My Favorite Albums Of The Year And Then Some Personal Crap At The End Of This Post

It's this time of the year again, when every single music magazine or website publishes its top 50 or 100 of their favorite albums of the year.
Nobody really gives a shit which ones were mine, beside I am so absolutely predictable anybody who's been following FBC! for the past few years will know *exactly* which ones are my top 3. But, this being December (meaning, not ALL albums of 2014 have been out yet) and because there won't be any new blog post on here until 2015 I thought I should keep FBC! on life support a little bit longer with crap and stuff. Speaking of, there will be other news at the end of this post so if you're not interested in music you can skip to the bottom right now.

Now, let's go back to music. There won't be a "top 100" albums because, as I buy everything on vinyl and I'm a permanently broke writer and translator, I don't buy that many records. My top 7 in decending order:

1. Scott Walker, Sunn O))), Soused. 

I know, I know. I haven't written a review for lack of time but in a nutshell, I think this is the most accessible Scott Walker record in 20 years, because, let's not kid ourselves, this is Scott Walker & backing band much more than a real collaboration.  Here's Brando, the belter on the album, if you don't find yourself singing OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH THE WIDE MISSOURIIIIIIIIIIII after listening to it then you don't know what an earworm is.
Only regret I have: this video is ridiculously stupid, Gisele Vienne should stick to choreography I think. Also, I wish there would have been more interviews of Scott Walker and the Sunn O))) people when the record came out, in terms of promotion because this record deserves to be heard and sold and bought and listened to obsessively over and over again.

2. Swans, To be Kind.

Told ya I was predictable. Musically I don't think the current Swans are super groundbreaking but the intensity of their music is so deep it doesn't matter. A band you need to see and experience live. Gira did a short Q&A in Brussels recently before the concert and stressed that because people don't buy records anymore, in any form, it's becoming difficult to make a living but as a touring band. Which is great for us, the audience, but imagine how hard it is on musicians. Buy records, people, they last longer than your stupid smartphones and tablets and other shit.

3. Liars, Mes.

I love Liars, a band I've never seen live but it's not for lack of want. It's probably the only electronic act I find interesting aside from Dan Deacon (who's going to release a new album soon, I'm told). It goes beyond the usual clichés of electronica yet manages to make you dance to dirty tunes. If there had been no Swans and Scott Walker this year they'd be my #1.

4. Einstürzende Neubauten, Lament.

Not strictly "an album" per se but the soundtrack to a live performance piece commissioned to them for the centenary of the First World War and premiered recently in Dixmude, Belgium. It's narrative and contains some tunes and lyrics not written by EN (the various hymn and Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind, made famous by Marlene Dietrich). As such it is uneven mostly because of the one song where they use autotune, proving to the world that even EN (and John Cale 2 years ago) can't manage to do anything decent with autotune.  Below is a live performance of Lament in Prague.

5. Neneh Cherry, Blank Project

That album came out about the same time as the new St. Vincent one (the indie Lady gaga), which was extraordinarily over-hyped in the same proportion it was overproduced and lacked soul. Meanwhile nobody really talked about Blank Project which I found much more adventurous musically than St. Vincent and had much more depth and soul.  Thank you, Neneh Cherry.

6. The Woodentops, Granular Tales.

 The Woodentops were one of my favorite bands when I was a teen, long, long ago sometimes in the last century. They made a new record that came out this year but unfortunately for them they're signed with Cherry Red, a label that doesn't bother with promotion and vinyls for things that should count. There are very few videos on YouTube alas, but trust me, this album is very good. Buy it, if only for A Little More Time, the best song on the record I think.

7. Hauschka, Abandoned City

A really good album of prepared piano music. It certainly lacks John Cage's use of silence and to a certain extent also lacks subtlety (there are some slow numbers which aren't very far removed from shopping mall piano playing, especially on the extra tunes you get if you buy the vinyl. In passing, this is a very generous gesture) but it's an excellent gateway drug to more experimental or interesting music straddling the divide between indie (for lack of a better word) and contemporary "classical" music. A bit disappointing live but apparently his physical handsomeness makes up for that in the eye of his audience.

And that's pretty much it for my end of year list. Told ya I didn't get to buy that many albums. If you want to contribute to the "let's extend the Frenchy musical library" fund, all monetary donations are accepted.
There were lots of other records my friends seemed to have loved, but that didn't do anything for me, such as The War On Drugs (boring) and Girls In Hawaii. I've seen a lot of people enamored of the new Perfume Genius, but alas I listened to it only after seeing the band live and, uh if you have pitch problems as a singer and your material so depends on adventurous and difficult singing, it's an issue. The few songs I heard from the record were very interesting but unfortunately that live experience totally ruined it for me.




And now that this year is nearly over, something deeply personal. I had started this year in the pits, as some of you know, and didn't expect much improvement as it went on. Yet at about the same time last year, about seventy people reached out to me on Facebook and somehow made things more bearable to me. I would like to thank all of you collectively, for taking the time to be supportive and loving when I truly needed it.  It was an astonishing and truly beautiful experience for me, especially as many of the people who messaged me were virtual friends I've had not much contact with before. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all, it's been much, much appreciated. And also very humbling.
After this, everything that could make 2014 better happened: the new Lydia Davis book came out, and then there was the Swans record, the Liars one, and blowing everybody away, the new Scott Walker one. It can only be a good year when all these bands release an album, right?

Something else wonderful that happened this year is I started to collaborate to Frog Magazine (a print only art and architecture biannual publication) where I found a happy home writing and publishing, thanks to its marvelous editor, Eric Troncy whom I finally met in person this year, and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship (hi, Eric!).
All of you who read FBC! for the now super rare art writing, I'd like to encourage you to go and buy Frog, because there is some truly great writing in it, all the photos are taken by contributors (i.e. not the same press photos we see over and over again in other mags).
In the next issue that will likely be out in the Spring of 2015 there will be a review of Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern written by yours truly as well as a feature on Cady Noland, and a review of Robert Gober at MoMA with really great photos by Grant Wahlquist, thanks to Chuck Kim's help in securing the photo op.
And in the latest issue (#14), which you can buy online at the link above but also at select vendors worldwide, I've published a very weird article that starts as a review of an exhibit of the late French TV stage magician Garcimore at a roadside museum but somehow manages to cover Marina Abramovic's magic pee, the distinction between mainstream culture and the possibility of an indie one in contemporary art, and lots of other things.
I'm not sure exactly what I've done with that one, to be honest, but I'm rather happy with it, a rarity with my own writing, so if you're curious take a gander at it. And if you read French I can only recommend you read ALL of Eric Troncy's articles. He's the best thing that ever happened to art writing, and, personally, to my own writing as well.

