{"id":8966,"date":"2011-10-23T23:36:22","date_gmt":"2011-10-24T03:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=8966"},"modified":"2013-09-28T14:45:19","modified_gmt":"2013-09-28T18:45:19","slug":"bob-dylan-the-painter-and-the-photograph-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2011\/10\/23\/bob-dylan-the-painter-and-the-photograph-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan: The Painter and the Photograph (4)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bob

Bob Dylan, “The Asia Series,” catalogues, 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

Accused by one reader of “badly parsing” Bob Dylan’s description of his working method as a painter in an earlier post on this subject<\/a>, I elaborated as follows to make myself more clear:<\/p>\n

Photographs including human figures that aren\u2019t simulacra (sculptures, mannikins, dolls) represent \u201creal people.\u201d But the photographs themselves aren\u2019t real people; they\u2019re images of real people. Photographs of people on the street (those that aren\u2019t staged, anyhow) represent \u201creal street scenes,\u201d but they aren\u2019t real street scenes; they\u2019re images of real street scenes.<\/em><\/p>\n

A photograph of a real person or a real street scene is \u201ctangible,\u201d technically speaking \u2014 capable of being perceived, especially by the sense of touch \u2014 but hardly tangible in the way that a real person or a real street scene is tangible when you stand physically in its presence.<\/em><\/p>\n

So when a professional wordsmith like Dylan gets asked whether he paints from sketches or photographs and answers \u201cI paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes . . . it has to start with something tangible,\u201d he\u2019s clearly making a distinction between painting from sketches or photographs he didn’t make himself and painting from real life. He\u2019s asserting that his work begins with direct, personal, eyes-on sensory encounter with his subjects (as distinct from direct, personal, eyes-on sensory encounter with photographs of things he\u2019s never actually seen).<\/em><\/p>\n

I see no other reasonable way to interpret his reply. Which, based on the evidence, is at the very least deliberately misleading, at worst an outright lie.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bob

Bob Dylan, “Opium,” 2009, left; L\u00e9on Busy, untitled, Vietnam, 1915, right.<\/p><\/div>\n

To be fair to Dylan (and the Gagosian Gallery, where the show, reviewed in my last post<\/a>, just closed), the exhibition catalogue does include an essay, “There Goes My Hero,” by Richard Prince\u00a0\u2014 himself no stranger to deriving works from other people’s photographs, and to\u00a0the ensuing uproar<\/a>. (Click here for \u00a0“Bob Dylan\u2019s Fugitive Art,”<\/a>\u00a0a truncated version of that text.)\u00a0Prince writes,<\/p>\n

“I know [Dylan] paints on the road. In hotel rooms. And there are a lot of hotel rooms \u2014 he goes all over the world. . . .\u00a0When you\u2019re painting a whole scene, whether it\u2019s a portrait or a boat going up the canal or a view outside your hotel window and you\u2019re trying to get the trees to fuse into a path a man is walking on \u2026 it takes something that\u2019s instinctive instead of learned. . . .\u00a0The paintings that Dylan showed me out in\u00a0L.A.\u00a0were paintings from his travels in Asia. Some of them looked too big for him to have painted them while he was there, so maybe he had done them from memory or a photograph or a sketch or a drawing.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, there’s some coy hinting here re the use of photographs, but hardly enough to offset those assertions about “visual journal,” “painting from real life,” “paintings\u00a0from his travels in Asia,”\u00a0and other contrary indications. Given the contradictions, I can\u00a0understand how those conflicting utterances have created a controversy. And it certainly doesn’t help when someone like Johanna Parker, a moderator for the Bob Dylan fan page\u00a0Expecting Rain<\/a>, makes statements along these lines:<\/p>\n

