Kafka’s hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art – crowds come to watch him in his age, standing guard to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to live performances, there’s the question of who is going to comprise the group, joining Sterling Smith (or, as he is known to concert bookers, the Representative from Corwood, that being his record label, which releases Jandek recordings) – or whether, indeed, anyone will join him at all; the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of the performance, with a runthrough of the set with participating musicians, all of whom are given a considerable say in the direction of the music) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the studio albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on, even as there is also a large element of improvisation in the performances. But in another sense, there seems to be no choice at all: follow the lyrics – especially those on the thematically linked albums that have appeared since the turn of the millennium, which trace, among other things, the ups and downs of a love affair, and the song-suites that have comprised some recent live performances – and it is clear, I think, that they have at their heart, a man in extremity, a man who performs because he falls short of the ordinary happiness most of us take for granted. He searches, for the most part in vain, for something to eat, but finds nothing. Nothing, that is, except perhaps performance itself, and the hope that I think is implicit to finding and addressing an audience.
Performing live, Smith’s face (the Representative’s) is almost always blank. It’s not a mask, but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project anything at all, but only because there’s nothing to there; because, with rare lapses, it remains disarmingly still, subtracted from expression. Yet, for all that, he is an intensely physical player. We can watch him shuffle and dip as he plays his guitar – we can watch his careful enunciation of his lyrics as he leans into the microphone, stretching his words, moaning them, or letting them rise into a despondent wail, but the face, half hidden by a fedora, is without expression and his thin, ageless body is always hidden in black. We can expect no stage banter – no ‘thank you’ for applause; when his guitar string breaks onstage during his performance at Newcastle, he waits, head down and silent for three long minutes until another guitar is brought to him from backstage. Indeed, he never even glances out into the audience or acknowledges its presence. He might as well, notes the observer of a solo piano and vocal performance in Hasselt, Belgium, be playing in an empty bar.
And yet, for all that, he will sometimes reference the live situation in his lyrics. ‘I made a mistake coming here today’, he sings in London at the beginning of a solo guitar/vocal gig. And he sings, ‘I wore a scarf in Denmark/ just like I said I would’, at a performance in Aarhus, Denmark, and refers to ‘the ticket that exploded’ at a gig that was part of a festival celebrating the work of William Burroughs in Amsterdam. It works another way too – as Barry Esson, Jandek’s erstwhile promoter and MC, announced at a gig rescheduled in Brooklyn after Hurricane Katrina prevented a performance, ‘the emotion behind this event is in tribute to New Orleans’. Lyrics are written to reflect the location and the occasion of the gig, even if, at the same time, as was clear to audiences at Camber Sands and Bristol in his UK dates in late 2005, he would flip almost randomly the pages of the book he brought with him on tour (resting, at the first of these gigs, on an improvised keyboard stand and a kitchen tray) to pick out phrases to sing.
There are moments when the stage persona, for a moment, breaks – when, for example, someone calls out between songs in Chicago, in 2006, ‘Where have you been man?’, eliciting a rare, quickly suppressed smile from the Representative, or, on another occasion, he asks into his microphone, ‘is this thing on?’ But almost all accounts of seeing Jandek live emphasise the ghostly intangibility of the performer (he’s called a ‘cowboy ghost’ according to a review of the Aarhus gig), and the way the Representative seems to drift on and off the stage (even, on one occasion, emerging with his band from a trap door in the floor). The distance from his audience that Smith carefully maintains is not part of the cultivation of mystique; I think it is an attempt to honour, rather, the music itself – to preserve it in its distance and its mystery.
Even Jandek’s disparagers honour this distance, intentionally or otherwise. For all his horror at the music, Irwin Chusid‘s first response to Jandek’s debut Ready for the House, passed to him by a radio station colleague in 1980, was to wonder at the fact that someone had gone to the effort of releasing it at all. On an interview included as an extra on the Jandek on Corwood DVD, he remembers being stunned by the ‘amusicality’ of the album, by its ‘sheer emptiness’; ‘I’d never heard anything that was so naked’ – but what really mystifies him is the effort its maker had gone to to record material, get it pressed and then distributed. Why bother at all? ‘It could be worst record ever released[….] It could also be the greatest record ever released. I can’t figure it out …’, wrote Chusid to the artist in 1980. He decides, of course, in favour of the former – which fails, for him, to fall into the category of ‘so bad, it’s good’ that he celebrates in his rag-bag of a book Songs in the Key of X. It is really only the myth of Jandek – recycled, clichéd accounts of an instrumentally incompetent recluse concerned for unfathomable reasons to move some of the albums he has had pressed – that concerns him.
