Master Thesis, Art History University of Amsterdam mw. prof. dr. C.M.K.E. Lerm-Hayes dhr. prof. dr. W. van de Leur 12th of July, 2017
Chrisje Loman, 10362592
The Falling Dance
An analysis of Royden Rabinowitch’s jazz sculptures connected to Thelonious Monk and J. Bernlef
Master Thesis, Art History University of Amsterdam mw. prof. dr. C.M.K.E. Lerm-Hayes dhr. prof. dr. W. van de Leur 12th of July, 2017
Chrisje Loman, 10362592
The Falling Dance
An analysis of Royden Rabinowitch’s jazz sculptures connected to Thelonious Monk and J. Bernlef
I still vividly remember a jazz concert of Raise the Roof my mom and dad took me to when I was seven years old. The band played at the Jazz festival in my home town on a warm summer day, I remember, but maybe it just felt so warm because I was dancing and jumping the whole concert long - after the saxophone player convinced me to. Five months ago, I searched for a subject to write my thesis on. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to write about visual art related to jazz music. During my bachelor and master Art History, I filled my elective space with courses like History of Jazz, Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn and Reading Black Music, developed and taught by Walter van de Leur – who triggered my interest in Jazz music even more. After following the very inspiring course Word & Image - developed by Erin la Cour and Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, of which I learned to think broader and more critical about visual art - I asked professor Lerm Hayes to be my thesis supervisor. I am glad she helped me through my research process and, in particular, I am very grateful for her inspiring words and for giving me the courage to write this thesis.
Moreover, I am glad she introduced me to the work of Royden Rabinowitch and told me about him being inspired by jazz music. I was not used to write about contem-porary, abstract art let alone about an artist who was still alive and was surprised by Rabinowitch being so approachable, I was able to visit him and his private collection in Ghent. The artist lives in a quiet, beautiful and old part of Ghent in what looks like a sheet iron shack1. Royden Rabinowitch welcomed us with warmth and began almost
immediately talking about his works exhibited there. What struck me was how he was so entirely dedicated and full of passion when talking about his works – later I understood he had to, almost like a necessity. After this first visit,
Preface
I went to Ghent twice more but Rabinowitch always took his time in order to answer all my questions by a mobile phone call or through a comprehensive email I got almost right away. I am particularly grateful to Rabinowitch for being so generous and full of patience in order to help me understand his art. Without those long conversations, I was never able to write my thesis. Throughout this text, I used a lot of elements from those conversations passim.2
This also applies to the interesting conversation I had with curator Frank Maes, who is working on his PhD on Royden Rabinowitch. Due to this, he could help me through some important mathematical theories and gave me insight to his loving Flemish masters; Pieter Breughel the Elder and Jan van Eyck - both painters are very special to Rabinowitch.
It was my dad who pointed me to the beautiful poems of J. Bernlef, his friend Kees who helped me translate them into English. My cousin Simon took the time to check my full thesis for English and my uncle Gerard made sure the layout looks stunning. Thank you all!
At the age of twelve, Rabinowitch too was taken to a jazz concert by his mom and dad: he saw The Thelonious Monk Quartet live in the Five Spot Café, New York. He often mentioned how fortunate he was being surrounded by inspiring people who helped him to give expression to the tension he found himself in.
In this line, I want to say thanks to the people who unconditionally believed in me and gave me all the trust and support to write this thesis.
2 Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. ‘Concerning the Work of Royden Rabinowitch: Our Disenchanted Ontology and Paradoxical Hope’. Royden Rabinowitch: Ghent. Gent: AsaMER, 2014. 21-36.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 5
1 Research question 2 Monk’s falling dance
3 Literature on jazz, poetry and visual art
2 Formative years of Royden Rabinowitch 18
3 People made bebop 1 The Birth of Bebop 2 Thelonious Monk
4 J. Bernlef 29
1 Biography
2 The Necessary Angel (1990) 3 Fixing Spontaneity?
5 Rabinowitch’s jazz sculptures 35
1 Throwing away cinders
2 Ellipse Developed through Right Angles – For John Coltrane. (1964) 3 Lesson of Wilbur Ware – for Abraham Robinson (1985)
4 Stan & Ollie or Handed Opposed Conic of One Size Bundled – for Shadow Wilson (1988)
5 Stan & Ollie or Handed Operator Bundle Construction trough Three Axes – for Thelonious Monk (1992)
6 Excursus: Bernlef, Rabinowitch & Breugel
6 Conclusion 61
7 Lists 63
5 Introduction
1
Introduction
1 Research questionThis thesis investigates the paradox of structure and spontaneity. Central to the work of the Canadian artist Royden Rabonowitch (Toronto, 1943) is the gap between the world of scientific facts and human values, a paradox he saw being solved in a jazz concert. In the summer of 1957, Rabinowitch’s father took him to New York City to see the Thelonious Monk quartet playing in the Five Spot Café. From July that same year, Monk began what turned out to be a six-month stay at this Café, playing six nights a week, four sets a night. It was his first long-term engagement as leader and Monk brought in his own quartet: John Coltrane on saxophone, Wilbur Ware on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums.3 Monk’s music, but in particular his dancing (after
he played his part in his quartet and another member played a solo), was incredibly revealing to the twelve year old Rabinowitch:
Monk’s spontaneous music issues from the structure of a piano and his spontaneous dancing to his sidemen’s music, acknowledges to everybody the limits of the structure that produced his music. Monk’s music and dance, for me, is the ideal model of the acknowledgement that I am always seeking.4/5
Another artist who is searching for the ideal balance between improvisation and composition, the balance between structure and spontaneity, is the Dutch poet and writer J. Bernlef (1937 - 2012).6 In his work, Bernlef is searching for the impossible, 3 Kelly, Robin D.C. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Time of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009
4 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Onthology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’. Institute for quantum computing University of Waterloo, Canada. 26 Mar. 2009. Lecture
5 ‘Royden Rabinowitch on J. Bernlef.’ E-mail interview. 25 Mar. 2017
‘The paradox: writing a poem in which every line is irreplaceable while at the same time the poem contains a naturalness, a colloquial language-like improvisation. Perfection with a puncture is where I am looking for.’7 Bernlef too, found this balance
being explored in Thelonious Monk’s music. In his novel Hoe van de trap te vallen: Jazz verhalen, the writer compares a solo of the jazz pianist with somebody who is falling off the stairs.8
In between 1964 and 1992, Rabinowitch constructed four sculptures addressed to members of the Thelonious Monk Quartet. Noticeable is that it took Rabinowitch several years to find a form that expressed Thelonious Monk’s dance - the sculpture for John Coltrane was made twenty-eight years before. It was curator Frank Maes who brought the works together in one room in a private collection of Rabinowitch’s work in Ghent, Belgium.9
The four works incorporate countless values and facts, which are not explicit on first acquaintance. The abstract, geometrical forms, made out of steel and wood, seem accidentally placed into space. However, by reading myself into Rabinowitch’s lectures, the scientific revolution of Newton as well as listening to live recordings of the Five Spot Sessions of 1957, Rabinowitch constructions seem to reveal themselves to me. Rabinowitch’s works do not lend themselves to have one fixed, factual explana-tion. There always needs to be ‘a puncture’: my personal experience of the object in space. Rabinowitch states that, in order to live in the tension of separated dimensions, we have to take seriously our internal rhythms. ‘Reading a work in purely abstract terms and simultaneously get engaged with its meaning and identity, that is the core
7 Bernlef, J. Perfectie met een Gaatje. Reflex: Utrecht, 1981. 12
8 Bernlef, J. Hoe Van De Trap Te Vallen: Jazz Verhalen. Amsterdam: Querido Uitgeverij B.V, 2006 9 The collection belongs to Karel and Martine Hoofd
7 Introduction
of our secular consciousness’ he explains. There is no perfect answer, no purpose, just this specific moment: like Monk’s dance.
