Harry’s Place Arts

A guest post by Cornelis Gijsbrechts

 
gwilym 11 January, 2009, 1:20 pm
 
There are many good things to be said for Austria, for example last night’s amazing 7 hour performance of Die Rosenkriege at Vienna’s Burgtheater was a really good thing.
 
Yes, thanks for this. For a moment I thought you were talking about the opera Der Rosenkavalier. This has reminded me of the re:search I carried out for The Vermeer Killerswhich included the experiment of matching up music or noise to Vermeer’s ‘Art of Painting’ - what sort of noise would allow the painting to ‘breathe’?
 
I start with the orgasmic caterwaulling of Led Zepplin’s Dazed and Confused (the 18 mins 36 secs version of the BBC John Peel Sessions). Moving quickly onto Nirvana Unplugged’s Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam and a line from the subsequent track, ‘face to face with the Man Who Sold the World’ - there is a sense that Vermeer has entered into a Faustian pact with his art of painting. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds provide some pathos on their The Murder Ballards, particularly its concluding track Death is not the end - ‘just remember, death is not the end, not the end.’
 
And on to The Velvet Undergound’s White Heat/White Light - the 17 mins 27 secs longSister Ray, a maelstrom of noise which plateaus out after about sixteen minutes: the trick here is to match the trance-like state induced by the heavily amplified feed-back with the painting in front of you. 
 
Finally, the immortal Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters from Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer - I do not remember the words to their signature song (the words are more or less inaudible), but it goes something like ‘Shubi dooby do’ and so on.
 
In fact, thinking about it, Vermeer’s painting is an appropriate precursor text to Ferrara’s film, in that both painting and film question the status of art and self-portraiture, setting loose a host of reflections.