Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar in the Style of the Red Krayola

Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar in the Style of the Red Krayola is a performance piece by Art & Language featuring the Red Krayola.

In the performance, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden of Art & Language stand on opposite ends of a video projector screen as each "Letter to the Jackson Pollock Bar" is performed twice. First, on the video screen, the text is performed by the Red Krayola in a pre-recorded musical improvisation. Then it is "corrected" by a straightforward reading from Baldwin or Ramsden.

Background

Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar

In 2012, Art & Language created two series of works featuring 'letters' addressed to frequent collaborators Mayo Thompson, front man of the Red Krayola, and Christian Mattiessen, director of the performing group Jackson Pollock Bar. The Jackson Pollock Bar has performed several Art & Language scripts as "theory installations" since the 1990s. The Letters to the Red Krayola discuss and depict specific Art & Language works, while the Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar are narrative vignettes drawing from Art & Language's experiences in and around the art world.

• 
  Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar XXVIII, 2011
• 
  Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar XXXVIII, 2011

The Red Krayola recording

The Red Krayola recorded their performance of Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar in 2012. They may have recorded it over Skype during the band's participation in the Whitney Biennial 2012: Thompson appeared at the Whitney via a Skype 'portal' leading up to the band's two in-person performances at the biennial in April 2012.

Personnel

• Bill Bowman
• Mayo Thompson
• Tom Watson
• Sandy Yang

2013 performance

Watch clip on YouTube

Art & Language performed Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar in the Style of the Red Krayola for the first time on May 18, 2013 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. This filmed performance contained 28 letters and ran for 95 minutes.

• 

2019 performance

Watch on Vimeo

Press release

On October 24, 2019, Art & Language held an event at the Lisson Gallery in New York City titled "Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar in the Style of the Red Krayola." Also displayed: 10 Posters (2019).

They performed a shorter version of the piece with only 10 letters.

• 
  Title card
• 
  Posters

Letters to the Jackson Pollock Bar in the Style of the Red Krayola

1.

The visitor parked her car. Pretty in an unshowy way, she was knowing and confident. Well rehearsed in the etiquette of art business, she possessed no curiosity either moral or intellectual. Nor could she see that a practice of years is liable to be complex. An essayistic practice even more so. Thus she lacked what would have been fatal to her trade. She made connections and distinctions between our works and made them into fetish things. It did not go well. And we were disconcerted that we were as much deflated by our own lack of knowledge as irritated by hers.

2.

The artist has produced five-hundred works in a career of thirteen or fourteen years. It is not possible to say if any of them has failed. They are composed of familiar or almost familiar objects made resonant, shown in a new light, to be seen with fresh eyes, made uncomfortable, strange, difficult, intractable, poetic, etc, etc. They are the objects of an artistic dispensation that is lead by its consumers and managers. The artist has been taught to make use of limited means. This is a new minimalism that should form into a movement. Its founding principle is poverty of intellectual ambition. Such ambition as it possesses is contracted out to a form of journalism that attenuates into cultural studies or less. These five-hundred works should be shown in a retrospective exhibition. We'd then be able to read that the work had been made at different times. Some earlier, some later.

3.

We leave the party with relief. It had been at the princely apartment. The resident prince has power, we were told. This is a power — a widely accepted agency and influence — that emanates from a universal virtue. It is exemplified by shamefully affirmative slogans uttered without shame: quietly, with assurance, conviction, and perfect timing. The prince and his like have calculated the performative effect of their speech with care. It is speech that is inclusive and hurts no one. Its positive consequences, real or imagined, have been packaged to lie within their control. Reeking of death and statis, they are weightless Fausts who do not share the human consequences that he suffered. Their evil lies in a perfect conjuncture. Commercial and career opportunities coincide in perfect harmony with their artistic and philosophic commitments. These are never in tension but always perfectly matched.

4.