My analysis of Rabinowitch’s jazz sculptures will be based on the disciplines form, sound and word: Rabinowitch’s constructions together with the 1957 live recordings of Monks Quartet at the Five Spot Café10/11, Carnagy Hall12 and J. Bernlef ’s writings
on jazz. Since writer J. Bernlef is searching for the same balance between value and fact, structure and spontaneity, I will use his poems and writing as a tertium compara-tionis. Those three representations of balancing values and facts will eventually come together in one movement: Monk’s falling dance.
My considered goal is to indicate the several layers of Royden Rabinowitch’s four sculptures addressed to the members of Thelonious Monk Quartet. Important to mention is that this thesis is a concatenation of my own associations and interpreta-tions when looking at Rabinowitch works, in order to answer the question: How did Royden Rabinowitch made visible his acknowledgement to the balance between structure and spon-taneity, values and facts in the five works he addressed to members of The Thelonious Monk quartet and how can we relate this to the Five Spot recordings and Bernlef ’s writing on jazz music? In doing so, this thesis will contain a representation of this balancing act in word, sound and form. To use Bernlef ’s metaphor right away, my research question in other words is: How did Royden Rabinowitch translates Monk’s crucial dance, Monk’s ‘ falling off the stairs’ into the following sculptures?
10 Monk, Thelonious and John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane: Complete Live at the Five Spot, 1958. Phoenix Records, 2013. CD
11 Monk, Thelonious and John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk Quartet - Live at ‘The Five Spot’ Discovery! EMI-Electrola, 1993. CD
12 Monk, Thelonious, and John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. EMI/Blue Note/Thelonious Records, 2005. CD
›
› Ellipse Developed through Right Angles – For John Coltrane. 1964. Hot-rolled steel. 183 x 16 x
16 cm
›
› Lesson of Wilbur Ware – for Abraham Robinson. 1985. Hot-rolled steel. 189 x 96 x 48 cm. ›
› Stan & Ollie or Handed Opposed Conics of One Size Bundled – for Shadow Wilson. 1988.
Hot-rolled steel, oiled. Four differently developed operators, each operator: 178 x 104 x 52 cm.
›
› Stan & Ollie or Handed Operator Bundle Construction trough Three Axes – for Thelonious Monk.
1992. Hot-rolled steel. 452 x 123 x 91.5 cm. 2 Monk’s falling dance
In 1955, Rabinowitch met Abraham Robinson (Waldenburg, 1918- New Haven, 1974), a friend of his parents. In this year Rabinowitch discovered the ‘strange beauty of bebop’ in the music of John Coltrane, Wilbure Ware, Max Roach and Shadow Wilson. He brought up these names in a conversation with his violin teacher, who immedi-ately dismissed these men as ‘crazy eccentrics’. Consequently, Rabinowitch lost his temper and was duly kicked out of class. Robinson defended him: as a mathematician and connoisseur of modern art, he pointed out that ‘these performers, deploying an obvious virtuosity, were undoubtedly creating incomparably important innovations in the history of Western classical music, innovations that are so important precisely because they are the first structures explicitly to ref lect our modern disenchanted ontology, the basis of a secular ethics.’ Robinson showed Rabinowitch that ‘our ancient physical understanding, i.e. Aristotle’s teleological cosmology the ontology of our ancient, static, religious civilisation, was replaced by our modern physical under-standing, i.e. Newton’s non-theological cosmology.’ 13 Indeed, the world of purpose 13 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Ontology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’.
9 Introduction
was replaced by a world of necessity.14 In the following chapter I will seek to explicate
in more detail Robinson’s ideas about the new understanding of Newton in relation to the early Bebop musicians.
In that same summer of 1957, Rabinowitch went to the Museum of Modern Art where he saw David Smith’s Five Units Equal. This sculpture, together with Monk’s music, finally convinced him that he should become a sculptor. It was Smith who introduced him in that year to the work of James Joyce. Joyce inspired Rabinowitch because his writings seem to ref lect the haze he found himself in. For him, Joyce was the first author who fully confronted the destabilisation of our secular ontology. Interestingly, when I visited Rabinowich in his studio in Ghent, he read me a passage of Joyce’s book, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which he had framed and hung on his wall:
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.15
In response to this, Rabinowitch claimed: ‘First: things fell, because it was their natural place. But this was absolutely wrong, there is no purpose. Things just happen the way they happen. And this change form Aristotle to Newton, was simply the real change of the symbolical change from the garden of Eden to the world. This change is really very radical.’16 Clearly, this ‘radical change’ is the change from a geocentric to a
heliocentric world; from a world that relies on purpose to a world that relies on neces-sity; and, lastly, from a world in which values and facts are equal to a world in which
14 Idem
15 Joyce, James, and Chester G. Anderson. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 16 ‘Royden Rabinowitch on James Joyce.’ Telephone interview. 28 Mar. 2017
those are completely separated. Living in this secular world means we have to deal with this paradox - they have to remain separated. Compellingly thus, we have to ask: how do we manage to live in this world?
In his novel Hoe van de trap te vallen: Jazz verhalen, J. Bernlef might give the answer when he compares a solo of Monk with somebody who is falling off the stairs; an essential aspect in this thesis.17
‘A solo of Monk. Like somebody falling off the stares. Suddenly. First, he just walks, one, two, three, four; step after step. The perfect balance between his body that is moving forward and the gravity, with the stairs as an accordion-like inter medium, disturbed with one smack.18
If we look at the happening in slow motion, we see the beautiful dance he is doing. How the body is using all its agility to not submit to the humiliating gravity. Just now, we see the body isn’t falling, it is dancing. With just one purpose: using the staircase to restore the original equilibrium before the body is down.19/20
In the first part of the writing, the man seems to be in perfect balance: he knows what he is doing and places his feet thoughtful on the stairs, one by one. Then, he misses a step resulting in the balance between his body and the gravity being disturbed: he is falling. But when this happening is unveiled in slow motion – a filmic technique,
17 Bernlef, J. Hoe Van De Trap Te Vallen: Jazz Verhalen. Amsterdam: Querido Uitgeverij B.V., 2006. 47
18 Original text Bernlef: Een solo van Monk. Als iemand die van de trap valt. Plotseling. Eerst loopt hij gewoon, een,
twee, drie, vier; tree voor tree. Dan verstapt hij zich. Een tree te weinig, een tree te veel, een denkbeeldige tree. De perfecte balans tussen zijn zich voorwaarts bewegende lichaam en de zwaartekracht, met de trap als harmonica-achtig intermediair, in één klap verstoord
19 Bernlef, J. Hoe Van De Trap Te Vallen: Jazz Verhalen. Amsterdam: Querido Uitgeverij B.V.,2006. 47
20 Original text Bernlef: Als we de gebeurtenis in slow-motion afdraaien zien we pas welk een fraaie dans hier ten beste
wordt gegeven. Hoe het lichaam al zijn behendigheid in de strijd werpt om zich niet te hoeven onderwerpen aan de vernederende zwaartekracht. Pas nu zien we dat wat het lichaam doet geen vallen is, maar een dans die maar één doel heeft: met behulp van de trap het oorspronkelijk evenwicht te hervinden voordat het lichaam beneden is
11 Introduction
which shows us what is not directly visible to our eyes – the falling becomes a dance in which the body is automatically trying to use its agility to avoid submitting to the humiliating gravity. The human value is searching for a way to cope with the indomi-table presence of gravity. In slow motion, Bernlef shows us that the body is not falling, but dancing. The only purpose of the dance is to recover its balance, before it is down. Important here is that this is happening during the fall, before he hits the ground. Bernlef is searching for a moment, which contains both movement and silence. This exact passage reminded me of Rabinowitch’s work. When I asked him for his opinion, he asserted:
Bernlef ’s search for a perfect balance between structure and spontaneity is ambitious. But the most I search for is to acknowledge to myself that structure really is at odds with spontaneity. For me, great jazz is that acknowledgment, which is why it is so very important to me. So Bernlef ’s search for the Impossible can be contrasted with my effort to acknowledge to myself that anything I make is motivated by some sort of search for a new plan (a new structure), which is always contradicted by a contrary motivation, i.e. by some sort of search for a new action (a new spontaneity). Bernlef ’s accurate reading of Monk is also an accurate reading of what I hope to do as an artist. But why is it so important for me to do this sort of thing? This is where Newton’s destruction (with his calculus) of Artistotle, James Joyce and Laurel & Hardy come in to answer this question.21
Rabinowtich’s work concerns itself with balancing the known and the unknown, feelings and facts, structure and spontaneity. He states: ‘We have to acknowledge that we must balance values against facts and seeing that this essential balancing act is indeed the basic ethics or secular ethical imperative demanded by our modern disen-chanted ontology [and] demanded by being in our secular world.’ 22 For Rabinowitch,
the greatest apparatus that ties together Newton’s destruction of a transcendental
21 ‘Royden Rabinowitch on J. Bernlef.’ E-mail interview. 25 Mar. 2017 22 Idem
reality with James Joyce’s work and with the music of the Bebop musicians is: Monk’s dance. ‘In the end, we have to accept there is only the fall’ 23, he explains.