I've Seen Gods On Earth And They Are The Almighty Swans

Swans At Brussels' Ancienne Belgique, September 25, 2014.

I've seen Gods on Earth and they are the almighty Swans.

 Little did I know, when as a teen I bought their red-colored vinyl record of Love Will Tear Us Apart covers (Michael Gira doing singing duties on one side, Jarboe on the other) in my shitty little provincial hometown that one day I would get to see these strange radical New Yorkers -as they were then- play live one day.
Which is why I'm so grateful to all these bands reforming these days and playing live, even if sometimes if makes me feel like my parent's generation deciding to attend a Rolling  Stones concert at some giant arena in 1982.
Not that Swans has anything do to with that sort of things of course, but I'm just happy they're having records of new music out* and that they're touring often.

 The concert was preceded by a rare public interview with Michael Gira at Huis23, a cosy intimate space above the venue's bar where about 60 of us gathered to see the cowboy-hatted man answer a few questions.
Asked if he did that often he said, "no, it's the very first time and the very last one, too!" It was very short, and the questions were not so interesting  -pro tip: when you interview an artist, musician, writer, filmmaker… ask them about THEIR work and not every other band under the sun- nonetheless Gira gave some interesting answers and also proved himself tremendously funny.

Asked why the band didn't play old material he said that they did that after they reformed a few years ago but that he realized they were "wasting time, and it felt fake somehow" like some sort of old bands reforming to cash in I guess, so he decided to forge ahead with new material.
  He spoke a little bit about running his own label and how he decided ultimately to only use if for his own band, which has all to do with current music economics: you all young fuckers downloading the music for free and never buying records, despite a lot of people being interested in what he was putting out (check the link above and buy stuff there!). And that it involved a lot of energy and "I'm not 30 anymore, and I have children and stuff" and so he preferred to focus on his own activities and manage to survive doing that.

 He told a funny anecdote about recording with Devendra Banhart and wanting him to focus on a vocal take, and playing some sort of private performance à la Joseph Beuys' Coyote (I Like America And America Likes Me) whereupon he stripped naked and threw a blanket over his head, running around in the studio like a mad man to elicit some sort of reaction from Banhart.
He also answered a lot of questions about other bands (yes in the 1980s he felt more of a kinship with Einstürzende Neubauten than bands like Sonic Youth, no, there's nobody like Swans out there today, etc.)
Also as the host kept on prodding him about "radical bands" and "radical music" and "radicality" [sic] in general in the end he said something like "I'm not sure being radical is really something desirable" (which I take it to mean "for the music's own sake"). There were some interesting bits about working in the studio and starting from mistakes, which every musician worth their salt always talks about. And after 20 minutes it was over, and time to get dinner for me and avoid (thank Lucifer) most of the opening act, Pharmakon. What I caught from her was some incessant wailing over electronic music which… give me back Lydia Lunch or Diamanda Galas, please. Talking about radicalness.

The venue was at capacity and the audience was a mix of middle-aged people who have known Swans for several decades like yours truly, and also much younger people who, despite what you would expect my generation to label them, weren't really hipsters. Thankfully there aren't that many hipsters in Brussels, but even if there were… I don't think they are the enemy.
The gear on stage was stacked in such a way that there was very little room in front for the musicians to move, which must be some quirk from the band because the stage is actually very large. Thor Harris and the drummer (Phil Puelo, Wikipedia tells me) were a little bit behind the stacks.

The lights went out at 8.15 PM sharp (they're always on time at Belgian venues) and… the mighty Thor Harris came on stage and started to bang on his gong slowly… and slowly… and slowly… and I thought, uh oh is it going to be some sort of prog-like slow boring something? Then came Christopher Hahn on lap steel guitar (from where I was on the 1st balcony I actually thought it was a synth or some sort of keyboard) and it went on… slowly… and on... then  came Gira and the rest of the band … and so the world exploded.

It's hard to describe a Swans concert and I'm going to fail like everybody else before me, because words are really lame in trying to recapture what is a collective trance-like atmosphere where everybody is enraptured by the music. It's true what everybody else says: it is ear-shatteringly loud. But not much more than a Dan Deacon concert or even a Sparks one. Having been warned by the lovely Barry Schwabsky who saw them recently in the US (hi, Barry!) I had made sure to bring my own earplugs (if you ever go to a concert in Belgium, most venues if not all usually give you free earplugs when you ask at the bar) but I took them off intermittently. The loudness is powerful enough to make the floor and walls vibrate, and all your body as well, which I'm sure must be the scientific reason why everybody is communing so well with the music as the band plays on.
It doesn't however muddies the sound whatsoever, and so you get to really appreciate the use of percussive elements. There is of course a strong "American music" feel to Swans because it is primarily a guitar band (or so you would think), where guitars sculpt drone-like repetitive sound, which comes in great waves crashing out and washing out all over you.

But I think it's only on stage that Thor Harris' importance to the music becomes obvious and you understand what he brings to the band: he's not only a powerful percussionist but a delicate multi-intrumentist as well who plays I think clarinet (I was far…) and some sort of string instrument with a bow, and the trombone. But even when that moment of recognition comes, it is fleeting because witnessing a Swans concert is something that takes you away from "normal" gigs, even if there are some highlights -Thor Harris crashing his great cymbals in synch with Gira jumping on the stage with his guitar, Harris bare-chested playing trombone, Gira and Hahn kinda "jamming" together with Hahn looking like an evil character out of a Lynch movie, which is rather incredible for a seated musician.

 It's fleeting because it's music you can't take apart and say, pore over the lyrics, dissociate some chord from another, analyze how it works, what it does, especially what it does as it is impossible to describe. You could say, "the band is tight", "it's a whole" but even this doesn't even begin to describe it. There's a certain perfection of craft, in any craft, when you have a group of people working  in  absolute synch together, and producing something that is more than the sum of its parts, and Swans is that more.  And the audience comes to feel it and be part of this more, too, experiencing something that all religions the world over would be at pain to ever match, because it is a more that is real. Like all great music the sound that comes out of these musicians is almost tactile, but unlike merely good music it can't be reduced to "slow song", "uptempo number", "great hooks" and not only because the music is more drone-like than anything else, because it isn't only drone-like nor repetitive. You can hear it, you can feel it, you can almost touch it.