"Did you receive a copy of the catalog?" asked the curator of voids. The volume in question was large and exquisitely well designed. Here were images and essays in celebration of provocations and penetrations that had long been domesticated, made harmless. Here were the documents of a callow entertainment that bathes in the institutional light. The curator was young. He is not yet spoken of with reverence and awe. There are others, a little older, to whom is attached an incomprehensible weight of intellectual reputation. These are the puissant enthusiasts of second-rate scholarship. They have achieved a parochial grandeur as a consequence of manipulative skill, of scholarly power. They are intellectual pipsqueaks. They are legends.

5.

While your vision of large paintings may be an agreeable one to those who, indeed, endorse the view that the exhibition is now the work of art, it is not one that we can fill to-order. You may be aware — you are aware — that Matthew Jesse Jackson's view of modernism as something now continued as a academic performance is something that we perhaps anticipated in the 1960's. To be asked kindly to participate in its present realisation is eerily offensive. As to the idea that curators are the new artists and other such adolescent claptrap, we find ourselves drawn only to invective. We are happy to work on scripts and projects which might rejuvenate the playback technique. The company of low-grade cultural theorists will not accomplish this.

6.

We are, of course, moaning and complaining about a cultural tide that has come in and out more than once. It seems that we face few opportunities but to behave as fetish entrepreneurs. Indeed, the fetish has assumed the status of the paradigmatic artwork. Its entrepreneurs the role of respondents to its Spenglerian imperative and this is a fetish that includes all possible negativity. We are well and truly in the shit — working self-destructively towards something that we might see as aesthetic, as the other of the fetish, through the barely-open fingers that cover our eyes.

7.

Having spoken to his students in a seminar some years before, we are accosted by this academic-cum-cultural manager on a later occasion. He is emblematic of his species. His conversation points his interlocutors towards its footnotes. These are insipid messages to the effect that his reading is well and truly networked, that it is well versed in the cans of cultural power. What is extraordinary is that such a being would imagine that we might really want to share a drink with him.

8.

How long does an artist or writer last as an unchallengeably good thing? For a short time, the self-image of the age finds its reflection in a novel, a public building, or in the life and work of an artist. These more than favoured cultural producers are eventually discarded or rather parked for a short time on a corner of the honoured past. Their final fate is that they, more than their less fortunate contemporaries, are doomed to be pickled in their time. Cultural history never overcomes the embarrassment that its old certainties entail.

9.

The sheep have emerged from the wood into the field. After rain and hail, the sun is shining palely from the west making the dirty cream of their walk glow white from within. They are all castrated rams about a year old. they have lived together as a flock of about twenty. They have had plenty to eat, they have put on weight and wool. They don't speculate about the future. The curator-historian has supplied his own Wikipedia entry in which he lists his own achievements at unimaginable length. His powers of self-patronage are such that his presence is required in all circumstances of urgent cultural signification.

10.

Artists once celebrated as practitioners of institutional critique are now often to be found among the state artists of our time. A particularly fortunate recipient of the accolade has penetrated the space of institutions and galleries with his idle decorations ad nauseum. His cultural performance has been so well formed, so marked with uncurious confidence as to shut out all but affirmative voices. Institutional critique, which in this artist's work has always been a matter of pious sentiment, is now a badge of state power. The transformation necessary for this is, we suspect, rather less than people might have imagined.

Interview with Matthew Jesse Jackson

The performance was followed by an interview with art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson.

Jackson has published two essays on Art & Language: "If You Were Art & Language, Then You'd Be a Fucking Decent Contemporary Artist" (2014) and "F’ed-Up Middlemen" ("Foutus les intermédiaires"), talk

Transcript

Jackson: It seems to me that one wishes that there might be an art practice in the 21st century that would engage the collaborative, the dialogic and have a keen sensitivity to political questions. Do you have any feelings about that thought?

Baldwin: Let us—perhaps we have to set a few limits, if we're gonna talk about sensitivity to political questions. One of those limits must be, I think, that art does not stand centerstage front in circumstances of substantial cultural change.

Jackson: Yes.

Baldwin: It does, however—if you—in the words of the poet W. H. Auden in his... "Art makes nothing happen. It lives in the valley of its own — survives, rather — in the valley of its own making." Now the question is if it survives in that valley, what can it do in that valley? What's in that valley for it to act upon?

Jackson: Have you been in the valley?