3 Literature on jazz, poetry and visual art
The writers and artists in the audience of the Five Spot Café declared every aspect of Thelonious Monk’s performance as ‘avant-garde’. In an age where expressions of bodily pleasure and excess became central of conceptual art, Monk’s dance was seen as a spectacular example of modern performance art – all taking place at the small café at the bowery, New York. It was a gathering place for visual artists, writers and musicians: a place where three art forms come together.24 Considering this fact, it is
no surprise that jazz music has played a crucial part in (African) American and later, European modern art.25
In contrast, Theodor Adorno rejects jazz as a distinctive music style and an art form in his 1933 essay Farewell to Jazz. In his article, On Jazz of 1936, he refers to jazz as ‘light music’ – here he primarily means the commercially successful and danceable swing music of the late 1930s and early 1940s. These writings have to be seen in the context of his critique on mass culture and culture industry. Although Adorno witnessed the change from swing era to bebop, which was no longer popular at all levels of society, he retained his negative view on jazz.26 Indeed, contemporary literature has
emphasized the durability of his criticism, with critics such as prof. Erik Redling even
23 ‘Royden Rabinowitch on James Joyce.’ Telephone interview. 28 Mar. 2017
24 Kelly, Robin D.G. Thelonious Monk: Live and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009
25 Lock, Graham and David Murray (Ed.). The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009
13 Introduction
claiming: ‘Adorno’s treatments also neglect the inspirational force jazz had and still has on a wide range of poets and other artists…’27
Although institutions that control art and music education and writing, for the most part, continue to relegate visual art and music to separate realms, in current years, several anthologies on jazz poetry continue to be published.28/29/30/31
Likewise, literature investigating the relationship between jazz, poetry and contemporary visual art is just appearing recently. What follows is a brief overview on those studies.
Traditional jazz studies have the notion to see jazz in purely musical terms. They describe jazz history in series of changes in rhythm, tonality, and harmony, or as an evolutionary line of great players. But jazz has entered other cultural disciplines through its impact on novelists, filmmakers, dancers, painters, biographers, and photographers. With his edited volume, Representing Jazz, Krin Gabbard attempts to show this ‘other history of jazz’ and resists the canonical, evolutionary model of Jazz History. ‘Jazz writers tend to ignore the extra musical aspects of jazz by conceptualising it as a safely autonomous, musical domain’, Gabbard states. He ponders: ‘Can’t the works of creative artists render the music as vividly as those of the critics? Isn’t there value in writing this other history of jazz?’32 While Gabbard wants
to give an alternative form of jazz writing by discussing images, art, film, poetry
27 Idem
28 Lock, Graham and David Murray, ed. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009
29 Fernstein, Sasha, Yusuf Komunyakaa, eds. The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991
30 Lange, Art, Nathaniel Mackey, eds. Moment’s notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993 31 Young, Kevin. Jazz Poems. New York: Random House Inc, Everyman’s Library, 2006
instead of rewriting mythological stories, many of the essays are based on linguistic texts and theories. References to philosophical studies of Descartes and Foucault or the work of Ralph Ellison point out the relevance of these linguistic studies. The idea of capturing jazz in other disciplines than text is very interesting and useful but it seems that the authors ultimately have to fall back on written theories, which is quite comprehensible.
The edited volume of Graham Lock and David Murray, The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African-American Visual Art, explores the complicated relationships that link African-American visual art to jazz and blues music. The editors aim to address a gap in the literature on art and music, a gap that appears to be the result of a ‘racial blind spot’. Every book on art and music seemed to have plenty to say about Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian, but hardly anything at all on jazz, blues and African American visual artists, claim Lock and Murray. Even in recent publications as The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art, they were astounded to find that ‘not a single African American painter or musician had been listed’.33 For this reason, Lock and Murray try to make
an attempt to redress the balance by focussing mainly on African-American culture. Indeed, The Hearing Eye, approaches both music and art and addresses successfully relationships. Lock and Murray proceed to collect essays that show how musicians have inf luenced visual artists and how both struggle with the possibilities and perils of creating metaphors inside bounded forms.34
By exploring particular instances, the writers try to move beyond the ‘vague rhetorical allusions of spontaneity and improvisation’. However, they eschewed musico-logical analysis, which they believed is too specialist an approach when dealing with visual art.
