as were his geometrical compositions.
Nothing broke the outward symmetry except for one thing
which was a novelty at that time – a gramophone. Mondrian
listened to jazz melodies played on it. He himself was also
a wonderful dancer. Thus, partially under the influence of
jazz, Neoplasticism evolved. Neoplasticism is one of the
most noteworthy trend of Modern Art. It had a great
influence on architecture and design. Yves Saint Loran
adjusted these compositions to women, and it was jazz which
breathed life into them, as Mondrian’s compositions develop
dynamism interwoven in jazz. The symmetry of his lines,
notwithstanding their austerity, is never dead and stiff,
but, like jazz, is dynamic and full of life.
In 1940
Mondrian went to New York – the city of his life-long
dreams. This city imparted even more dynamism to his
compositions. At that time he created compositions on a New
York theme and his famous canvas “Broadway, Boogie-Woogie”.
In that period a new artistic style was emerging in New
York, headed by Jackson Pollock. When Mondrian saw his work,
he told Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock’s future dealer, that it
was the best work of art in recent years. When in 1940ies
Jackson Pollock laid a canvas on the floor and proceeded
with creation of his abstractions by splashing colors, what
was he listening to? Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Billie
Holiday, Duke Ellington. Sometimes he played his music so
loudly that his friend Lee Krasner was ready to climb to the
roof to escape music.
Mondrian
and Pollock, both at different times and separately, were
nourishing on Cubism, and it is not surprising that Cubism
and Picasso bring us to African art, specifically African
sculpture, again. No one knows whether this trend would have
emerged in 1906 had Picasso not seen African sculptures in
1906 in Trocadero Museum in Paris. Thanks to these exotic
creations, he has penetrated into the depths of form and
content. Picasso attained the goal he had been seeking. His
eyes opened to the “simplicity” of beauty. Almost ornamental
simplicity of form, line, characterizing African ritual
statues, originates from their symbolic nature. Form is
simplified in order to show deep content (with the desire to
normalize interrelations with cosmos) rather than opposite.
Later all that the primitive man had attained instinctively
was turned by Abstract Art into the product of cognition.
Symmetry and rhythm, spelt out in abstract works, are also
strongly felt in jazz. Jazz makes feelings abstract. And if
we scrutinize the whole African culture we shall see that
this road of alienation and abstraction from reality is a
characteristic feature of cultures of African origin.
But let
us stop by Pollock and see where the ant’s track is leading
us. Surprisingly, in the end of 1950ies, when the Cold War
is still raging, the track leads us beyond the iron curtain
into the Soviet Union. Over there, in one communal
apartment, Joseph Brodski, a future Nobel Prize laureate, at
that time a completely young poet, by means of a wire,
plugged into an old Phillips receiver, brought by his father
from the front, is listening to jazz melodies and finds in
them a spiritual relief, catches a charge of freedom in
them. Later, this time in America, an elderly Brodski
recollects in his Memoirs how, thanks to that receiver, he
got to know the jazz pantheon, and how in that period German
names, still in use since the end of war, were gradually
replaced in young people’s language with Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald , Charlie Parker, Sidney
Bechet, Django Reinhardt and others. The manner they walked
also changed. In the poet’s words their bodies, constrained
under the pressure of collectivism, gradually came to life
and started to move under swing melodies. In his Memoirs
(“Trofejnoe”, 1986) he recollects how he, a 15-16
years-old boy, overheard in 1955-56 in one dirty industrial
suburb of Leningrad Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, streaming from
a window; how the boys of his generation were collecting
transparent records with jazz music, which could be bought
only illicitly, from individual sellers. He remarks that all
the above stated promoted the process of destalinization
much better than Khruschev’s all speeches, delivered at the
20th CPSU Congress and after it.
Similar
opinion is expressed by a Georgian composer Gia Qancheli in
a documentary dedicated to the poet. He says that he got to
love music thanks to the film “A Sunny Valley Serenade”,
that his generation was nourished on jazz melodies performed
by Glenn Miller’s orchestra. He also mentions with irony
that Stalin made a gross mistake by authorizing the show of
this film, as it promoted a free thinking of individuals.
The society, which seemed to be safely locked behind an iron
curtain, was in fact getting information rather than
enjoying those pictures. For them those means of recreation
were transformed into a sermon on individualism.
Jazz is
a music of freedom. Quite recently an American film was
released about a famous Cuban jazz musician, Arturo
Sandovari, in which it is shown how stealthily he was
listening to Dizzy Gillespie’s performance on the radio, and
how his wife was warning him that it might be dangerous for
their family. Here we can also remember Benny Gudman’s visit
to Georgia in the early 1960ies, which has completely
changed the thinking of many representatives of young
generation of that time.
But let
us go back to art. Side by side with jazz, in late 1950ies,
in Khruschev’s “warmed up” country information on art kept
penetrating into the country. In 1957, thanks to the
exhibition brought to the 6th Youth Festival and,
subsequently, in 1959, due to the exhibition financed by the
American State Department, Soviet artists got acquainted
with American Abstract Expressionism and other events. A
Georgian Alexandre Bandzeladze saw some American artist’s
abstract work in a newspaper. The critical article was
appended a caricature entitled “a laugh room”. The
spectators were mockingly viewing an abstract composition of
an American artist. This black and white illustration turned
out to be an impulse, which drove the artist to start,
underground, in secret from the authorities, to paint
abstractions. The artist was also inspired by Polish
avant-garde music, in which elements of jazz were likewise
strong. Subsequently in the studio of this freedom-loving
artist a whole series of young avant-gardist artists were
nurtured. Jazz melodies, in-wrought in Pollock’s and other
Americans’ arabesques or reaching alive to the Communist
block countries, were conducive to the development of
individual thinking.
In this
way jazz, born among the black musicians of New-Orleans and
Louisiana, a confluence of Spanish folk music, French
military marches and blues, created by the descendants of
black slaves, may be regarded as a spiritual sanctuary for
the freedom-loving people, breathing a spirit of protest in
all parts of the world.
An
internally free individual is in a constant search of
information – verbal, visual, sonic, which helps him to
acquire self-confidence while defending his personal
freedom. The short stories from recent history testify to
the great role, played by art and culture, in people’s (my,
your, everybody’s) life.
Tbilisi,
2002
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