Ramsden: Have we been in the valley?

Jackson: Yes.

Ramsden: We're in the valley—we're always in the valley.

Jackson: You've never gotten out of the valley?

Ramsden: The longer we stay in the valley, the more possibilities there are we get out of it.

Baldwin: Wouldn't you say that the valley, if there is one, is porous to penetrated by—that in fact Auden's rather neat statement isn't neat at all. It's a very messy statement.

Ramsden: Yes.

Baldwin: That valley is full... of sharks and dangers and demons and whatever you want to call it.

Jackson: Semiotic managers?

Baldwin: Indeed.

Ramsden: Yes.

Jackson: Is it possible that an art practice might be managed by such semiotic managers for great success?

Ramsden: Yes, yes. Happens all the time. Happens all around us.

Jackson: Could one imagine a way to try to escape its grasp?

Ramsden: Well... I hate talking about dialogical and conversational because it's extremely fashionable to talk about things like that, right?

Jackson: Things that are collaborative and have a certain political quality.

Ramsden: Right, OK, yes. All of these things and all of the connections between these things. They're not just good on one side, bad on the other side: they're all connected. And working in those connections and with those pathways is what we do. Because that's way—that's the only way a kind of conversational practice can make any kind of sense of where we are and what the possibilities are.

Jackson: But your conversation seems esoteric and hermetic most of the time. It seems so irrelevant.

Ramsden: Yeah... yeah. But... (to Baldwin) you can talk. There is a sense in which the—which the longer... if you explore the internality, the internality of what you do, the practice of what you do, the more possibilities of finding your way around the world.

Jackson: Is what you do and the way you work, in some way, potentially a model for others?

Baldwin: I doubt it.

Ramsden: Yeah I doubt that very much.

Baldwin: However—

Ramsden: And so does everybody.

Baldwin: Stranger things have happened. But the point is that if you think of this practice as, in some regards, made... of... the production—made out of the production of desultory contradictions, of a kind of malingering, a kind of hiding, a kind of disguise. And disguises a kind—involves a kind of plotting, and so on. Made of all those things. Now, it would seems to me that all those things are ? to the interests of the semiotic manager.

Jackson: But they want to be—

Baldwin: They could be packaged, I suppose, so as to become so. But I don't know how—

Jackson: But the art they support will probably become politically effective, it might seem.

Baldwin: It might seem, yes.

Ramsden: But there's nothing—nothing can be protected from what you call the semiotic manager. Everything can be semiotically managed. Except in... What you're saying is that in our case, possibly, a dialogical and conversational practice has certain protections against the semiotic manager.

Jackson: Ah, and so it would go forward over time and it might be quite diverse in its manifestations?

Baldwin: Not simply diverse. I would think that in some sense or another, it would also be insecure.

Jackson: Ah.

Baldwin: In certain senses. Now...

Jackson: Does it mean that you're insecure?

Baldwin: No, personally, or..?

Jackson: Is there a sort of shame associated with the fact that there is a pinnacle that you've reached?

Baldwin: Oh yes, oh yes. That there is a kind of—I want to be careful... Shame can be something that drives one on or it can be something also that causes one to seek to be entirely out of the sight of others.

Jackson: But, but—

Baldwin: And I'm not quite sure which of those—which side of the power of shame one is working with.

Jackson: But your gestures so frequently seem to be guided towards a public. You create slogans. Your rhetoric is emphatically public so often. Yet you're riven by shame?

Baldwin: Fucked up slogans, generally speaking.

Jackson: They're corrected.

Baldwin: Yes.

Jackson: Who corrected them?

Baldwin: Well, occasionally Leon Trotsky. But occasionally not. Occasionally they were corrected by some bizarre sense of ? getting into a metric of some plausible song or something like that.

Jackson: But you could have been so successful. Why did you turn in this direction?

Ramsden: Could we have been so successful?

Jackson: Everyone says that you could have been wonderfully successful.

Baldwin: OK, there was a moment—and this is commonplace by now—but there was a moment subsequent to the putatively grand and heroic days of conceptual art where conceptual art sidled ever, ever closer to the management; so I levered ever closer to the institution. But the question was to try to devise some way of—some form of resistance. What is that resistance going to look like? A mere denunciation is a hopeless strategy.