33 Maur, Karin v. The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art. Munich, Prestel, 1999
34 Lock, Graham and David Murray, ed. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009
15 Introduction
In Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz and Song, Charles O. Hartman focuses on American poetry that has been ‘vitally motivated by the example of jazz musicians and their ideas of personal sound and spontaneous composition’, he writes.35 Working
from the connection between arts, Hartman shows how music and poems illuminate each other. The book mainly focusses on the work of American poets and the music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.36
Dutch artists too, were inf luenced by modern Jazz. The edited volume, Ik ben een Gemankeerde Jazz Saxofonist: Lucebert & Jazz, focuses on the poet and painter Lucebert and contains a collection of articles on his work that appeared in newspapers and maga-zines over the last three decades. 37 Ben Ijpma wants to show where and in what way
Jazz inf luenced the work of Lucebert, with the focus on his poems. Different angles like Dutch studies, Jazz studies, Literature and journalism are represented. Besides, the book consists of a CD with compositions oriented on Lucebert. The poet belonged to the experimental movement called De Vijftigers, to whom form, association, sound and images became important. Interestingly, the group distanced itself from the intellectual, idealised poetry. Furthermore, the lecture that J. Bernlef ’s delivered on a new work of Lucebert, 38 is included in the book too. Here, Bernlef describes the
importance of Lucebert’s work to him and calls his work ‘the poetic equivalent of the bebop’.39
35 Hartman, Charles O., ed. Jazz Tekst: Voice and Improvistation in Poetry, Jazz and Song. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991
36 Idem
37 IJpma, Ben, Ben van Melick, red. Ik Ben een Gemankeerde Jazz Saxofonist: Lucebert & Jazz. Rimburg, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Huis Clos, 2013
38 Lucebert. Licht is de wind der duisternis. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1999
39 IJpma, Ben, Ben van Melick, red. Ik Ben een Gemankeerde Jazz Saxofonist: Lucebert & Jazz. Rimburg, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Huis Clos, 2013
Even though Royden Rabinowitch’s works are represented in museum collections worldwide, 40 written publications on his art are, nevertheless, surprisingly difficult
to find. On the occasion of the exposition in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, in 1992, Rudi Fuchs published ‘Royden Rabinowitch: Sculpture 1962/1992’, providing an overview of the exhibited works and is illustrated by two short texts of Franz-W. Kaiser and Rudi Fuchs.41 Furthermore, since 2014, one can visit Rabinowitch’s private collection in his
studio in Ghent. Roman Kurzmeyer, Roland Nachtigäller, Frank Maes and Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes writings on the works exhibited there are to be found in the cata-logue ‘Royden Rabinowitch: Ghent’ - all of which contributed to this study.42 In this same
year, professor Lerm Hayes organised a lecture followed by a discussion at the Univer-sity of Amsterdam titled A Paradoxial Hope: Royden Rabinowitch on Art and Science.43 As a
result of this meeting, theoretical physicist Sander Bais has recently written a book on the ‘hidden geometry’ in Rabinowitch’s work.44 His writings have been invaluable
in this study in clarifying the mathematical side of the structures to a greater extent. In addition, the curator of the private exhibition in Ghent, Frank Maes, organised a performance and exhibition in his atelier in Veurne, Emergent. The small guide he wrote on this, next to my conversations with him, were of great importance too.45 40 His works are in collections of over fifty museums, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Städtisches
Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of modern and contemporary art, Geneva; National Gallery of Australia Canberra; Rupf Foundation, Kunstmuseum Bern; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
41 Fuchs, Rudi. Royden Rabinowitch: Sculpture 1962-1992. [tent. Cat]. Den Haag: Haags Gemeente Museum, 1992 42 Kurzmeyer, Roman, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Roland Nachtigäller, Royden Rabinowitch, Frank Maes. Royden
Rabinowitch: Ghent. Gent, AsaMER: 2014
43 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘A Paradoxical Hope: Royden Rabinowitch on Art and Science’: University of Amsterdam, in cooperation with the History and Philosophy of the Humanities and Sciences group of the Faculty of Humanities, Amsterdam. December 14th, 2014. Lecture
44 Bais, Sander. Cutting Edges: Reading the hidden geometry of Royden Rabinowitch. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Santa Fe Institure, 2016
45 Maes, Frank, Luc Derycke. Royden Rabinowitch ‘Murphy’ or Rudolf Steiner Exposed by Samuel Beckett Adriaan Verwée
17 Introduction
Rabinowitch himself gave several lectures on the content of his work that are issued and published.46/47 However, a great part of the material contributing to this study
is derived from conversations in Ghent with Rabinowitch himself, who was always so generous with his time and patience in order to help me understand his ideas. Not much has been written of Royden Rabinowitch’s relation to Thelonious Monk, nor on the connection of his works to the poems of J. Bernlef. Hence, this study will adopt Lock and Murray’s method by exploring a particular instance in order not to be resigned to vague rhetorical allusions and terminology. Whereas Lock and Murray mainly render paintings, this research is focused on sculpture. By focusing on four specific works of Rabinowitch, five poems of J. Bernlef and a the concerts of 1957 by the Thelonious Monk Quartet in The Five Spot Café, one hopes to demonstrate how visual art, word and music can connect. In doing so, this analysis will add something to the existing literature that is mainly aimed at well-known American poets and minimalists.
Before turning to the analysis I will provide the works some context with a short biography of the three main figures. I will start with Royden Rabinowitch and his forming conversations with mathematician Abraham Robinson. There after I will focus on Thelonious Monk and the position of the Bebop musicians during the forties and fifties in New York. Additionally, I will discuss J. Bernlef ’s writings and his ideas on the unrepeatability of jazz.
46 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘The beginnings of my Work’: a talk delivered by Royden Rabinowitch to Prof. Lerm Hayes and her MA students’ University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Oct. 2nd 2014. Lecture
47 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Onthology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’. Institute for quantum computing University of Waterloo, Canada. 26 Mar. 2009. Lecture
2
Formative years of Royden Rabinowitch
Conversations with Abraham Robinson (1980, Walderberg, Germany – 1974, New Haven, Connecticut)
In 2009 Royden Rabinowitch gave a talk at the University of Waterloo in Canada, entitled ‘Modern Ontology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art.’ In this lecture he describes how his conversations with the mathematician Abraham Robinson formed his work.
As a young boy, Rabinowitch lived close to a fabrication factory that constructed steel water tanks. There was also a cooper’s yard on walking distance, where barrels were made out of oak staves. Next to his house was a farm where cows were licking salt blocks in certain shapes. Rabinowitch was surrounded by all those shapes and mate-rials, and filled up his time by drawing them.48
Upon first seeing these salt licks, Robinson introduced Rabinowitch to Henri Poin-caré’s distinction of geometric and somatic space. Here, somatic space refers to the space that is direct and is the basis for our physical experience and our values; geometric space is indirect and the basis of our physical understanding and our facts. This became clear when Robinson juxtaposed the salt licks with a differential surface. The two shapes appeared to be similar but in actuality they were not: the shape of the salt lick was born out of chance – and the differential surface out of a geometric equation.49
48 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Onthology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’. Institute for quantum computing University of Waterloo, Canada. 26 Mar. 2009. Lecture
19 Formative years of Royden Rabinowitch
Related to this, Robinson later showed Rabinowitch how the physical understanding of the world is the basis for our state of being and how our modern ontology is based on Newton’s completion of the Copernican revolution in de 17th century.
Aristotle’s (384 B.C – 322 B.C.) teleological cosmology was based on the idea that man had a central place in universe. He assumed that nature was immediately present to man’s senses: that the sun rotated around the earth, simply because he saw the sun rising up in the east and set down in the west. In this physical understanding, based on observation, values were equal to facts. Aristotle believed that the ‘unmoved mover’ created nature for his purpose and made objects move to their ‘natural resting place’ or purpose. This physical understanding was the underpinning of the ancient, religious civilisation in which things had a purpose or did not have a purpose. In this ancient world, there was a clear distinction between good and bad: a hierarchical civi-lisation with the burning hell far below and God’s heaven above.
Isaac Newton’s description of the universe was non-theological and materialistic, it concerned the natural world and it involved nothing of the supernatural world. A scientist could only describe how things moved according to their own initial motion and forces acting on them. With his laws of gravity, Newton proved Copernicus’ conjecture about the position of the earth in relation to the sun and other planets: the earth was not in the centre of the universe, it moved around the sun together with
500 B.C. 0 500 1000 1500 2000
Aristotle Newton
fig. 1 Newton’s destruction
other planets. Newton made the ‘unmoved mover’ superf luous, there was no room for God, no supernatural power and no purpose, things just moved instead.