 Swans is probably the best live band on the planet right now because it sculpt sounds with an intensity that is unmatched by anybody or anything else, and there is a sort of manic energy that runs through the various songs/tunes/pieces (most from To be Kind plus one I didn't recognize at all that I don't think was on The Seer but, hhhmmm, I think the lucid part of my brain was pretty much gone by then). I tried to record some video snippets at various moments, only snippets because I didn't want to hold my camera throughout when the only thing I wanted to do was be in the moment and enjoy the gig.
Which is a trite way to describe the sort of feeling you have when you are at a Swans concert, aside from saying that as a spectator, you are indeed in the moment. There is nothing before and no mental recognition of what would be an after, you are, indeed, here, now. It's a bit beyond music, that power to make you just be. Now.

And it also makes you think, once the lights come on again, and the band has left the stage, and the rumble of hundreds of feet and bodies moving to reach the exits reaches you -nobody talked much after, really- it does make you think that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the visual arts that can ever match this intensity. Nothing.

* Filth is being reissued on vinyl next month, if anybody reading this loves me and has some spare $, you know what I want for Christmas.

The Audience Is Waiting. On the late music of Scott Walker.

In December 2012 Scott Walker released Bish Bosch, the last record in a trilogy with which he has established a very personal style so far unmatched by any other musician. In 2013, after listening to each record in succession over a period of several months, I wrote the following text for an essay contest, albeit with a different (and, admittedly, really crappy) introduction. The text was prompted by the music, obviously, but also by the many reviews and reactions I had read then, none of which ever matching my experience of listening to the music. I must confess having come very late to the music of Scott Walker, maybe 4 or 5 years ago only, and via his later output, being totally ignorant of his 1960s music.  The text was also written from the point of view of an art writer, a bit as if it was a piece of visual art. It was also intended for a general audience, initially, so I tried as much as possible to write it  in non-artspeak. I had shelved it after a few unsuccessful attempts to pitch it to music magazine,  and thought about maybe posting it later this year when his collaboration with Sunn 0))), Soused, was going to be released on Sept. 22nd, but as today marks FBC! 7th anniversary and that I'm in no real mood to write anything else, here it is for your enjoyment. Or not.

“The audience is waiting
 Its audience is waiting 
Its audience is waiting 
Its audience is waiting”
Scott Walker, “Hand Me Ups”, The Drift, 2006

The Audience Is Waiting. On the late music of Scott Walker.

Looking up  at what established critics have written about Scott Walker's recent output, and being confronted with qualifiers such as “terrifying, harrowing, austere, arcane, inaccessible, difficult, taxing, demanding, dense, austere, impenetrable, dark”, one cannot help but feeling doomed to fail at describing the experience of listening to it. But as the artist himself has said in the 2006 documentary 30th Century Man “I fail lots of times, but at least I’m trying.”
Let’s try.


The Artist, The Audience.
Scott Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in 1943, is nearly as old as rock music and pop music, if you will, having gotten his start as a teenage singer in the 1950s, in the wake of the commotion caused by Elvis Presley’s success. In the United Kingdom, he is mostly known or remembered as the lead singer of 1960s band The Walker Brothers and as an immense Pop star back then, who went solo in 1967 and released in quick succession four albums of delicate and timeless Pop music, backed-up by soaring orchestras that enhanced his famous baritone voice. He’s also credited as introducing Belgian singer Jacques Brel to an English- speaking audience by being the first one to cover his songs, later sung by the likes of David Bowie and Marc Almond.
The story goes that Scott Walker lost himself in the 1970s by recording mediocre albums of middle-of-the-road standards, before resurfacing as an avant-garde musician in 1995 with his record Tilt, following in the footsteps of earlier attempts, his 1984 solo record Climate of Hunter and the four songs he composed for the Walker Brother’s final album Nite Flights, after they had briefly reformed for a failed come-back. This story is of course incomplete, and as such has only served to grow a myth, about a reclusive and mad genius who releases a new masterpiece once every decade, using strange sound-making techniques and devices in the studio.
The reality is probably more complex, his glacial rate of delivery having to do with record companies’ corporate issues and with their need for commercial pragmatism, in addition to Walker’s own self-avowed slow rate of production.
The result of this complicated tale we’ve been fed however is that there seems to exist a split within his audience, between the part that grew up accustomed to his magnificent but still largely conventional music, and a newer one more interested in his recent adventurous output. That some people might enjoy both is rarely acknowledged, not least by the artist himself who’s convinced his old 1960s fans cannot abide his newer music. A quick look at comments on video sharing websites or social networks appears to confirm this: “rubbish”, “garbage”, “crap”, “trash”, or the ultimate crime, “pretentious” have been used to describe his recent songs, while some people, seemingly unaware Walker likely doesn’t read their comments, use the same pages to plead or demand he “goes back to his old style, to accommodate his fans”.

Walker’s most recent album, Bish Bosch, was released at the end of 2012, several years after The Drift (2006), completing the trilogy started with Tilt (1995). With this latest record, we are now afforded the possibility to comprehend better what he has been doing for the last two decades or so, to situate it within a larger context. As if to further complicate matters, the Scott Walker actuality has been quite busy recently when a box set of his first five solo records Scott Walker The Collection (Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3, Scott 4 and ‘Til The Band Comes In) was commercialized earlier this year, accentuating the divide between fans of his older music and lovers of his newer output. Though in truth the latter set tends to also enjoy early Scott Walker music, so the musical divide might simply be a generation gap rather than a real, sharp aesthetic division.
The box set also helped to finally attempt a comprehensive examination of the artist’s work, allowing to detect in early songs the roots of his current musicianship, as evidenced in a recent article by John Doran on the specialized music website The Quietus. Viewed retrospectively, old songs such as Plastic Palace People (1968) with its fragmented lyrics and breaks of rhythm within the same tune help understand the evolution that lead to Walker’s current work. Other songs like The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated To The Neo-Stalinist Regime) or Hero Of The War, both on Scott 4, are just the seeds which Bolivia 95 and Patriot (A Single) on Tilt will grow from several decades later, their lyrics as political and poetical at the end of the 1960s than they will be at the turn of this century.
Outside of the United Kingdom, Walker’s reputation and fame are rather murky. Except maybe in Japan, he’s virtually unknown as a former pop star, which helps with a better reception of the Tilt, The Drift and Bish Bosch trilogy. For one thing it is the esteem in which these records are held critically that has paved the way for people to rediscover his early work, as in the United States.