Jackson: But why did you need to denounce it? You were the most famous conceptual artists in the world many years ago.

Ramsden: Because conceptual art was—what happened to conceptual art was it calcified into a kind of style. And there had to be ways of—eventually of being aggressive in some way or addressing conceptual art from other kinds of directions, rather than simply repeat it as a kind of style. That's normal stuff. That caused the problems that we have.

Baldwin: But there was a very strong imperative, not resisted by many, or any, of our peers and colleagues, which was to—in one way or another—to become some agents of police: to police one's work, the purity of one's work, the consistency of one's work, in a way.

Jackson: So the impurity and inaccessibility of your work is some sort of badge of honor?

Baldwin: [chuckles] No, uh—

Ramsden: Not ?.

Baldwin: It is a contingent necessity in respect of any kind of possible resistance, I think. It simply—it has to be.

Jackson: A series of contingent necessities.

Baldwin: Yes. Those are the things one has to face.

Ramsden: So, why couldn't you... If you could make conceptual art, why wouldn't you speak conceptual art, shout conceptual art and sing conceptual art? Why couldn't you do those things? And that took us away from a kind of mainstream—of modernism. Because conceptual art was... What are we talking about conceptual art for?

Baldwin: Because—

Ramsden: It was a ? of modernism.

Jackson: Yes.

Baldwin: Why couldn't you fuck it up as painting?

Jackson: But you did.

Ramsden: Modernism—

Jackson: But you messed it up many times. You've messed it up over and over again.

Baldwin: Yeah.

Ramsden: That's what we do. We mess things up.

Jackson: Did people enjoy what just happened?

Ramsden: I have no idea.

Jackson: Does it seem probable?

Ramsden: N... uh...

Baldwin: I don't know if I have any idea or have any interest in knowing, actually.

Jackson: But the public's very important to you, right?

Baldwin: Go on, yeah.

Ramsden: There are people in the public who are very important to us.

Jackson: But not the entire public.

Ramsden: No, that's a quantification.

Jackson: Ah. But do you seek a special kind of audience?

Ramsden: Do we seek it? Seek?

Baldwin: Seek or seek?

Ramsden: See... Seek—

Jackson: Seek.

Ramsden: A special kind of audience.

Jackson: Do you seek a special kind of audience?

Baldwin: This, this is one of those—this is one of these questions... Here's another word with shame and whatever. This is an embarrassing question in a way. Embarrassing for us to try and answer. Because in one way or another, we have to kind of own up to a sort of Wollheimian tendency to look for a sympathetic interlocutor, sympathetic viewer.

Jackson: But why would your work evoke any sort of sympathy?

Baldwin: I'm saying one inevitably does that because that is, I suppose, one of those ways that one composes a sentence or whatever. One is motivated by the thought of an interlocutor of some kind. But whether that in the end, we hypothesize an audience, I truly don't know.

Jackson: But you must—you must have an audience in mind whenever you make these things. You must hope that the things that you make will be successful, yes?

Baldwin: Okay, okay, okay. If you, if you—

Ramsden: Yes... yes.

Baldwin: But if you hypothesize an audience, as something—as some passive body that can consume—

Jackson: That can consume, yes.

Baldwin: Make a kind of—at best—make a kind of hermeneutic judgment about what you've done.

Jackson: Whether it's good or bad.

Baldwin: Yeah, well, that's all right. But there's another side to the audience or another practice that the audience can engage in, which is far more active, far more disruptive, far more interlocutory, far more annoying, and so on.

Jackson: You would be open to this. You wouldn't resist this sort of—

Baldwin: No.

Ramsden: Of course—no, no.

Jackson: No, in fact, you encourage it?

Baldwin: Yes

Ramsden: Yeah.

Baldwin: But whether one addresses something in the sense that whether one constructs something in order to have it disrupted—

Jackson: Right.

Baldwin: I'm not sure. I think in our occasions, when one has done that—we have done that, not to create a mere provocation in an irritating sense.