The lure of such a myth is undeniable. For many years, all that was known of the man behind Jandek was the record sleeves, many of which (as we can now be sure) depict Smith himself, the Representative, at various ages in a variety of situations, sometimes making use of image-altering software. For Richard Unterberger, the album cover photographs show ‘all the attention to framing and focus of the do-it-yourself stalls at Woolworth’s’ – but their artlessness is their merit, being inseparable from the recordings they sleeve. There is nothing affected about them, nothing ironical or distancing – they simply are, and uncannily so. The blank, defiant face of Six and Six matches perfectly this hard, anaesthetised recording – but if the smiling man in a cardigan in front of a country barn seems the very contrary of the despairing intoner of Worthless Recluse (an acapella recording notable for the particular extremity it reaches on some of the pieces), this doesn’t matter. Is it a holiday snap? A record of a visit to a relative in the countryside? Its incongruity seems exactly the point: an ordinary man created these songs – a man with a past like anyone else. What are we to make of Smith apparently becoming a Sufi on the covers of Raining Down Diamonds and Khartoum? Is it an oblique religious or political commentary, following 9/11 (the albums were released in 2005, but were perhaps recorded earlier …) … the sign, perhaps, that all religions are one, and that Smith is encouraging us to reach a hand to the Islamic world in fidelity and friendship? Perhaps the cover photographs mean nothing at all; perhaps they mean everything. ‘Explanations are, in fact, only a moment in the tradition of the inexplicable’, writes Agamben, ‘they are the moment, to be precise, which keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained’.
More recently, the sleeves have not always pictured Smith – they are what appear to be holiday snaps from Cork, the Dingle penninsula in Ireland and Chester, in Northwest England, and, most recently, a series of rural scenes. What are to read into all this? Everything – since the space is blank and will admit of an infinite variety of transferences – and nothing, since it is blank and remains so. Perhaps, as Smith said to Katy Vine about his music and his relation to Jandek, ‘there’s nothing to get’; perhaps this ‘nothing’ is the correlate of the man who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek: it is Smith himself, or rather it is a hungry absence in the space of Smith, who can find nothing he wants to eat.
The outsider artist, as Chusid and Unterberger use this term, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting, but merely gets on with it; it issues from him with perfect ingenuousness. He simply does it – and it is what makes him what he is; the outsider works by instinct, perhaps in a manner more direct and naive than others, and can be admired (or mocked) for this reason. Like the man who builds a palace from tin cans in his backyard, his work would be the monument to a magnificent eccentricity; the wonder is that it exists at all. It can be admired (he does everything on his own terms), or reviled (no one else would release his music) – what matters is that dogged directness that is so naive, so simplistic, so untrained it’s significant as a phenomenon.
Perhaps this rather patronising category does capture something important about Jandek’s oeuvre – its tenacity, its seeming perversity (quote) bespeak a musical vision that can seem a simple incompetence. Yet at its best, on albums like I Threw You Away from the recent run of studio albums, or the early Chair Beside a Window, or a difficult album like Put My Dream On This Planet, this music can be said to belong to the outside only in the sense that it maintains an extremity almost unparalleled within the singer/songwriter idiom. This is what commentators like Chusid even as they disparage the music: holding itself at its distance and its reserve, it is entirely apart.
Heidegger writes that the origin of the work of art is to be considered apart from both artist and artwork. It is a spring – an Ursprung – that wells up in what he calls the working of the work of art, the way it struggles into existence. The moment of inspiration is blind in some vital sense; it belongs outside the artist. Indeed, in the philosophy of art, it was always thus – Plato fears the poet for precisely this reason: he or she may be divinely inspired, but inspiration is a form of possession or madness (see the Apology, the Ion and the Meno). In the Phaedrus, we find a more nuanced account of the dangers of lyric poetry as it glorifies the deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. ‘[I]f any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill (techne) alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brough to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found’. Skill, technique is not sufficient; one has to be inspired in order to be a good poet. But when inspiration is absent? The poet is a mere imitator, concerned with mimesis alone.
In the case of Jandek, technique – the received account of technique – is precisely what is wagered in the experience of inspiration. Why do musicians suppose he cannot play or sing? Because they are in thrall to a music of imitation, of tonality, of conventional song structures and playing styles. One has to listen to Jandek with another ear – or rather, listening to the music co-creates the ear of the one who listens. Here is something new; a new kind of playing, a new kind of singing, even as it borrows from established forms, even as Smith remains a kind of singer-songwriter: it is an inspired art insofar as overruns mere technical proficiency. But to listen with this new ear – to be exposed to the dangerous extremity of divine madness – isn’t this precisely the danger? Plato would have expelled all the poets from his ideal city, except for those lyric poets whose work had been appropriately purified, bearing only on the relationship between gods and human beings, performed in a standardised rhythm and mode. More admirable than those who dismiss Jandek for incompetence – for a perceived lack of instrumental and vocal prowess, or (in a more recent turn) for the apparent shortcomings in his improvisational competency – are those who are afraid for themselves in the face of such music – who meets its hunger with an unassuaged hunger of their own.