What It’s All About Is Not “About”.
When confronted to the Scott Walker of the 21st century, it helps to think about other mediums outside of music, such as literature or visual arts. Most music critics tend to compare Walker to T.S Eliot, Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, understandably enough as his lyrics draw from language tropes most famously pioneered by these modernists, however these comparisons are unhelpful in the sense that they are used by the reviewers to try and explain away what this music “is about”.
That this music is wholly unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something might be a more interesting avenue to explore. That this music is unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something may be what makes it unbearable to anyone attached to simple answers and used to a completely passive reception. That this music is unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something is also why it is so new and fascinating.

If we lose the impulse to try to explain it away we can look at other elementary questions, like the ones an art historian starts with when confronted with an unknown artwork outside of an immediately recognizable context. What does the work do? What does it want? Where does it exist?

Impulsively some quick answers come forth: what the work does is to simply exist, as such it is new, it creates its own style, and as every single artwork that operates as “new”, it doesn’t come from nothing, even when it does seem to appear out of thin air. So let’s look at it, now that we have a body of works within which we can draw comparisons.
In the visual arts field, most enduring artworks are effectively not “about” something, because in the space where they exist they are multi-layered, dealing with complex influences, functioning in a fuzzy cultural and social context, answering to historical and mundane demands alike, interfering or dialoguing with vernacular and elitist tropes. They appear: irritating, dense, scandalous, annoying, puzzling, funny, bleak, scary, strange, encountering resistance and praise, sometimes failing their creators’ original intent but succeeding in changing the then-current rules of the game, or more prosaically the artistic conventions of the context within which they function.
As such, they often meet the incomprehension and the mockery of a general audience, the same general audience whose offspring will flock museums, concert halls and literary commemorations later on: witness the annual Bloomsday celebrating James Joyce in modern- day Dublin, the success of the many Picasso or Warhol retrospectives, and the reverence accorded to modern recreations of Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s Rite Of Spring. Yet all these works have caused a scandal and met a large resistance when they first appeared.
The late Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley was reviled as a jokester in the 1990s, yet his recent retrospective (December 2012-April 2013) held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam attracted nearly half a million people. Marcel Duchamp, the seminal 20th century artist whose readymades influenced everything from Pop Art to 1980s Appropriation Art, used to say that the audience accepts unconventional artworks only after a certain delay. It proved certainly true for many influential movements and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Postwar ones, so revered nowadays that it is sometimes difficult to understand the outcry that greeted them when they first appeared. As they’ve been slowly assimilated and even co- opted, at least superficially, by latter-day graphic designers and interior decorators, as attested by the way the radicalism of Minimalism has been absorbed by contemporary corporate office design, the uproar they met when they were first offered on view seems incomprehensible.

Out Of Thin Air
Listening to Scott Walker in the 21st century can sometimes prove a challenge to an audience unaware or unaccustomed to a wide array of musical genres that exist outside of mainstream Pop music, yet there is an ever-growing circle of listeners who latch on his songs without hesitation. For this audience, there is a musical context, which without being directly traceable as an obvious influence on Walker makes it familiar to ease into his music. This context is often ignored or goes unmentioned in reviews of his work, sadly, as they tend to focus on the apparent dichotomy between his 1960s pop music and his recent dissonant one. Dissonance in itself is important if you recall it is a leading principle of modern and contemporary classical music, along with atonality. Modern and contemporary music is roughly contemporary to Modernist art and literature: most milestones like Schoenberg’s “Scandal Concert”, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Kandinsky’s invention of abstract painting, or Duchamp’s readymades were all made or released around 1911-1913.

Abstraction, cerebral art and atonality have been with us for a good century and for the culture at large we’re only getting accustomed to it now. Outside of high culture, in the musical world most of us inhabit, the one that encompasses popular and vernacular music released commercially, we’ve been used to underground, alternative and independent music for many decades as well, music that strives to be experimental, unconventional and innovative.
Some of it was ignored at the time of its making but grew extremely influential, with bands like The Velvet Underground; other acts whose perception of eccentricity has more to do with image like Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart, their music not really sounding unconventional or difficult anymore today, still managed to attract a sizable public.
A bit more foreign to a mainstream audience, some niche genres such as industrial music have existed since at least the mid-1970s, with pioneer band Throbbing Gristle in the UK (1975) or German band Einstürzende Neubauten (1980), later bigger acts such as Nine Inch Nails, acknowledged as an influence by Walker, brought the genre to a larger international audience in the mid-1990s. Outside of industrial music, Walker is known for being a lover of classical music, as well as of modern and contemporary classical music. Composers Turnage, Kurtag, Berio, Ligeti or Lachenmann are often mentioned in interviews or were played at the Meltdown Festival he programmed at the Southbank Center in 2000. He has also often talked about his love of progressive jazz back in the 1960s, and as for current mainstream rock bands, he’s a Radiohead fan. An audience that is accustomed to these types of unconventional music might be naturally drawn to what Walker does nowadays.

The Audience Is Reading
Listening carefully to the Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch trilogy in successive order, we can recognize an evolution, with Tilt introducing the brand new style created by Walker, and in retrospect probably the easiest of the three to get into, The Drift being a consolidation and refinement of the same style, while Bish Bosch clearly opens up new possibilities and directions in his development, hinting at a more baroque and diverse future output while signaling a sort of irregular closure of the cycle. Like most groundbreaking works in all mediums, these records are by no means perfect. They offer however a certain methodical construction that even an untrained ear can recognize, when listening attentively. Interviews with the artist can also be illuminating in getting a deeper understanding about his creative process.
In all his interviews Scott Walker explains that he starts all his songs by writing the lyrics, later on molding the sounds and the music to match them. Read separately from the music, the lyrics are poetical with an often lush imagery yet they can appear nonsensical because of the complex puns, metaphors and figurative expressions assembled together in a non-linear way. Nevertheless there is a narrative continuity to them, as well as common themes: violence, decay, anatomy, eroticism, fauna, astronomy, wars, dictators, and childhood. There are even some love songs. Some of his songs are clearly explicit in denouncing the horrors of war but associated with a poetic language that brings them beyond a simplistic political message. Walker has also been insistent that there was humor throughout all his records, though it is the most apparent in Bish Bosch you can catch glimpses of it on his other albums. Walker himself rarely offers explanations about his lyrics save for some well-known