“I consider Mr. Dylan a well-read man who chooses the subjects for his art carefully. I am not sure why he doesn’t credit his sources. Sometimes I think he is playing with his admirers and critics and tests both their loyalty and their investigative skills. I think he copies with a wink and a smile at his audience. He knows he will be found out.” (Quoted in\u00a0“Controversy Grows Over Bob Dylan’s Paintings at the Gagosian,”<\/a>\u00a0by Marlon Bishop,\u00a0September 29, 2011, at the WNYC Culture website.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"BobI consider this little more than mealy-mouthed bullshit. This isn’t a matter of hiding fragments of public-domain children’s rhymes inside his songs like a trail of breadcrumbs, as Dylan did in his 1990 album\u00a0Under the Red Sky<\/em>. Following these clues doesn’t enrich one’s understanding of the acts of either painting or photographing, or add layers of nuance to the paintings.<\/p>\n

Nor is it a matter of “Open up yer eyes an’ ears an’ yer influenced an’ there’s nothing you can do about it,” as Dylan wrote in “My Life in a Stolen Moment,”\u00a0a short and semi-fictionalized autobiography he published in 1962. Dylan has identified himself as a “conscious artist”; for such a person, knowingly incorporating aspects of someone else’s work as the complex infrastructure for a carefully painted canvas constitutes a deliberate choice, not some osmotic process.<\/p>\n

What bothers me about this \u2014 the only thing that bothers me, in fact, from Dylan’s end \u2014 is the lack of straightforwardness. “To live outside the law you must be honest,” Dylan wrote in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” almost half a century ago. I don’t understand this game, but I don’t find it enjoyable or instructive in any way, and I don’t consider it honest. Dylan’s had his ups and downs as an artist, so there’s work of his I don’t hold in high regard; but as a public figure he’s rarely disappointed me.<\/p>\n

If you read his published interviews, his liner notes for his own and other people’s albums, his autobiography\u00a0Chronicles: Volume One<\/em>, and take into account the hundreds of songs by others he’s included in his own performances and recordings, you’ll find him giving credit and paying homage to countless figures in the creative arts on whose work he’s drawn for inspiration. He’s done that voluntarily, and (in my opinion) forthrightly and generously. Which make his\u00a0lack of candor in this situation all the more disturbing; it’s beneath him, an untypical act of bad faith.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

\"ArtInfo<\/p>\n

Yet there are aspects of the debate over this matter that perturb me for other reasons.\u00a0The discussion of Dylan’s method has its peculiarities, among them the fact that much of the commentary, pro and con, comes from Dylan fans and scholars who know little or nothing about common practices in the visual arts, and the bulk of the remainder comes from art writers who know little or nothing about common practices in music.<\/p>\n

Consider, for example, the distinctly vindictive tone manifested in\u00a0Ann Binlot’s September 27, 2011, article for ArtInfo,\u00a0“Did Bob Dylan Rip Off Classic Photos for His Gagosian Show? See the Evidence”<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Time and time again folk rock legend Bob Dylan has blatantly borrowed for his lyrics. Christie’s auction house acknowledged in 2009 that a handwritten Dylan poem that was up for sale really consisted of words from a song by country crooner Hank Snow. Director Martin Scorsese showed in his 2005 documentary,\u00a0<\/em>No Direction Home, how Dylan stole the line ‘Go away from my window…’ \u2014 the immortal opener of his 1964 song ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ \u2014 from singer\u00a0John Jacob Niles.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, true, the 15-year-old\u00a0Bobby Zimmerman signed his name to and submitted for publication<\/a>\u00a0(in a summer-camp souvenir journal) the lyrics of a mawkish C&W “the day my dog Tippy died” ditty by Snow \u2014 a verse so bathetic that I suspect Dylan proposed it as his own either out of adolescent prankishness or as a ploy to impress girls. Someone else preserved this bit of Dylan juvenilia and put it up for auction; Dylan wasn’t claiming the lyric, or even\u00a0the manuscript<\/a>, as his own in ’09. Hardly the early warning signals of a future career fueled by IP theft, as Binlot implies.<\/p>\n