On The Ruins of Adventure (as I write, the most recent studio album) – lumbering, staggering along, this is a dazed music, a music concussed – the fretless bass accompanies aimlessly a part-sung, part-spoken vocalising marked by despondency and abyssal despair. ‘It’s toooooo bleak’ – the ‘to’ howled and stretched. ‘Embrace the greeey of reality …’ The song does not fall from the Muses, but is a thickening of the earth – a fetid swamp, or the earth moving, swarming with mosquitoes, in solifluction. Without melody or regular rhythm – without the pulse of a musical groove, it is sludgy and inert – yet it moves nonetheless; it surges forward. But what moves? What lurches lifelessly from track to track?
Heidegger calls earth that materiality foregrounded in the work of art – in this case, lumpen bass picking and a vocalising thick with despair that wanders without settling on particular pitches. This is his name, too, for the reserve that looms around us in our relation to the world (the world become useless, things as they obtrude from the purposes by which we understand them). The Ursprung of the artwork, its origin, says Heidegger, shows how earth is in perpetual struggle with the ‘world’ of intelligibility and meaning. Explanations cannot exhaust the inexplicable: perhaps there is a way of speaking of Jandek’s art that keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained – that allows earth to resound in the torpor of his voice or the sludgy waddling of the bass. A way, then of speaking its inspired necessity as it remains outside mere technical proficiency and the imitation of existing forms.
It is Smith’s peculiar vocation to dramatise the struggle between a despair too overwhelming to permit of a beginning, of its doubling into song, and the strength, precisely to sing, to perform. Jandek remains in the neither-nor, the neutrality of this perpetually thwarted commencement. It is necessary to sing, to play – but it is just as necessary to interrupt them, to mark the performance with its own impossibility. ‘I made a mistake coming here today’ – to begin at all is a mistake; the mistake is the art, or what blossoms into art. But the flower fades straightaway; the song empties and becomes a husk. What else is performance but a sham?
The hunger artist fasts because he can find nothing to eat. Could Smith sing or play otherwise? Perhaps something changes with live performance, in which he seems to be able to take a greater distance with respect to this impossibility than previously. Manhattan Tuesday, The Afternoon of Insensitivity, which sees the Representative playing keyboards with an organ setting, accompanied by, among others, Loren Connors, constructs a sombre sound-world that is of a piece with Miles Davis’s ‘He Loved Him Madly’, not only participates in despair, performing it, trudging through it, but muses explicitly on its source in the performer’s own life. ‘It seems I’ve been depressed all my life …’
On Glasgow Monday, The Cell, Smith sings his way – wispily, breathily, in a speech-song entirely new in his work – to a kind of resolution; it seems enough to ask questions (‘What do I have?’), to let them resound. What matters is that this questioning is shared – that the audience, asked by Barry Esson to reserve their applause to the end of the song suite, shelters the inexplicable along with him. Does he find a kind of consolation thereby, a lightening of despair, when it is shared, addressed to others? I think here of the song ‘I Love You’ from Brooklyn Wednesday – does this song give despair (Smith’s, and that unleashed by Hurricane Katrina) a direction, thereby lifting it from itself, transmuting its substance? Perhaps this lightening was always present in Jandek’s music – perhaps it was there from the first, and this as why, to answer Chusid’s question, Smith went to the trouble of recording, pressing and trying to distribute 1000 copies of Ready for the House.
Listening to the small portion of the live performances that have been released by Corwood, and dreaming of releases to come, one might wonder whether the hunger artist has found something to eat. In both East and West, the ghost is often thought of as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost ‘hungry’ since it is still attached to the world. Has the Representative from Corwood, who looks, as so many have commented, exactly like a ghost, found something to attach him? But I think of another hunger artist – the starving novelist-to-be of Hamsun’s novel, who keeps a stone in his mouth to satiate his hunger. Driven to extremity, one day he bits down on that stone as though it were a piece of bread. And I wonder whether Jandek itself is Smith’s way to bite down on the stone he’s been turning for decades in his mouth, false succour. False, but also true, for how else to keep fidelity with the extremity in which he lives?
Lars Iyer's Blog 