examples, so we get to know that Jesse (on The Drift) is a song responding to 9/11 – here paraphrasing Walker in the interview he gave in the documentary 30th Century Man – a song visually composed by juxtaposing the images of the vertical twin towers, reflecting “American hubris” but having “no spiritual reflective qualities” in contrast with the horizontal vision of the American prairie where Elvis Presley, in a nightmare, speaks to his stillborn twin brother Jesse Garon whom he cannot see and who is therefore deprived of “a reflective quality” himself.
Pretty much all of Walker’s song lyrics share this jumping from one idea to another via associative pairing or aural puns, which at first listen give a very fragmentary idea of what is going on. It’s only when listening to the music several times over that the structure of the songs become apparent.
Because he uses many words coming from foreign languages, they sometimes come out as nonsensical, though they make sense once you understand the underlying themes. For example a song about the Balkan wars would refer to Bosnian place names, or on the contrary the place name translated in English would open another entire new avenues by using free words associations. Sometimes the listener understands them instinctively, sometimes not at all; depending on their level of obscurity Walker occasionally offers footnotes and references on the album sleeves or the lyrics booklet. These can be helpful sometimes, but in truth they don’t always feel necessary.

The Audience Is Listening.
Now as for the music, it also follows an inner logic that makes lots of sense once Walker unveils the main rule that underlines his creative process: as the lyrics are what come first to him, the music has to match them, sometimes quite literally. In an interview recently published in the magazine The Believer, he explains how the drums in the song See You Don’t Bump His Head on Bish Bosch are there to match the image of the swan in the lyrics, where the bird seems to be gliding majestically over the water while below the surface it is frantically paddling, to keep on moving.
Once that principle of sounds corresponding to the lyrics or trying to give the best possible approximation of them is understood, then the infamous percussive meat-punching for the song Clara on The Drift becomes evident as a signifier for the mob defiling the corpse of Mussolini’s mistress after she’s been executed along the Italian dictator. Aside from the Foley effects used on his records, the songs themselves tend to be built to include many moments of silence, “silence” being defined by Walker as the origin for the lyrics and as an essential part of the music itself.
All the music is constructed according to an internal structure that isn’t made to be obvious to a listener, so the traditional verse-chorus-bridge we’ve been used to with Pop music and rock’n’roll is noticeably absent, though there are repetitions of musical patterns and lyrics in most songs.
When we switch on the radio, go shopping, hear movie soundtracks, go to restaurants and bars, most of the current commercial music that we’re passively subjected to is constructed around drum loops or build with the idea that the beat is the essential component holding the song together as an entity.
Walker’s music is totally opposite: there are breaks and changes within the beat, and sometimes there isn’t any beat at all for very long moments. These shifts in patterns are startling to an audience that isn’t used to them, though they are relatively common in

contemporary classical music. The other changes that tend to shock and surprise the listener are the shifts in registers when Walker sings, which are likely the source of the dismay or even the disgust expressed by some of his [now former] audience, the one that screams “bollocks” in capital letters in YouTube comments under videos from The Drift or Bish Bosch. Journalists invariably mention Walker’s current singing style as “strangled”, “as if his testicles were being squeezed” which immediately signal that they haven’t really listened to the records in their entirety, because you can’t really hear that in songs such as Cossacks even though it is the opening tune on The Drift, or that they somewhat missed the recent video clip for Epizootics! from Bish Bosch, a song where you can clearly hear his baritone though not throughout.
In all the records in the Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch trilogy, Walker doesn’t restrict himself to one singing style but rather sings in at least three different registers, his regular baritone as well as some lower and higher range, sometimes shifting from one to the other within the same song. The singer’s magnificent baritone has been lauded everywhere as one of the greatest male voice of the 20th century, consequently the high register he sometime uses in his songs seems to be the one that rankles both his old fans and his current detractors, who regret that he has “abandoned his own voice”. He hasn’t actually done that but rather has added two different registers to his usual one and has been prominently using the tenor-like over the others, something he explains in interviews once again by the need to voice his lyrics according to their internal structure, but also in terms of pitch in relation to the way the rest of the music is laid out.
When listening carefully to Walker’s current singing style and his shifts between registers within the same song, the most strikingly strange thing isn’t his use of the high register, but first and foremost his diction. It is so impeccable it does indeed sound peculiar, the same way opera singers can sometime sound incomprehensible when they sing in English as every single word is so impeccably pronounced.
Walker articulates his singing so clearly and precisely that every single letter and sounds comes out crystal clear: no final “s” is ever forgotten, every single “th” so exact you can almost picture his tongue being placed between his teeth. His phrasing and articulation are so perfect as to manage to convey humor even with onomatopoeia, which he uses sometimes in appropriated lyrics, bringing echoes of Baroque singing with, say, a marked elongation of consonants or an over-artificial way of repeating “la la la la”. But this use of ultra-precise phrasing and diction isn’t new at all, as it can be heard as early as in the Walker Brothers day, in their cover of Land Of Thousand Dances for example.
In his recent music, it is just used as yet another tool to emphasize the prominence of the lyrics, as an additional instrument at the service of the music in its totality rather than a personal mean of self-expression. If you start hearing it as such then it becomes clear that the voice and the singing are the binding element of the music. It’s not the beat that holds a Scott Walker song together, since it is not continuous indeed nor the melody since it also shifts all the time; but the precise articulation of the lyrics by the voice, a voice that Walker wants to see purged of its ego or personality so as to express a universal experience of “another kind of self”. One can only hazard guesses at what this another kind of self is, a sort of collective persona that could sum up the absurdity of human existence with all its travails but also all its redemptive experiences (love, beauty, empathy, humor…). In this context, the famous Scott Walker’s baritone ceases to be the trademark of a former Pop star but just another means at the musician’s disposal in the vast array of instruments needed to complete the music. Therefore it can be modified, adulterated or bypassed in favor of another register more apt to convey a particular piece of lyrics, without any concern about whether the voice sounds “natural” or not.

Its volume also reinforces the artificiality of the voice and the diction: Walker can shift from a whisper to a shout to spoken words to a snippet of melody within the same minute. By doing so he has pretty much invented his own style of singing, a style that is so new very few musicians have been able to cover his recent material successfully, a style that can appear unnatural because we’re not yet used to it.