With his discovery of the ‘fundamental theorem of the calculus’, Newton proved that nature is not present to man’s senses at all. He described nature as a set of facts that are independent of men’s values. He was the first to use math as a methodological tool to explain the physical world as mathematical arguments were supported by empir-ical evidence. Unlike the static geometry of the Greeks, calculus allowed mathemati-cians to make sense of motion and dynamic change; Newton connected this abstract, factual world to the world of values and physical observations.50
Newton’s findings radically changed our state of being. Instead of the equal rela-tionship of values and facts, the two were separated by Newton. Robinson made very clear that this separation could never be resolved; facts can never be equalised again with values. Robinson was born in a Jewish family in Waldenburg, Germany and escaped the Nazis during World War II to England. Here, he could ref lect on the Nazis National Socialism, which he saw as ‘especially threatened by our modern civilisa-tion’s progressive search for reality.’ 51 He saw our modern ‘disenchanted ontology’,
where values and facts were separated being replaced by ‘enchanted ontology’ where values and facts were equal. The Nazis embraced the Aristotelian world view; believing that their optical values of the physiognomy of humans (measurements of the face, colour of the skin, size of the nose) were equal to their place on the factual, hierarchical scale of ‘ubermensch’ and ‘untermench’.
50 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘The beginnings of my Work’: a talk delivered by Royden Rabinowitch to Prof. Lerm Hayes and her MA students’ University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Oct. 2nd 2014. Lecture
51 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Onthology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’. Institute for quantum computing University of Waterloo, Canada. 26 Mar. 2009. Lecture 7
21 Formative years of Royden Rabinowitch
According to Rabinowitch, there rest us no other option than to accept that the gap between values and facts, structure and spontaneity. The artist is searching for a form that ref lects our modern state of being, which is us in a world of tension; a world where values are separated by facts, a world in which our direct observations do not give us the idea of the real, factual world. His search can be compared to Bernlef ’s search for ‘Perfection with a puncture’. It is exactly this puncture that makes the difference: we do not live in an ideal world and we should always question the facts, trust our values and be on the move. Indeed, we should always keep dancing and falling.
3
People made Bebop
1 The Birth of BebopScott DeVeaux, Associate Professor of music at the University of Virginia, is a highly recognized jazz scholar. Mainly because of his book The Birth of Bebop, that marks a crucial change in writing about jazz history. By integrating musicology, biography and cultural history in his study, he creates a carefully balanced view on the emer-gence of bebop in America. In order to place Thelonious Monk into a broader context, it is valuable to provide a short overview of DeVeaux’s writing. After his book, the way scholars wrote about ‘the history of jazz’, would never be the same.52
In The Birth of Bebop, DeVeaux challenges two main narratives, used by earlier jazz historians. The first is the narrative of ‘jazz as an evolutionary continuity’. In this storyline, bebop is presented as a musical style that evaluates to an art form. This modernistic idea, distances bebop from the commercial market. In doing so, jazz’s ties to African American music disappear; ‘we cannot forget race in the story of bebop’, argues DeVeaux. The second narrative describes bebop as a revolutionary movement and as an expression of black musicians against the white, mainstream swing bands. Here, race and African American culture embody the centre of the revolution. This idea too, needs some nuance. It neglects historical facts: bebop pioneers hired white musicians to play with them, for instance. DeVeaux does not want to ignore both narratives but he does not want to choose either. They exclude each other, he states. [‘The main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other.’ Lee Smolin. A quote Rabino-witch used in naming some of his works.] His main question is: ‘Can bebop be both
52 DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop, A Social and Musical History. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997
23 People made Bebop
continuous and discontinuous?’ He offers a different approach by focusing on the profes-sional musician: the point where ‘the musical’ and ‘the social’ meet.
The book consists of three parts. The first section describes the training ground for the bebop musicians: the swing bands. DeVeaux introduces Coleman Hawkins as foundational for bebop’s emergence as musical style. Hawkins harmonic progres-sion and virtuosity are precisely explained in a musicological study. Besides, DeVeaux shines a light on Hawkins career choices and on his racial boundaries. The musician was tired of traveling with big bands and the limited locations to play. He rather stayed on one spot: New York.
The second part talks about the young, African American musicians who wanted to unite their music with the commercial world. The main protagonists here are the legends Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. They were frustrated about the unequal competition between black and white musicians. Because of this racial inequality, the musicians were concentrated on a place they were allowed to play: New York City. In the bars of Harlem, they shaped their new style in jam sessions. They were not trying to make ‘black music that whites could not steal’, they were just searching for new opportunities and ways to express their new music, DeVeaux writes.
Part three neglects the modernist idea of bebop as a ‘non-commercial’ (and in this way high-culture), music style and describes the process of making bebop commer-cial. In the mid-1930s jam sessions shifted from ‘closed’ jam sessions to the public sphere in forms of jazz-concerts. Also, the record industry became really important.
To sell records, the looseness of the jam sessions had to be reshaped, this changed the music and made it more sophisticated.
Overall, DeVeaux gives a highly nuanced view on the birth of bebop. It turns out that writing about jazz history can be both evolutionary as revolutionary and musi-cally as socio-culturally. As long as we focus on the individual musicians, all the different aspects that make history, can be included. Like DeVeaux states: ‘People made Bebop’.53
2 Thelonious Monk
(1917, North Carolina – 1982, New Jersey)
The importance of telling a ‘personal story’ instead of a general one, such as DeVeaux insists, becomes clear when focusing on the career of Thelonious Monk, which is quite different from most of the early Bebop musicians.
For Monk, unlike the many other black musicians, the pressure to make it in the music business was less urgent. Thelonious Monk was born in North Carolina, but moved to New York City with his family at the age of five. He was part of a proud, independent, black, working-class family. His parents loved music and insisted that their three children to take music lessons.54 He did not have to deal with the
strug-gles of recent migrants to gain foothold in the big city; he was living at home with his family.55
As a young boy, Monk was obsessed by the piano playing of his older sister and learned to play himself - by ear. He seemed to be a talented musician, which resulted in a lot of music courses and private piano lessons. Also relevant to mention is that
53 DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop, A Social and Musical History. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997
54 Natambu, Kofi. ‘Thelonious Monk: The Jazz Composer As Visionary’. Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. Volume 14 Number 2 (Fall, 2014.): p 32
25 People made Bebop
Monk excelled academically in maths and physics, which helped him to compose music. Interestingly, when he was twenty-two years old, Monk became the house piano player of Minton’s Playhouse, a small nightclub in Harlem where young musi-cians gathered during the night and experimented in jam sessions. Here, Monk was free to invent and work out his ideas on piano. When asked about Monk’s eccentric reputation, manager of the club Teddy Hill answered: ‘One reason for it, I guess, is that he was living at home with his own people. Maybe if the guy had to stand on his own two feet, it might have been different. But knowing that he had a place to eat and sleep, that might have had a lot to do with it’.56
Monk’s challenging compositions and unusual solo playing with dissonant harmo-nies, dynamic rhythms and lyrical melodies made him a leading figure among modernist jazz cognoscenti. In his music, he reclaimed sound itself as the most important individual and collective element. In this new approach to sound, he used a lot of special elements such as pauses and empty gaps – which are very important to Bernlef ’s work too (see chapter 4). One could suggest that Monk’s most valu-able quality was that he was constantly trying to question, rethink and critique the traditionally specific roles and identities of harmonic structure, melody, form and rhythmic content in modern music. He was always on the move, questioning the facts with his own values.57
56 DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop, A Social and Musical History. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997
Monk at the Five Spot Café
In earlier years, The Five Spot Café was situated in the Bowery, Manhattan, hidden in the shadows of the train line, known as Third Avenue El. In 1955, the city decided to remove the train line, which brought the neighbourhood fresh air, quiet, sunlight and a wave of artists and musicians in search of cheaper rents. The owners of the café, the Termini brothers, decided to transform the bar for the new clients and smartened up the walls with posters from various art exhibitions. They also applied for a cabaret license and opened up as ‘the newest jazz club in the Village’. Within a few weeks, the bar had become the place for cheap beer and good music.58
It is not a coincidence that Rabinowitch’s meeting with David Smith was in the same summer as his introduction to the Thelonious Monk Quartet at the Five Spot Café. Before Thelonious Monk came to play at the Five Spot Café; it had become a gath-ering place for emerging modern artists and writers, from leading abstract expres-sionists to the so-called Beat-generation literati. Among the regulars were Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Together with painter Herman Cherry, David Smith too belonged to the first wave of artists. The artists found in Monk’s ‘angular sounds’ a sense of freedom and a musical parallel to their own experiments on canvas and in verse.59
Manager Harry Colomby brought Monk into the Five Spot in the summer of 1957. Monk was at the age of thirty-nine and it was his first long term engagement as a leader, since working with Coleman Hawkins. Monk brought in his own quartet; he hired John Coltrane, called on his favourite bass player Wilbur Ware and turned to his old friend Shadow Wilson.60
58 Kelly, Robin D.G. Thelonious Monk: Live and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009 59 Idem
27 People made Bebop
With the Five Spot Sessions, Monk began to emerge from relative obscurity. After more than two decades of scuff ling, his career was on an upswing. Now, Monk was ‘the jazz world’s hottest ticket’, the small café had become the one of the hippest joints in the city, fans were lined up in the street to catch a glimpse of Monk and his quartet.61 Finally, Monk was taken seriously.