Jackson: But it has to exist. You have to do something.

Baldwin: But yeah, there has to be a kind of irritability in the work, which...

Jackson: Right.

Baldwin: ...will support that.

Jackson: But is the irritability an irritability you have, or is it an irritability that you occasion for others?

Baldwin: Both--

Jackson: Both.

Baldwin: We have unto occasion for others, I think, probably both.

Jackson: So it's a self-alienating practice?

Baldwin: To some degree, yeah.

Jackson: You don't enjoy what you do?

Ramsden: Yes, we do.

Jackson: You do enjoy it?

Ramsden: Of course we do.

Jackson: What's the source of the enjoyment?

Ramsden: Going to work, continuing a narrative of the history of Art Language, of developing it, seeing where it goes, trying to complete it.

Jackson: But you are straight, white men who are working on your special practice.

Ramsden: Yes.

Baldwin: Straight—

Ramsden: Yeah, go on, go on.

Jackson: Right. But the practice—

Ramsden: Why are you looking—

Jackson: But it still has potential?

Ramsden: Why are you looking at me like that?

Jackson: Well, I'm just asking, does it still have potential?

Baldwin: Potential for what?

Ramsden: Because we're white men, working on our special practice.

Jackson: Yes.

Ramsden: Yeah, what are we supposed to be?

Jackson: Well, it's not about who you're supposed to be, it's what you do. Does what you do have value today?

Baldwin: As straight white men—

Jackson: Right.

Baldwin: We, I suppose, have... presented with at least two alternatives. One is to join up, to encourage the semiotic manager. The other is to find some desultory way to resist.

Jackson: But what are you resisting?

Baldwin: Conscription...

Jackson: Conscription.

Baldwin: ...to a secure semiotic. OK, but as straight white men, we've got—

Jackson: But, well—

Baldwin: That's probably all there is left—

Ramsden: I hate this ? question.

Baldwin: As straight white men.

Jackson: I do too. But you could make paintings. And then people would want those paintings because you're quite well known as part of the conceptual art movement. But I don't see any paintings here. Did you fail?

Baldwin: Oh, badly.

Ramsden: All the time, all the time.

Jackson: Right, you could have been straight white men who make paintings that people buy!

Ramsden: I'd like to be.

Jackson: But you couldn't seem to produce it for this moment. Why?

Ramsden: What do you mean, this moment? This moment?

Jackson: Well, this is in some sense the pinnacle of the art world.

Ramsden: Yeah.

Jackson: And you're here, tonight.

Ramsden: So? This is the pinnacle of the art world; this is great.

Jackson: But you just produced something that would be extremely difficult to sell, I would think.

Ramsden: Yeah, we... This is getting embarrassing. Speaking of embarrassment, yeah? This is difficult to sell. Not impossible.

Jackson: Not impossible, right.

Ramsden: You can sell anything.

Jackson: But there's only one. You could have had 17 of those.

Ramsden: Of what—

Jackson: I'm just saying from a quantitative standpoint.

Ramsden: You mean we could have continued to make those.

Jackson: Well, 17 paintings versus one of those.

Ramsden: Yeah, we could have had that kind of show, yeah.

Jackson: That would have worked out.

Ramsden: But we didn't, because they only gave us one night stand.

Jackson: Right, exactly, you got one night. Do you think that it's working out well... so far?

Ramsden: Yeah.

Jackson: Re—

Ramsden: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jackson: This is a successful occasion for you?

Baldwin: Is this a successful occasion? Um, I very much doubt it, but I...

Jackson: But you're probably implying, I take it from—

Baldwin: But I'm having a good time. This is the problem.

Jackson: But I take it from your tone that you're implying that success isn't the goal tonight.

Baldwin: Well, I wouldn't know precisely what success amounted to in a circumstance like this.

Jackson: So you've sort of become inured to the lack of success.

Ramsden: And we never have.

Baldwin: Well, I'm not inured to it. I don't know what it is in this circumstance. I am ignorant of its possibility, so to speak.

Jackson: Right. But you are continuing to create and what you create is extremely hard to describe. And is that a virtue?