The Voices And Their Audience
For someone coming new to his later work without any knowledge of his 1960s career, the debate doesn’t really exists, but for clarity’s sake the question of natural versus unnatural range and register deserves a quick detour.
Now that we’re living in the 21st century and have been used to so many singers in both pop and classical music singing outside of any “natural” or “conventional” range, from falsetto (Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Russell Mael) to counter-tenor (Alfred Deller, Klaus Nomi) you wonder why Walker’s use of a different one from his natural baritone in the music he’s been making for almost twenty years now is so disturbing. Especially at a time when nobody seems to think twice about how artificial and bizarre Autotune sounds when added to the voice of Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga yet their records and songs sell by the millions. Outside of pop music, Schoenberg has come up with Sprechstimme as early as 1912, and once again we can quote opera or baroque singing as rather unnatural for untrained singers. More recently we’ve been used to the recitative spoken lyrics expressed in hip-hop music, a genre that pretty much radically did away with a lot of the melody and put the beat at the forefront of the music.
Take seemingly niche musical genres such as Death Metal and Black Metal, where singers routinely seem to be vomiting rocks when uttering fairly disturbing lyrics about mayhem and murder, on top of complex distorted musical structures. All the same these types of singing styles are no more conventional than Walker’s yet don’t encounter the same type of indignant resistance. In most cases they’ve been already digested, sometimes via assimilation by more mainstream acts, sometimes because of the powerful effect of dilution and dissemination operated by movie soundtracks. We have yet to see how David Bowie’s homage to Walker’s current singing style in his latest record could help spread it, but just the fact it has been recognized as such in the mainstream media signals a flicker of recognition.

The Audience Is Waiting.
So, what is so new with Walker’s music that makes it difficult to immediately assimilate? Is that the voice, then, considering the various singing styles enumerated above? The only real difference is that with Walker, the breaks in the beat patterns added to the use of different registers within the same song create surprising variations. Where Walker creates his own style is for one thing the musical domain where he operates, because he is neither a contemporary classical musician nor an alternative artist, as he uses instruments and orchestrations that belong to both genres, bridging them in something that doesn’t exist elsewhere yet. Contemporary classical music sometimes make uses of electric instruments associated with rock and roll, while some rock musicians have occasionally used the power of multiple instruments inspired by classical orchestras to create new works, like Glenn Branca’s guitar pieces. What these lack usually is a singer. There are unconventional singers in contemporary classical music, there are rock acts that play with large orchestras, but rarely do these mix together to create a brand new genre.

A striking thing comes up repeatedly when musicians who either worked with Walker or enjoy his music comment on how what he does doesn’t belong to anything known musically: it is not classical, it is not avant-garde, it is not Pop or rock music, it isn’t harmony, it isn’t discord, but something that exists at the frontier between all of these. It escapes any known definition as of now, and because it occupies such an uncertain space it produced discomfort in the listener. That uncertain, undefined space is a space that moves away from known musical conventions.
It is not only the voice that is unconventionally used in Walker’s music, but the whole structure of the music that constantly shifts unto itself, a process that Walker explains as a way to avoid complacency in the listener. In very simple terms, the titles of the last three records are fairly revelatory about what the music somehow does: it tilts, it drifts away from accepted musical tropes, to somewhat unsatisfactorily wrap up with Bish Bosch: the job is done, sort of, with an atrociously bad pun that also shifts from “bish bash bosh” to “a kind of universal female artist”, according to interviews given by Walker. One doesn’t have to swallow this explanation whole, but listening to the last album you can sense another departure, another shift for Walker. This record is irregularly shaped, like a baroque pearl, it sounds more dynamic, more diverse than the two previous ones, more humorous as well, a bit as if Walker was announcing he was done exploring the sound he had created and was now ready to experiment with new avenues with the next record. It’s also less tight and compact than Tilt and The Drift, and if it contains great up-tempo songs (See You Don’t Bump His Head, Epizootics!) it doesn’t present such magnificent and beautiful highlights like Farmer In The City or Rosary (on Tilt) or Jesse and A Lover Loves (on The Drift).
There’s a certain abandonment of pure obvious beauty, though there are some beautiful moments on Bish Bosch (Dimple comes to mind) for something more playful and exploratory. And yet Bish Bosch is still far ahead of most commercial music that has come up since then and been hailed as new or innovative: David Bowie’s The Next Day still adheres to conventional song structure even when he tries to imitate Walker on Heat, while The Knife’s attempts at Shaking The Habitual sound mostly contrived and laborious, as for Kanye West’s Yeezus, the bloated egomania at work can’t mask the poverty of the lyrics while the music itself is rather bland and unimaginative.
To the simple question asked earlier, “What does the work want?” the simple answer is that Scott Walker’s music demands undivided attention from the listener. This is not wallpaper music that can be used as a backdrop for parties or domestic chores, but something else, something closer to contemporary visual arts. It shares with artists like Mike Kelley the same interest for irritating, grotesque or annoying motifs that are unforgettable and force the audience to pay attention, to look, to listen, to try and think. Like most complex artworks it asks questions and points to avenues of explorations, rather than provide the audience with easy answers, with comfort, with delusions. Because its forms are so new it is easy to mock, ridicule, vilify or crudely parody, like most groundbreaking works of art have been. Because the work is so new despite its nearly two decades of existence, it has only found a limited

public... so far. Because it is so innovative yet existing in a context where all sorts of unconventional genres of music are readily available on the Internet, it is in fact on its way to finding an ever expanding audience, as evidenced in the many personal blog posts written about it.

Meanwhile, the audience is waiting. It is waiting for the time when it will meet the trajectory of Scott Walker’s music and finally surrender to it. It is still blind to the realization that the unthinkable has already happened: the very first music that speaks of the 21st century is here.

FBC! Lite, Summer Edition

Coming soon, in a Frog magazine near you.

Posting on FBC! is becoming more and more infrequent, but I'm happy to inform you that part of it is due to spending some time writing for an upcoming print publication in Frog magazine where yours truly has found a happy refuge at the invitation of its chief editor, curator and writer Eric Troncy. Frog has already reprinted a couple of old blog posts for its December issue last year, but I've written an original (and long) essay for the September magazine. It's about magic. Sort of.

Posting on here is becoming rare also because I'm practicing my other type of writing, the one I'm not very good at (fiction) but I'm working on it. Not sure when/if it will ever see the light, but if it does I'll keep you posted. 

Also, I'm technically on a break because I've misplaced my camera battery charger, so until I get a new one I can't take any pictures. Besides I haven't done much art viewing recently, or the one I've done was too uninspiring for me to want to spend a couple of hours in front of the computer to report on it. I might make it to the Düsseldorf Quadriennale in August so if I do there will be a post on here, but nothing is much certain, as I haven't booked a train ticket yet and it ends in about 3 weeks. 

