Haunted by a horse
May. 4th, 2008 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI was haunted on my trip to Denmark. Not by the ghost of a murdered king on the ramparts of Elsinore, but by some of the most mournful air conditioning systems I've ever heard. The bathroom in my room at the Cabin Hotel in Aarhus was filled with spine-tinglingly creepy sighing, as if a spirit were trapped under the shower drain. Later, the same spook seemed to follow me on the train to Fredericia.
Danish TV is already creepy enough, filled with the subtitled ghosts of old 80s American TV shows. I sought something more specifically Danish at the reconstructed village called Den Gamle By (The Old Town) and in the Aarhus art gallery, where I found the windswept 1930s canvases of Jens Sondergaard and Nils Lergaard satisfying, in a harrowing, windswept way. But the spookiest, most fascinating thing was the song that accompanied a 1970 Super 8 film of a horse being sacrificed out on the pack ice. I got obsessed with the mourning song about the horse, returning time and again to try and record bits of its strange open chords, its mournful shamanic singing, part Nico, part Bjork. And of course the wind, keening in the background.
Fluxus seems to have had tentacles everywhere -- the Danish wing was represented by people like Bjorn Norgaard, Lene Adler Petersen -- who made the horse film -- and the composer Henning Christiansen (right) who made the song that accompanies it. They came to Scotland with Joseph Beuys in the early 70s, invited by Richard Demarco, and you can hear the results (someone -- possibly Beuys himself -- tuning a piano in the courtyard of the Edinburgh Art College, for instance) on the Henning Christiansen page at Ubu.com. There's nothing quite like the Horse Song there, though perhaps Abschiedssymphonie comes closest; field recordings and vocal gestures mixed with piano composition and primitive scratching noises.
The Fluxus Danes killed a horse out on the ice partly as a protest against the pointless human sacrifice then going on in Vietnam, partly to "comment on the way in which museums accumulated our common heritage". You can actually see clips of the Super 8 film "Hesteofringen" -- warning: it's rather disturbing -- here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I've made an mp3 of the song so that it can haunt you as it now haunts me:
The Horse Sacrifice, Henning Christiansen (stereo mp3 file)
I'd never heard of Henning Christiansen before, but you can read about him on this page -- how he attended the Darmstadt summer school in 1962, then hooked up with George Maciunas' crew in Wiesbaden and joined Fluxus, "embracing a multitude of disciplines verging on the political, including performance, painting and making music with stones, buckets of water, glass bowls, sheep, birds and tape delay". And here's a glimpse of a 2007 show he mounted. He's an old troll now with green ears, but still making music more haunting than the Danish air conditioning.
As for the horse, its spirit lives on; we don't need to look far to find new pointless wars for the poor beast to symbolize.
Danish TV is already creepy enough, filled with the subtitled ghosts of old 80s American TV shows. I sought something more specifically Danish at the reconstructed village called Den Gamle By (The Old Town) and in the Aarhus art gallery, where I found the windswept 1930s canvases of Jens Sondergaard and Nils Lergaard satisfying, in a harrowing, windswept way. But the spookiest, most fascinating thing was the song that accompanied a 1970 Super 8 film of a horse being sacrificed out on the pack ice. I got obsessed with the mourning song about the horse, returning time and again to try and record bits of its strange open chords, its mournful shamanic singing, part Nico, part Bjork. And of course the wind, keening in the background.
Fluxus seems to have had tentacles everywhere -- the Danish wing was represented by people like Bjorn Norgaard, Lene Adler Petersen -- who made the horse film -- and the composer Henning Christiansen (right) who made the song that accompanies it. They came to Scotland with Joseph Beuys in the early 70s, invited by Richard Demarco, and you can hear the results (someone -- possibly Beuys himself -- tuning a piano in the courtyard of the Edinburgh Art College, for instance) on the Henning Christiansen page at Ubu.com. There's nothing quite like the Horse Song there, though perhaps Abschiedssymphonie comes closest; field recordings and vocal gestures mixed with piano composition and primitive scratching noises.The Fluxus Danes killed a horse out on the ice partly as a protest against the pointless human sacrifice then going on in Vietnam, partly to "comment on the way in which museums accumulated our common heritage". You can actually see clips of the Super 8 film "Hesteofringen" -- warning: it's rather disturbing -- here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I've made an mp3 of the song so that it can haunt you as it now haunts me:
The Horse Sacrifice, Henning Christiansen (stereo mp3 file)
I'd never heard of Henning Christiansen before, but you can read about him on this page -- how he attended the Darmstadt summer school in 1962, then hooked up with George Maciunas' crew in Wiesbaden and joined Fluxus, "embracing a multitude of disciplines verging on the political, including performance, painting and making music with stones, buckets of water, glass bowls, sheep, birds and tape delay". And here's a glimpse of a 2007 show he mounted. He's an old troll now with green ears, but still making music more haunting than the Danish air conditioning.