In November 1957, this appreciation had a crowning moment; the band had the opportunity to play the Morningside Community Centre benefit at Carnegie Hall. By this time, they had been playing for twenty-two weeks, six nights a week: the band was tight.
Monk’s dance
It was in the Five Spot Café that Monk established his well-known dance. He’d danced before but, according to both his wife Nelly and Coltrane, this was different; it was new. Monk was really pleased with his band; he often left the piano and went to the front to lead the soloists with his dance. ‘At first, he just moved with the music, his attention focussed on the band. His movements eventually became more elaborate, evolving into a peculiar little spinning dance, elbow pumping up and down on each turn, with an occasional stutter step allowing him to glide left and right’, writes Kelly.62 Monk told Coltrane that he wanted to hear the band, so got up from his piano
and that he couldn’t help dancing to his own music. When Monk left his piano, Coltrane could improvise before he returned, which allowed the saxophone player to experiment within the ensemble. Wilbur Ware too, found freedom in the piano-less interactions. He could go ‘outside and inside’ the harmonic structures of the song,
61 Kelly, Robin D.G. Thelonious Monk: Live and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009 62 Idem
building up tension. When Monk came back in, the band members just needed one chord and they knew where he was at, Ware declared.63
To the writers and artists in the café, every aspect of Monk’s performance became ‘avant-garde’. His dance was seen as an example of modern performance art. For the musicians, Monks dance was his way of letting the band know it was swinging and a kind of ‘conducting’. Kelly cites the explanation of tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse: ‘It wasn’t a stage presentation, it was how he felt at that moment (…) when he danced, it meant the thing was swinging, and it made him do that. It was never a ‘routine’ where someone said, ‘Keep that in, it looks good.’ It was spontaneous, he often didn’t do it’.64
63 Kelly, Robin D.G. Thelonious Monk: Live and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009 64 Kelly, Robin D.G. Thelonious Monk: Live and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009. 232
29 J. Bernlef
4
J. Bernlef
(Sint-Pancras, 1937 – Amsterdam, 2012) 1 BiographyJ. Bernlef 65 was a Dutch writer; poet and translator who wrote a lot about jazz music.
As a young boy he grew up in the Netherlands of the 50s, where the American bebop music was slowly gaining some interest. He became bored with the classical music on the radio and was very pleased when he heard ‘real American jazz’ at a friend’s place. Instead of playing classical music on his piano, he tried to improvise just like those jazz musicians. He practiced a lot until his fingers were ‘automatically finding the keys’, but when he tried to do the same on his typewriter, it did not really follow suit. Indeed, he claims ‘I was a bad piano player already, now I was a bad writer too’.66
Despite this, there were a lot of characteristics of jazz that he could use in his writ-ings. He learned for instance that jazz, singing and speaking were highly related, and for this reason he strived for a ‘naturalness’, a colloquial language-like improvisation in his work. Furthermore, he searched for ways to display the rhythms of the voice in a direct way. Concerning, timing and rhythm in jazz he states: ‘bar line and metronome are being overplayed by a physical, pulsing timing (…) until a remarkable phenom-enon arises that is called swing’.67 In this statement, we can determine that he found
structure and spontaneity being resolved in jazz music. Here, timing is the placing of notes/beats right behind or before the fixed rhythm of the metronome, there where it ‘feels right’. The structure of the bar line - a system to fixate sounds into notes – is combined with a physical, spontaneous ‘need’ to move on this rhythm.
65 Pseudonym for Hendrik Jan Marsman; Sint Pancras, 14 January 1937 – Amsterdam, 29 October 2012 66 Bernlef, J. Schiet niet op de pianist: over jazz. Amsterdam: Querido Uitgeverij B.V., 1993
2 The Necessary Angel
In 1990, J. Bernlef ’s collection of poems entitled De Noodzakelijke Engel was published.68
As the title suggests, Bernlef drew his inspiration from The Necessary Angel, a collec-tion of essays written by the American writer Wallace Stevens.6970 In this collection
of essays, Stevens questions ‘the absolute’ and neglects a ‘metaphysical truth’. He suggests that the ‘outer world’ only exists within the observation of the consciousness and, in here, it is valuable. There is nothing outside of us behind which we can hide, Steven’s states. In one of his most famous poems, ‘Local Objects’ 71, Stevens examines
his relationship with ‘the outer world’. In here, the poet is a wondering ghost for whom only the things in the here and now are important. Those few things represent moments of insight.72 This idea of being in the middle of things and the
impor-tance of personal observation in the existence of the outer world are also important elements of Bernlef ’s poetry - and of Rabinowitch’s constructions too.
Bernlef ’s bundle exists of four parts. The first is dedicated to three ‘necessary angels’, or three jazz musicians: Steve Lacy, Chet Baker and Warne Marsh. In this thesis, I will mainly focus on the five poems Bernlef dedicated to Steve Lacy (1934 – 2004), an American jazz saxophone player and composer who devoted a large part of his repertoire to Thelonious Monk’s music.73 He appears in Bernlef ’s poems as The
Necessary Angel. He is a fallen and therefore an earthy angel who answers a longing for a new mythology and a purpose in our post-religious world. But instead of the religious angel, the messenger of God, this angel is necessary: ‘he is not among us / to work miracles
68 Bernlef, J. De Noodzakelijke Engel. Amsterdam: Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V., 1990
69 Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951 70 Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984 71 Idem
72 Hof, Kees van ‘t. ‘Aardse Engelen’. Ons Erfdeel 33 (1990): 742-743
31 J. Bernlef
Noodzakelijke engel
De engel is noodzakelijk en dus gevallen, vleugels als nagels in het vlees gegroeid. Hij gaat gebukt. Droog en bijna sloom begint hij
zijn dag met het vergeten van zijn instrument hij heeft een stem maar houdt hem tegen. Eén noot, zo weet hij, en er is
Geen terugweg meer, het web weeft zich dan als vanzelf. De verhalen over hem bekend zijn vals: ‘Geluid of geen geluid dat is alles wat je hebt
Ik ben er nog lang niet, - de vonk, de afgrond en de sprong zij rusten diep in mij.’