In other news, you regular FBC! readers know how nuts we are about Scott Walker's recent musical output here at our worldwide headquarters, so we're very pleased (and more than a little impatient) to have learned that the great man had teamed up with Sunn 0))) for an upcoming release on September 22nd, Soused. 

From the info on the 4AD website it seems that all 5 tracks have been composed by Scott Walker, and yours truly hopes he will also do most of the singing - what I really can't stand with Sunn 0))) is their totally stereotypical metal style of singing. Aside from their wearing monk robes and using smoke machines on stage, but then if that disguising apparatus means that Walker might actually end up touring with them, maybe there's an upside - apart from making me roaring with laughter at the vision of Walker with his trademark baseball cap donning a monk robe and getting back on stage. It probably will never happen, but it's fun thinking about it. 

Surprisingly for Walker there's only a 2 years gap between Bish Bosch and that new record, which means he must have written at lightning speed, for someone known to labor for several years on a song. I, for one, won't complain. Just 2 months more and we'll discover the thing. Henry Rollins has apparently listened to the record already and I take his word when it says it's great.

This one is the only good news this week, when, you know, the world is on fire, shit happens all the time, and we're killing the planet a little bit more every day. About this I have very little to say except I am a bit puzzled by certain types of social network activists who seem to think they can change the world by posting such original thoughts as "world leaders, I conjure you to listen to ME and bring in global peace", and, er… I'm not sure it's the most efficient way to go at it. Not that I have anything better to propose, but I don't know that thinking you can address the powers that be from the sanctity of your social network account will bring global results, even if the NSA closely monitors your kitten photos and foodie Instagram pictures. 

Support Nicolas Bourriaud In His Quest To Modernize An Antiquated French School

A totally irrelevant image posted here so text-adverse people would get their short attention span focusing on something.

I had posted this on Facebook, but for easy sharing I'm pasting it in a FBC! post.

"Please give Nicolas Bourriaud some support in his quest to make the National School of Fine Art (ENSBA) in Paris an institution that would finally join the 21st century, instead of being steeped in the same mediocrity it has been mired in since the 19th.
This is a ridiculous situation of the kind that makes French art the laughingstock of the international art community nowadays, and as such is difficult to explain. Basically there is an internal conflict with long-standing staff at the school, which has extended to students going on strike. Because they’re upset their new director, Nicolas Bourriaud, is trying to make up for a big shortfall in public spending in his budget by renting out facilities to private companies, and by his partnering with art galleries for one occasional event. Those of you used to fundraising to keep art alive and available to the public will appreciate the irony.

It really boils down to an ugly internal conflict of the kind that shouldn’t even be allowed to happen, if the apparatchik civil servants running the French art world were smart enough to lay aside their petty private interests for one moment in favor of looking at the big picture instead. There won’t be good French artists until there are good French art schools, and there won’t be any good French art schools if administrators go on strike against any needed reform coming from their hierarchy.
If so inclined, please sign the petition below and share it liberally. It’s in French, but on change.org so there’s nothing complicated about it. Please support Nicolas Bourriaud in modernizing this school, and maybe 10 years from now the question won’t be “why are there no good French artists?” anymore, but “how come France has such a bumper crop of new talents?”

Link to the petition HERE

Please Let Us Interrupt This Current Absence Of Posting

Garcimore's most famous stage costume

Hello, dear, beloved readers! It's been a while, isn't it?  As usual we at the FBC! Headquarters have been a bit busy with non-blog-related things including a lot of non-art writing, some others related to the obligation to make a living (we're available for all stand-up comedy  English-French-English live translation gigs for a hefty fee + expenses if you need us), and, you know, life.
Some of this life has included and will continue to include extensive train travels (my favorite) and so I can announce now there will be an upcoming article in the September issue of Frog Magazine, about the late French TV magician Garcimore. And then some more!

Meanwhile, I know you can't live without a heavy dose of FBC! and are frustrated, what do I say, you are dying without it. Fear not, intrepid readership, for I have found a more than acceptable substitute for all your FBC!-deprivation woes. While waiting for yours truly to post stuff on here somedays, why don't you go and check my other favorite blogs, starting with Houseguest, written by my bestie the fabulous Grant Wahlquist. Houseguest is a blog almost entirely devoted to studio visits with various artists, such as Joe Mama-Nitzberg or Jennifer Moon. It doesn't shy away from the tough questions ("do you have a day job, how does it impact your work?), always provides a nifty intro to the artist's work, and also shines a light on the working habits of artists.

My other favorite blog is the fruit of Tosh Berman's labor, Tosh whom I've already talked about on here. Since the beginning of this year, Tosh has been writing daily posts centered around the famous births or deaths of artists, writers, actors, filmmakers, dancers or musicians but written in the first person. These posts are mostly fiction but with a heavy dose of real facts about the people Tosh writes about.

Lastly there are some shows I do intend to visit in the next few months, such as the Düsseldorf Quadriennale, so stay tuned for more FBC! posts in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime, check my friends' blogs!

A Lackluster Art Brussels 2014

 Some furry something by the Chapuisat brothers. I think my cat would have liked it.

Last week was the annual Art Brussels art fair, an event that left me rather dubious, with the disclaimer that all art fairs give me the willies, and also that I was rather wiped out after providing live translation an hour away the day prior to my visit.  

I had gone to the art fair last year as well and was rather unimpressed, and would have skipped this year’s if not for friends being in town and wanting me to come visit.  This year was even more underwhelming if that is possible, and I wouldn’t have reported on it if several people in the business hadn’t asked for my opinion, I suppose to test the waters and see if they’d want to apply for future edition. 

Most of the galleries represented were Belgian (maybe a 75% ratio?) giving the fair a decidedly local feel; as for the rest it was a hodgepodge of French, German, British, Latin American and a few  galleries from the United States. My feeling about this specific art fair is that it is totally over-hyped abroad, but that is true of the local art scene as well.

Not that the local art scene is bad, far from it, but the emphasis is on “local”. Brussels certainly isn’t “the new Berlin” and even less “the new Los Angeles”. It’s dynamic thanks to a myriad little non-profits that are very active, and then they have some weird hybrid model here where they seem to have public money going to support private commercial galleries as long as they show local artists, I’m given to understand (a lot of exhibitions at private galleries get a notice "with the support of [either the Flemish or Walloon authorities]"). They even have art dealers doubling as the main “art critics” writing and publishing about the artists they represent and claiming it represents scholarly work instead of pure marketing, but then the notion of “conflict of interest” doesn’t seem to rise to the consciousness of a lot of actors in the Euro art world in general. In any case, the impression one gets from the Brussels art scene is that there are many little thing going on, but a lot of them seem stuck in a post-conceptual time warp, and the ambition always remains hyperlocal rather than international. And, why the hell not? But this is where the comparison with Berlin and Los Angeles stops. 