As for the horse, its spirit lives on; we don't need to look far to find new pointless wars for the poor beast to symbolize.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 07:57 am (UTC)No mention of a last name, just one huge HAMLET and some specifics of the house. And that is the Hamlet pictured selling the house in my artistic representation! You could say he haunted me every time I went home I guess.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 07:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 08:13 am (UTC)OH YOU TWIST IT AND TURN IT
Date: 2008-05-04 08:40 am (UTC)And when you did, did you twist it and turn it, twist it and burn it, slice it and burn it, and did you CRUCIFY HIS HEART??!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 09:22 am (UTC)I think what disturbs me about this is the literalness of it, for art to work it seems that there should always be an element of transmutation. This just feels like lazy thinking.
Prefer his green ear. A homage to Van Gogh I'll bet.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 09:57 am (UTC)I don't think it's literal at all. Vietnam protest is only one of the putative themes, remember -- another is the museumification of ritual. And this action fits into the Joseph Beuys mode of shamanism. I'd say it's also about Danishness, about ancient and modern ways of being, about grief and collusion and that place where they meet, about rural and folk ways of life and animal husbandry (when our relationship with animals wasn't a sentimental one). There are obvious overlaps with what the Viennese Actionists were doing at the time too.
I think killing the horse was horrible, but there's no doubt that the song wouldn't haunt me quite the way it does if the animal hadn't died. Needless to say I'm against sacrifice and in favour of kindness to animals. But don't forget that we live in a culture not only posited on a religion based on a sacrifice -- "he died so that we may have eternal life" etc -- but in a world where vaguely-seen others are continually being sacrificed for our economic comfort. Not to mention that we all die as a kind of biological sacrifice to our children, if we have them. Sacrifice is still very much with us.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 10:22 am (UTC)It's all personal, of course - the scary thing about all this is how well the hoary old cliché "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like" runs through cultural dialogue like marrow through bone. If it works for you then fine. It doesn't for me. I'd suspect that a song by you on the subject of all this would prove more interesting to me than the subject itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 09:50 am (UTC)Near my house there's an artist who put up, city-funded, a playful bronze sculpture and he's STILL taking nothing but heat from people because the same shot a dog in the 1970s and filmed it, also as an "art project" to protest the vietnam war. And he repeatedly apologized, but a lot of people still hate his guts. At least he realized he was an idiot at the time.
In general though, I have this to say: you know what, antiwar liberal pacifist artists, I'm on your side, just, this shit doesn't help. When you start killing animals for peace protests something has gone very wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 03:24 pm (UTC)Poor horse.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 09:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 10:48 am (UTC)Iraq needs a horse.
I'm off to email Kerry Catona to see if she'll be the "horse" for this generation. I'll mutter something about £10,000 and a front cover shot for Ok!.
I'll keep you posted.
They shoot celebrities, don't they?
Date: 2008-05-04 11:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 11:09 am (UTC)And the sacrifice of this horse in Denmark had little to do with Vietnam, I would wager, and more to do with the longing for some pagan masculine bonding through death ... oh wait thats Vietnam too, freaky ..
have a look:
The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (http://www.caterina.net/paw/archives/000213.html)
by Robert Bly
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 05:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 06:32 pm (UTC)Haunted by a horse
Date: 2008-05-04 12:35 pm (UTC)Re: Haunted by a horse
Date: 2008-05-04 12:45 pm (UTC)tv
Date: 2008-05-04 12:56 pm (UTC)frou frou
Date: 2008-05-04 03:25 pm (UTC)The panes flash, tremble with your ghostly passage
Through them, an x-ray sheerness billowing, and I have risen
But cannot speak, remembering only that one was meant
To rise and not to speak. Young storm, this house is yours.
Let our eye darken, your rain come, the candle reeling
Deep in what still reflects control itself and me.
Daybreak's great gray rust-veined irises humble and proud
Along your path will have laid their foreheads in the dust.
-Merrill
There was a youtube of the Frantisek Zapasy film you saw in Prague that showed a white horse stuck in the mud in an open field, but I can't find it anymore :(
Re: frou frou
Date: 2008-05-04 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 03:41 pm (UTC)Thank you,
Ria.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 04:54 pm (UTC)Oh my God, I didn't know any photos of me that long ago existed!
I think this is probably taken in 1988. I'm wearing my MA1 bomber jacket and playing a borrowed or rented guitar. I think it's a London pub, but I have no idea which one.
SKINNER?
Date: 2008-05-04 05:11 pm (UTC)Lowden or nothing.
Although nice touch matching your belt and the head of the guitar PERFECTLY.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-04 08:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-05 02:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-05 02:36 am (UTC)