Joseph Frank, the "Primitivism" of Modernism, and Mid-Aughts Indie Music

[The cover art to Animal Collective's 2005 album Feels, which mixture of the abstract and primitive will prove salient, as I hope to soon prove]

 

An essay that has surprisingly been on my mind lately is Spatial Form in Modern Literature, an influential 1945 study by critic Joseph Frank that was on my Comps reading list last year.  In it, Frank posits that so-called "primitive" art arises in civilizations not from any lack of skill or development, but from times of great turmoil.  "Modern" art, for Frank, arises when mankind does not feel in tune with the universe, and there thus arises a need to impose some sort of spatial order upon the chaos, to create realms of pure abstraction wherein the artist can escape the caprices of nature and horrors of modernity, by moving instead into some shapeless, formless Platonic ideal that transcends history.

This thesis is Frank's attempt to account for how the European art world went from producing painitngs of such incredible detail and hyper-realism as this:

 Or this:

Or this:

To then in the early 20th century abruptly start painting far more like this:

 Or this:

Or this:

 Or this:

We also in the 20th century go from writing poetry more or less like this:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art far more lovely and temperate
 Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date"

To something more like this:

"Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
 Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata."

A common reading for this shift is simply that, in the ever increasing velocity of our modern age with its emphasis on novelty and convenience above all else, that our many artists likewise abandoned the hard work of technique and skill, to instead embrace the cheap and easy shock of splattered paint in their mad dash to be the next "new thing."  That aspect of modernity may or may not be an influence as well, but Joseph Frank suspects that something far more profound is occurring here.

Basically, Frank is critiquing the lazy evolutionary model wherein art supposedly progresses from cave etchings, to hieroglyphs, to pictograms, to portraits, to photo-realism; such a reading claims that anything other than the hyper-detail of 18th century portraits is more "primitive," that any turn towards abstraction is a step backwards, a sign of decadence.   Actually, argues Frank, abstraction and realism have nothing to do with a civilization's relative "development," and everything to do with that civilization's relationship with the Universe.  For those realistic paintings, so elegant, so balanced according to the golden mean, were a sign that the artists felt in tune with the universe, that there was a place for everything and everything was in its place, that they lived in a world of absolute order, beginning with an immutable God above all, atop a descending hierarchy of chosen Kings, Dukes, Lords, Barons, Counts, Yeomen, and Peasants, all residing in a carefully ordered Universe designed and run by a Great Clockmaker of elegant rationality.

Such, needless to say, is no longer the Universe we feel that we live in.

1899 is when Freud's On the Interpretation of Dreams firmly established that we are not whole beings, that there is a split between our conscious and unconscious selves, that we are an irreconcilable mess of contradictory impulses and repressions; Nietzsche's death in 1900 precipitated the mass-readings of his works, which firmly established in the Western mind that the existence of God is no longer a given, and religion has been on the defensive ever since then; 1905 is when Einstein publishes his Theory of General Relativity, which blows up the idea that the Universe is carefully ordered at all, that in fact it is a far more bizarre place than we ever thought; and of course the First World War destroyed the idea that there was anything intrinsically superior, morally or ethically, about Western Civilization at all.

Unsurprisingly then, argues Frank, that amidst all this great upheaval, wherein the Universe itself feels unsettled and man knows no longer his place in the cosmos, art likewise turns towards great upheaval, towards the "Primitive," the simplified, the bold and the energetic and the percussive, in an attempt to cut through and beat back the chaos, and to recover a much more elemental expression of life and vitality amongst all the smothering modernity.

This has all been a long preamble to me reminiscing on the Indie Music I was listening to a decade ago, at the height of the Iraq War, in a post-9/11 world gone mad.  It's been the recent release of Painting With, Animal Collective's first new album in 4 years, that has put me in this reflective mood.

Animal Collective first rose to prominence within the Indie world shortly after the invasion of Iraq; their dazzling experimentation, sonic soundscapes, wild hollering, created new sounds that most of us had never even heard before.  There was just something so primal, so "primitive," to use Joseph Frank's word, about what they were doing.  Though there isn't a political bone in Animal Collective's body, I deeply suspect that their sound could only have arisen in response to the Bush administration, that could only found an audience and risen to prominence in such a time of turmoil. As Pitchfork recently put it more eloquently:

"Despite its futuristic sheen, Animal Collective's music has always evoked a primitive kind of purity. Early on they wore masks—a gesture that connected them not only to the lucid dreams of playtime but to traditions of shamanism and present-day Mardi Gras, where people hide their faces not to disguise their natures but reveal them.[...] Modern guys seeking a spiritual basement deep below the civilized self."

Joseph Frank himself could have written those words about any number of Modernist artists. 

And Animal Collective was hardly the outlier, but the rule: remember that this is the era of "Screamo-Emo"--not a genre I personally enjoyed, but whose primal screaming I did at least understand as catharsis in response to the violence of the era; it is when TV on the Radio released their first two albums, which likewise reveled in a certain primal disjointedness (singing "I was a lover/before this war..."); it is when the high, glistening polish of late-90s Boy Bands and of Nu-Metal (vestiges of yet another earlier era where we naively thought the world was orderly) gave way to Garage Rock, with the primal, simplistic beating of Meg White against Jack White's wailing vocals, or of the 2-piece Black Keys turning towards roots rock, or The Strokes or Interpol, self-consciously stripping down their sounds to a very 70s-style pre-punk simplicity; it is when Arcade Fire rose to popularity with a guy beating a drum and tambourine wildly on stage while the band cried along in the soaring chorus to "Wake Up!".