Ramsden: It's a reflection of the collaborative way that we work, yes, and a lot of other things. Masking.

Jackson: Right. Malingering.

Ramsden: Malingering, acting, things like that.

Jackson: Disguising, blurting.

Ramsden: Yeah, all those things.

Jackson: Right. But then you put all of those things together and they just don't seem to market very well.

Ramsden: That's true.

Jackson: They seem so irrelevant.

Ramsden: Yeah.

Baldwin: I have no doubt that they are.

Jackson: Do you seek to become more relevant? Is tonight an exercise in attempting to become relevant for perhaps a younger generation?

Baldwin: Relevant? Yeah, OK, you think to another generation?

Jackson: Well, perhaps.

Baldwin: I would... This is a very difficult one, because I don't want to, you know, one doesn't really want to be Jean-Baptiste in these circumstances, to say, you know, 'prepare ye the way,' or some shit like that. At the same time, I would have... There are moments, perhaps moments which are not of the best, but moments when one would hope that some example might be found in the practice by others. One—

Ramsden: Example of what? Example of—what do you mean example?

Baldwin: Some example, something to follow, something to take account of, something to bring into their work, or whatever.

Ramsden: A fragment maybe, just a fragment.

Jackson: So by being perplexed continually by your own activities and not fully understanding their value and sharing that with the public you're encouraging the public to question the character of cultural value?

Ramsden: That makes us sound very clever but yeah.

Jackson: That's what you're doing?

Ramsden: One of the things we do, I hope.

Jackson: And others have a tendency in the 21st century to become collaborative and dialogical and political artists who produce appropriately semiotically managed materials for the public.

Baldwin: Yeah.

Ramsden: It's a neat system.

Jackson: Yeah.

Baldwin: But this is the point, that one of the things, one of the dynamic possibilities—

Jackson: Right.

Baldwin: That collaborative—

Jackson: Right, a dialogical practices—

Baldwin: Discursive practices--

Jackson: Gives you a certain possibility

Baldwin: Offer you is the opportunity to avoid that—

Jackson: Right, because, well, you—

Baldwin: In other words to—

Jackson: You could interpret what's happening now as a certain kind of hiding—

Baldwin: No, but because it gives you a certain kind of—

Jackson: Hiding. Like you've been—you've been trapped. Sighing is another moment within the practice. And I might add that—

Baldwin: it gives you a kind of a way of murdering each other's pet projects. Right. But your project seems, I do think your project has a certain kind of political efficacy. Political efficacy, those hard to see. It's a sort of undercurrent that you feel. And it's important for us to continue to discuss this. Maybe it'll become a private discussion, and it won't really matter.

Play The Red Krayola Live 1967

The interview is cut off by an instrumental improvisation by guitarists J. Spaceman and John Coxon, both from the psychedelic rock band Spiritualized. This performance was a tribute to the Red Crayola's album Live 1967. In 2021, a rehearsal for the performance was released on vinyl as Play The Red Krayola Live 1967.

Interpretations

The performance draws connections between Art & Language, the Red Crayola, and the Jackson Pollock Bar's previous collaborations and histories. The structure of the piece is based on the Red Crayola's first album, The Parable of Arable Land (1967), whose track list alternates between instrumental improvisations and written rock songs. In 2019, Ramsden compared Art & Language's performances of texts over the Red Crayola's music in the video Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors (1976) to the loose 'Familiar Ugly' ensemble featured on Parable's 'free form freak-out' improvisations. The Red Krayola revisited this structure themselves on Fingerpainting (1999).

The title of the performance invokes Art & Language's Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock paintings (1979-80). The paintings put two ideas in conversation by depicting one "in the style of" the other and invite misreadings.

The performance also stems from the Jackson Pollock Bar's 'theory installation' performances of scripts written by Art & Language. In a 'theory installation,' actors perform scenes of art world discourse, such as panel interviews and lectures, while miming to fully pre-recorded audio tracks. Art & Language Sings a Song (2008) is another filmed performance that layers the concerns of Art & Language, the Jackson Pollock Bar, and the Red Crayola, and explores complications in performing and interpreting lyrics.