And yes, “Go ‘Way From My Window” was a staple in the folk-music revival of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Joan Baez, one of Dylan’s paramours, had it in her\u00a0repertoire, and recorded it as well<\/a>. (Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0notes that “The theme of the song is so common in the UK, USA and Canada that the phrase ‘Night-visiting song’ has been coined to cover all possible versions.”)\u00a0Dylan didn’t need to “source” that phrase in any way; his audience\u00a0would recognize\u00a0the reference to Niles automatically.<\/p>\n

Dylan’s ironic intent in this repurposing of that phrase couldn’t be more clear; where the Niles song is a generic, maudlin, one-size-fits-all “leave me alone, you who broke my heart” plea, Dylan’s is an itemized, merciless, surgical dissection of and dismissal of a lover \u2014 and a wry, alternative take on the entire “night-visiting song” genre.<\/p>\n

\"John

John Jacob Niles, “My Precarious Life in the Public Domain,” album cover<\/p><\/div>\n

Here’s Niles on the origins of his composition<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“In 1908 my father had in his employ a Negro ditch-digger known as Objerall Jacket. As he dug, he sang, “Go way from my window, go way from my door” \u2014 just those words, over and over again, on two notes. Working beside Jacket all day (I was sixteen at the time), I decided that something had to be done. The results were a four-verse song dedicated to a blue-eyes, blond girl, who didn’t think much of my efforts. . . .”<\/em><\/p>\n

So if Dylan “stole” that phrase from Niles, Niles “stole” it (plus a second phrase) from Jacket, who, most likely, didn’t make it up but recalled it from a song he’d heard, written by someone whose name we’ll never know. Which is how vernacular music got transmitted, verbal phrases and even whole verses, musical phrases and even whole melodies. It’s no less true in jazz, another form that shaped Dylan’s work; quotation and pastiche play a central role in jazz improvisation. Common practice, in short, accepted by all who work within those traditions. (As I write this, I’m listening to\u00a0Gillian Welch’s “I Dream A Highway,” which includes the line “Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand.” Straight out of “John Henry.” Should we wax indignant over that “theft” also?)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Nor is that process of compositional borrowing, reworking, and incorporating unique to folk music. The American composers Charles Ives and Aaron Copland frequently used folk and popular-song motifs in their compositions. Igor\u00a0Stravinsky built his ballet “Petroushka” out of a pastiche of eastern European folk songs and dances, organ-grinder tunes, and such. Erik Satie “sampled”\u00a0other contemporary composers, Gregorian chant, and\u00a0assorted ethnological recordings for fragments that he reworked and combined. The instances in classical music are countless. Rarely have such composers felt it obligatory, or even worthwhile, to footnote their sources, leaving that to musicologists. And rarely have critics or audiences felt cheated by such reinterpretations of existing materials.<\/p>\n

Thus the comments on Dylan’s musical practice by art writers who (like Binlot) have\u00a0clearly failed to do anything remotely resembling elementary research before issuing uninformed, irresponsible attacks on Dylan’s musical practice in the guise of news stories have embarrassed the profession. They’ve also confused the issues related to Dylan’s methods as a painter, rather than contributing to their clarification.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

For an index of links to all posts related to this story,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you read his published interviews, his liner notes for his own and other people’s albums, his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, and take into account the hundreds of songs by others he’s included in his own performances and recordings, you’ll find him giving credit and paying homage to countless figures in the creative arts on whose work he’s drawn for inspiration. He’s done that voluntarily, and (in my opinion) forthrightly and generously. Which make his lack of candor in this situation all the more disturbing; it’s beneath him, an untypical act of bad faith. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15],"tags":[76,201,260,389,419,449],"class_list":["post-8966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectual-property-2","category-news-commentary","tag-bob-dylan","tag-gagosian-gallery","tag-john-elderfield","tag-paintings","tag-photographs","tag-richard-prince","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}