In all of these examples, any sort of pretense towards technical skill or complexity is eschewed in favor of the primal drum beat, the crying shout, bold strokes, tribal unison, and simple forms, because time is out of joint, the universe is in chaos, and, as Joseph Frank diagnoses it, the artists instinctively push back against the complexity as fiercely and primitively as they can.

And Animal Collective was right in the middle of all that chaos.  Go listen to the freak-folk of 2004's "Sung Tongs," or the beating pulse of 2005's "Feels," or the stripped-down ambient noise of 2003's "Campfire Songs."  For all their ambition and experimentation, there is just something childlike about them, in their sense of wonderment, their desire to try everything, to not be bounded by any preconceived notions of how things should be.  In Animal Collective we had the all-too-rare chance to see the world as though it were new, the perfect antidote to a mad world.

Which is why their new album has been a bit...disappointing.  Fun, yes, but nothing transcendent, nothing that escapes you away into Platonic realms of pure abstraction.  It no longer feels childlike, but rather, written for children--which is something different entirely.  It's as though they were producing songs for Yo Gabba Gabba, which, while not necessarily a bad thing, is not the same as writing as children. Granted, these guys are all now old enough to be Dads now, and besides, what band has ever sustained their creative streak over 16 years?  (Goodness, that's twice as long as the Beatles!).

But, like Joseph Frank, I suspect something more profound is going on here with Animal Collective than mere artistic burnout.

For Animal Collective arguably hit their high-point, critically, commercially, and artistically, with 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion.  At the risk of hyperbole, it is easily one of the most gorgeous albums of the past 10 years.  Here, they weren't just experimenting for its own sake anymore, but had set out to make something stunningly beautiful with their sonic palate, and succeeded beyond dreams.  It was the moment when all their sounds clicked, and justified all their sonic experiments since 2000.

But why did this album happen in 2009?  Did it just take them that long for their sound to "evolve"?  Again, let us break ourselves of that lazy evolutionary model, and instead remember that most these Indie Bands are leftish by nature, and that 2009 was the inauguration of Barack Obama, the reclamation of the House and Senate for the Democrats, the formal repudiation of the entire Bush Administration and winding down of the Iraq War.  For the Lefties at least, it was a moment of great cosmic convergence, a sense that the Universe made sense again.  For that one brief shining moment, we finally felt in tune with the cosmos (not for naught was Merriweather's penultimate track "No More Running").  And for me at least, Merriweather Post Pavilion was the soundtrack for that moment.

Of course it didn't--couldn't--last; partisan ranker quickly reasserted itself.  But nevertheless the shift into the Obama administration still threw off the cathartic "primitivism" of Bush-era Indie Rock.  The White Stripes broke up and Jack White got professional drummers for his solo career, and he hasn't sounded nearly as vital since; the Black Keys finally found mainstream success, but only after getting a full-sized back-up band to sound like everyone else; the Strokes and Interpol faded away; Emo became a punchline; Arcade Fire turned to disco; TV on the Radio's last 3 albums have increasingly sounded, well, like Pop albums (Nine Types of Light could've just been another nameless R&B record), cleansed of all the wild discordance that marked their first two discs.

This is relevant because there has been of late a movement in music criticism towards "Poptimism," wherein the sort of critics who once tried to out-do each other as to who could champion the most obscure band, have now come full circle, and now unironically sing the praises of Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Adele, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, etc, as the true musical innovators of our time, claiming that to deny their musical genius is but a shallow form of contrarian snobbery, if not outright misogyny and racism.  Suddenly, the critics we once sought to shame us away from the dull banality of pop music are now trying to shame us back towards it--but to be fair, if the Indie Bands just sound like Pop Bands now anyways, well then, why even bother turning from Pop in the first place?

Animal Collective for their part quickly backed away from Pop melodies after Merriweather, but...it just hasn't been the same.  Their follow-up, 2012's Centipede Hz, was certainly a turn back towards dense musical collages and experimentation, sure, but it just felt so much more forced; there wasn't that same sense of joie de vivre, of childlike wonder.  The spell had been broken.  And now Painting With is a step back towards the Poppier, to be just like everyone else, a sort of sonic throwing in of the towel.  They illustrate an interesting conundrum for the Bush era Indie artist--if the Universe feels in tune again, just what is the Modernist artist supposed to do anymore?

Just wait, is all.

For we were swiftly reminded of what a disjointed Universe looks like, didn't we.   For we now have the explosive race riots in Ferguson, in Baltimore, the #blacklivesmatter movement, which in turn is met with viciousness by the rise of reactionary racists like Trump and Cruz in the Republican polls.  The similar rise of ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis signify that the legacy of the Iraq invasion is far from over.  As the Obama Administration draws to a close, even amidst our recovering economy, the Universe once again feels chaotic and disjointed.

Pay attention to the music soon coming from the Indie scene, is what I'm saying--I think a fresh wave of neo-Modern "Primitivists" are now on their way, and that the Poptimists will soon be left wondering why they ever let themselves think, even if briefly, that the Universe was ever so simply ordered in the first place.