Hij is niet onder ons om wonderen te verrichten maar ons de kale plekken voor te spelen een
voor een.
but / to play us the bare spots // one / by / one.’74 To be precise, he is here to point our glance
to something else other than simple window-dressing.75
Necessary angel
The angel is necessary and hence fallen, wings like nails grown into the flesh. He is weighed down. Dry and almost inert he starts his day with forgetting his instrument he has a voice but arrests it.
One note, he knows well, and there is No way back, the web
is then weaving itself. The stories known about him, are false: ‘Sound or no sound [that] is all you have I have yet a long way to go, - the spark, the abyss and the jump they rest deep inside me.’
He is not among us to work miracles but to play us the bare spots one
by one.
74 Bernlef, J. De Noodzakelijke Engel. Amsterdam: Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V., 1990. 11 75 Ekkers, Remco. ‘Twee soorten engelen’. De Gids 154:7 (1991): 576-577
This, exactly is what art should do, stresses Bernlef. This pointing to the empty voids literally describes the writer’s desire; writing open poems. ‘The disadvantage of language is its abstracting character, the differentiation of the real world is f lattened down by it’, he outlines. The poet tends to write unfinished poems and wishes his readers to complete them with their own fantasy and imagination.76 Rabinowitch’s
work is open too: ‘if it isn’t open, it isn’t art’, he says.77 He reduces his works to
‘objec-tive’ scientific forms - like the rhythm and chords of the music – whilst simultane-ously, inviting the spectator to communicate with those forms by moving around them – similar to the communication without language between Wilbur Ware, Shadow Wilson and Coltrane, and also Thelonious Monk who dances to their music. Scientist Sander Bais describes the equations of science as ‘the most compact represen-tations of the world around us (…) restricted to the grammar of nature, without giving it a purpose and attack a value’.78 He calls those equations ‘the poetry of science’.
For Rabinowitch, the gap that Bernlef is pointing us to is his acknowledging of us living in two separated worlds, a world of values and a world of facts. It is the gap in between those two worlds, the space in between in which we f loat around: not yet fallen but about to fall. When God banned Adam and Eve from the garden to the earth, he banned the angels who sinned too: fallen angels. 79 ‘This fall is the symbolic version
of the transition, by Newton’s destruction from the ancient to our modern world’, Rabinowitch explains.
76 ‘IM: J. Bernlef’. Radio interview De Buren, Radio Brussel. 31th of August, 2017
77 Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. ‘Concerning the Work of Royden Rabinowitch: Our Disenchanted Ontology and Paradoxical Hope’. Royden Rabinowitch: Ghent. Gent: AsaMER, 2014. 21-36
78 Bais, Sander. Cutting Edges: Reading the Hidden Geometry of Royden Rabinowitch. Sante Fe Institute, University of Amsterdam: 2016
79 Peter 2:4, ‘For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment ...’
33 J. Bernlef
3 Fixing spontaneity?
A recording of a jazz concert, a poem or a sculpture; attempts to capture spontaneity into a fixed form. In J. Bernlef ’s following poem from 1961 from the cycle ‘Wat is er poezie?’ this desire is illustrated 80:
We want to put tears in the window photograph a smile
no net limits the water and still, we say ‘emptiness’ because we see a bird fly: poetry?‘
Tears and a smile; forms of spontaneity. A photograph and a window, means to capture that spontaneity?’ wonders analyst Mouris Bertram81. His answer is no, in
both cases the tension is gone; like the possibility that the smiling person burst out into tears. We use words that do not measure up to what we see, such as the word ‘emptiness’ for a bird that is f lying away. The bird interrupts the emptiness in an unexpected way, but there is no word to describe this moment. All that is left is an empty space.
In ‘Perfectie met een gaatje’ J. Bernlef writes about the in-resolvability of a jazz solo: ‘behind every solo, a span of other solos are hidden, a branching system of unused possibilities (…) without this conjecture of other possibilities – which determines the melancholic character – jazz will lose much of its tension’.82/83
80 Mourits, Bertram. ‘Poetry and all that jazz: J. Bernlef op zoek naar de gecomponeerde improvisatie’ Vooys 10 (1991-1992)
81 Mourits, Bertram. ‘Poetry and all that jazz: J. Bernlef op zoek naar de gecomponeerde improvisatie’ Vooys 10 (1991-1992). 103
82 Bernlef, J. Perfectie met een Gaatje. Utrecht: Reflex, 1981. 79
83 Original text: ‘Achter iedere solo verbergen zich massa’s andere solo’s, een zich steeds verder vertakkend systeem van ongebruikte mogelijkheden. (…) Zonder dat vermoeden van andere mogelijkheden – die denk ik het melancholische karakter bepaalt – verliest jazz veel van zijn spanning.’ 79
Tranen willen wij in de etalage leggen een glimlach fotograferen
geen net beperkt het water en toch zeggen wij ‘leegte’
He quotes from saxophone player Eric Dolphy: ‘after the music is over, it is all gone in the air. You can never capture it again’. The recorder made it possible to capture that moment and to repeat the unrepeatable jazz concert. Unfortunately, the tension of other possibilities is gone.
In the end, spontaneity is all about tension, which can never be captured in words, sounds or steel forms an sich. I remember Rabinowitch telling me - while pointing at one of his sculptures: ‘this is not the artwork’. Roland Nachtigäller formulates it as the following: ‘In the movement of the observer a relationship fraught with tension is taken up quite naturally between the coolly or analytically constructed rigid mate-rial and the viewer, whose positioning is completely f lexible and unpredictable: rationality and intuition as poles between which the artist’s ideas meet the observers angles’. The one that maintains the tension, the balance of values and facts, structure and spontaneity, the one that completes the artwork is the reader, listener or observer himself.
35 Rabinowitch’s Jazz sculptures
5
Rabinowitch’s Jazz sculptures
1 Throwing away ‘Cinders’In preparation of the jazz sculptures, Rabinowitch made transcriptions of the recordings of The Thelonious Monk Quartet in which he found mathematical structures. About these transcription in relation to the sculptures, he wrote (to me) the following:
The reason that I actually made these things was to abandon my intense and concentrated developments of one-to-one relations between certain musical structures and certain mathematical calculations. The transcriptions are an abstraction of Monk’s spontaneity, ironically.
The observer, Rabinowitch explains, only experiences his abandonment of very heavy weights - highly developed one-to-one relations regarding mathematical calculations and musical structures - resulting in collections of very light; spontaneous appear-ances. In the end, the artist admits that the vestiges of the origins of these construc-tions always lurking behind their appearances; this doubtlessly defines these works as deeply ironic.