That one was really fun too, with a texture obtained by carving into styrofoam, but you can't help thinking it's going to age badly, yellowing and crumbling in a year or two.

The result here in Brussels is that you have many small art events everywhere all the time, some of them interesting, many others totally incomprehensible if you’re a foreigner. The main issue that stops the growth of the Brussels and Belgian art scene, IMHO,  is that there isn’t a national museum of modern/contemporary art anymore, and if not for the Wiels (a Kunsthalle installed in a gorgeous former brewery) that stages ambitious international exhibitions, there would be no real visibility for foreign artists here and for Belgian artists abroad. 

The SMAK in Ghent (please, let someone tell them what smack means) and the MHKA in Antwerp are good institutions, and you have really interesting museums in Ostend and Leuven, but generally speaking it feels like the country is lacking a national collecting institution that could really support artists and attracts visitors, and become the natural home for the famed Belgian private collections. 

To my knowledge Brussels is the only Western capital that doesn’t have a flagship modern and contemporary art museum, when most big cities actually have several, collecting or not (NYC: MoMA, PS1, The New Museum. LA: MOCA, LACMA, the Hammer. Paris: the Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the Jeu de Paume. Etc.)  

This lack of a great institution (when there used to be one before) feels extraordinarily provincial, especially since there is a public here for cutting-edge culture if you look at, say, contemporary ballet or avant-garde music.  Provincialism was also the vibe I got from the art fair* and it is strange to see visual arts trailing live performances in a country that used to be more trailblazing for contemporary arts 20 years ago.

A work by Hans Op De Beek, one of my favorite Belgian artists.

As for the business end of the fair I do not know, except I’ve been told of lukewarm sales from a few art dealers I know. As a spectator, I felt a little bit like I was visiting Art Cologne circa 1993. A lot of the art being shown had a D+, C- quality to my eye, with an overall grayscale aspect: a lot of black and white photos, drawings, post-conceptual art… The disappointing thing was that, if you’re at an art fair that isn’t huge on the international circuit (it’s not Basel or Frieze obviously) and where most of the exhibitors are local, you could think that it allows for some discoveries, maybe some new artists, some interesting booths, and some surprises. For example, about 20 years ago I remember going to the FIAC in Paris, a fair that at the time was particularly lame in terms of offerings, but I got to discover Tetsumi Kudo, whom nobody gave a damn about then but looked so different from everything else on view then it really stayed imprinted in my mind. 

Do You Want To Know The Time Of Your Death? a really fun, fun display from the Belgian National Lottery booth. It's a real national lottery, not an art collective operating under that name.

At Art Brussels if felt like most of the new artists were totally derivative of something else, as, say, many of the painters seemed to be doing pale imitations of Sigmar Polke or Martin Kippenberger.  There were lots of very pretty gray drawings and watercolors in the style of Hans Op De Beek, as well as many real Hans Op De Beek works (thanks God for the real Hans Op De Beek). Someone somewhere made some really, really bad giant knock-offs of Warhol, and then you had many artists trying to do some 1960s- style Op Art. It reached a stage where I was very happy to see works by artists I don’t really care for usually, like Anthony Caro, because, woozah! It’s well made! There’s an attention to detail and craft! Other things that I liked were due to the fact that I’m a sucker for taxidermy, so the Kader Attia work with a stuffed cheetah (I think the work might have referred to post-colonialism maybe?) made me happy. There was a bandaged bear somewhere, too (not pictured here, a bit reminiscent of a tamer Paul McCarthy).  I was pleased with the many Hans Op De Beek everywhere, because his work is always visually appealing; with a ghost-like quality that makes them very attractive.

The taxidermied cheetah in the Kader Attia work.

In the section with the most established galleries there seems to have been a lot of Thomas Ruff photos, and as I’m a big fan I was rather happy to see them. Another standout for me was a very rare Stanley Brouwn, a pioneer conceptual artist whose work is too confidential everywhere. I was surprised to see a large Allen Ruppersberg on display but that was before I knew he was about to have a solo show at the Wiels next  month**. But my favorite booth ever was the one for the Belgian National Lottery, which, er, I don’t know why there were there, maybe they fund something art-related, but we got to see old drawing machines and that was fun.

Some lottery drawing machines

Overall, it was hard not to feel underwhelmed by the fair, as everybody I talked to concurred.  It’s a bit difficult to know what to attribute this to, a lack of money, a lack of ambition, or something else? There were a few good things to counter the lackluster art offerings, namely the fact that the fair is human-sized, and the general atmosphere was more relaxed and felt less like a display of bling than at the usual fairs.  The few cafés scattered strategically around weren’t horribly expensive save for the Ruinart champagne one but that would have been expected.
 In the end, it’s just a fair, i.e. an anachronistic medieval trade exchange of physical goods, and not some cutting-edge intellectual group exhibition. Its only purpose being commerce, there isn’t much to be drawn in terms of having a panorama of contemporary art. But as far as trade goes, it gives the image of mediocre offerings proposed to a clientele perceived as undemanding and provincial. I can’t tell if it was a successful commercial strategy, but as an amateur bystander it made me feel like someone going to a bookstore wanting to see what the current serious literature was at and being confronted with third-rate genre writing instead.

 Stanley Brouwne

     *  Lest I be accused of comparing everything to Los Angeles (where the art fairs always suck) everybody I met who went to Art Brussels told me the same thing, whether they were curators, artists, critics or art dealers themselves, so I didn’t invent this “provincial vibe”.

     ** The Wiels is by far and large the standout institution in Brussels and I really love their shows. But  out of the last 4 solo shows and the next 2 upcoming ones, they showcased 5 male artists and one woman. The next show is Allen Ruppersberg and Robert Heinecken, which I'm looking forward to. They announce it as something coming out of LA, but if you want to showcase a great photographer based in LA who’s been on the scene for decades and deserves a solo show, Judy Fiskin comes to mind. The lack of women representation in the art world is a problem everywhere, not specifically Belgium, but it’s not a reason for Belgian institutions to contribute to enforce the status quo. People here are smarter than this.