As a young boy, Rabinowitch was in awe of a conic section model (figure 2) his parents gave him that ‘[…] for some strange reason I could not draw but only contemplate’.84
Since then, he hoped he would be able to make something like the conic section model that he ‘could not concentrate on but could only casually look at’.85
Just like the jazz sculptures, most of Rabinowitch’s works are based on ‘simple’
differ-84 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Ontology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’. Institute for quantum computing University of Waterloo, Canada. 26 Mar. 2009. Lecture. 6
85 Idem
ential equations, derived from those cone sections like ellipses, circles and parabolas. In the visitors’ guide, made for Rabinwitch’s exposition in Gent, curator Frank Maes describes those differential equations as the most powerful, precise means to measure and define the objective truth and the most precise ways to understand and fixate the world around us.86/87 Gallileo Gallileï’s first theorem for example, states that ‘a
projec-tile which is carried by a uniform horizontal motion compounded with a naturally accelerated vertical motion describes a path which is a semi-parabola’.88 Furthermore,
Kepler’s First Law of Planetary Motion, states that ‘the orbit of each planet is an ellipse, with one focus on the centre of the sun’.89 The observations of Kepler and Gallileï
made it possible for Newton to derive the shape of orbits mathematically using the calculus. Depending on the energy of the orbiting body, orbit shapes that are any of the four conic sections are possible.90 ‘How paradoxical that those simple, abstract
forms of the parabola and the ellipse represent the factual world around us’ Maes accurately illustrates.91
Rabinowitch strives to develop forms which are both abstract as concrete: forms that incorporate both structure as spontaneity. In the creative process, the artist draws a plan for the sculpture, according to formulas derived from the conical sections.
86 Original text: ‘De differentiaalvergelijking is het krachtigste en meest precieze middel om o.a. krommingen, trajecten en versnellingen te definiëren en te meten, of om er testbare voorspellingen over te maken.’ p. 4
87 Maes, Frank and Luc Derycke. Royden Rabinowitch ‘Murphy’ or Rudolf Steiner Exposed by Samuel Beckett Adriaan
Verwée Come se niente fosse: Bezoekersgids. Veurne, vzw EMERGENT galerie & vereniging. 2016. 4
88 Barbour, Julian B. The Discovery of Dynamics: A Study from a Machian Point of View of the Discovery and the Structure of
Dynamical Theories. Oxford University Press, 2001. 380
89 Weisstein, Eric W. ‘Conic Section.’ MathWorld: A Wolfram Web Resource 90 Idem
91 Maes, Frank, Luc Derycke. Royden Rabinowitch ‘Murphy’ or Rudolf Steiner Exposed by Samuel Beckett Adriaan Verwée
37 Rabinowitch’s Jazz sculptures
Those formulas are purely abstract and do not appear in our direct observation of the world: this is Poincaré’s geometric space.92/93 Ironically, those lines Rabinowitch draws
on the paper, come forth with his movements in space - his arm is moving his hand that is holding the pencil: Poincaré’s somatic space. Furthermore, as soon as those lines are drawn on the paper, the abstract formula is turned into a concrete form. The forms become even more concrete in the fabric, where industrial machines develop, roll or break the f lat, steel plates into the sculpture.94
While explaining, Rabinowitch depicts himself standing in a river, with an empty bag in his hand. He is picking up stones out of the river and puts them in his bag - just until the bag is heavy enough in order to throw it all away. Indeed, this is his aban-donment. This throwing away or momentum – ‘mass in motion’ – is all about movement.95
Rabinowitch hopes that the observer, as direct as possible, experiences this movement that is produced by the force of the ‘stones’ or cinders? 96 Bernlef ’s poem Cinders, the
second part of ‘Five pieces for Steve Lacy’, perfectly illustrates Rabinowitch’s ‘abandon-ment’:
Cinders, can be considered to be burnt coal but can refer to metal-slags too: this is the waste-material that comes off when one melts metal. In the poem, the heap of black embers is lying behind the sheet iron shack and, although they are situated right there, we cannot see them. Rabinowitch too, is playing with our physical or somatic
92 Idem
93 Rabinowitch relies on Poincaré who states that the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry. When drawing a three dimensional cone (on a flat surface), these lines are not a representation of the object in geometrical space, they are the reproduction of our personal sensation: ‘representative space is only an image of geometrical space’, according to Poincaré
94 Conversation Frank Maes 26-06-2017 95 Idem
space, which is concerned with the relative notions of left - right, underneath – above and in front of - behind. In the second verse, Steve Lacy is characterized as an adult cherub, which, in Christian theology, is a ‘second class’ angel. In poetry, cherubijntje, is a metaphor for the childish innocence (Vondel, kinder lyck, 1632).97/98
The protagonist, paradoxically, is a child and an adult at once.99
Cinders
Behind the sheet iron shack the heap of black cinders
Here he comes through the poor-man’s grass: adult cherub
Many years he silently looked into mirrors at an empty chair on the balcony
at a hole in the sole of his shoe He looks around, nods contentedly:
the grass blown about underneath the low light the sheet iron shack blistering under his attention ‘The melody is here already’ he says, ‘always – now only the right notes’ and picks up the cinders. One by one.
He smiles like a child that wants to get away
‘like in a fairytale’, he says. That way dropping cinders He leaves the ground/site.
97 Kusters, Wiel. Ik graaf, jij graaft. Amsterdam: Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1995 98 Appendix 2: Joost van den Vondel, Kinder lijck (1632)
99 Analysed by Henk Loman
Sintels
Achter de plaatijzeren loods de hoop zwarte sintels
Hij komt aangelopen door het armeluisgras: volwassen cherubijn
Jarenlang keek hij zwijgend in spiegels naar een lege stoel op het balkon naar een gat in de zool van zijn schoen Hij kijkt om zich heen, knikt tevreden: het gras verwaaid onder het lage licht
de plaatijzeren loods bladderend onder zijn aandacht. ‘De melodie is er al’, zegt hij, ‘altijd –
nu nog de juiste noten’ en raapt de sintels op. Een voor een.
Hij lacht als een kind dat weg wil ‘als in het sprookje’, zegt hij. Zo sintels strooiend verlaat hij het terrein.
39 Rabinowitch’s Jazz sculptures
In the third verse, emptiness, silence and voids dominate: those concepts are often represented in Bernlefs work.100
Later, it seems that the (dark) memories are getting vague, like grass that is being blown about underneath the low light. The he is back in reality and seems to accept his current existence. The poem becomes lighter indeed: ‘The melody is here already’ he says, ‘always – / now only the right notes’ and picks up / the cinders. // One / by / one.101/102 The melody, like a thread, is known. Now, he just needs to shape it.
There-fore, he picks up the cinders; the gaps and empty voids (see: 1. The necessary angel, chapter 2), nevertheless he is throwing them away after. Laughing as a child that wants to leave the distressing environment and does not believe in fairytales – or: the enchanted ancient world - anymore.103
Steve Lacy, the he in this poem, can be easily replaced by Rabinowitch: musical struc-tures are his cinders, the Aristotelian world his fairy tale, the jazz sculpstruc-tures as his abandoned cinders. How astonishing that as a child, Royden Rabinowitch was working as a cleaner in the steel factory next to his parents’ house. He literally was sweeping away the waste material that comes off when one works metal.104 He swept or threw
away cinders, just like the next four jazz sculptures.
After outlining previous relevant information, I now turn to the objects of study: the four sculptures Rabinowitch dedicated to the Thelonious Monk Quartet in which I will search for the artist’s translation of Monk’s falling dance.
100 Ekkers, Remco. ‘Twee soorten engelen’. De Gids 154:7 (1991): 576-577 101 Bernlef, J. De Noodzakelijke Engel. Amsterdam: Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V., 1990. 12
102 Just like Bebop musicians, Bernlef is repeating a theme. See the last verse of ‘1. Necessary angel’: One / by / one 103 Rabinowitch, Royden. ‘Modern Onthology: The corollary of Modern Physics and the Content of my Art’. Institute for
quantum computing University of Waterloo, Canada. 26 Mar. 2009. Lecture. 16 104 Conversation Frank Maes
