Ghost Songs
‘Wood Cut’ by Mamma Andersson, courtesy David Zwirner Gallery, New York
The writer and environmental activist George Monbiot has declared that the concept of ‘green’ economic growth is vacuous at best, and that the only way to avoid environmental catastrophe is to consume less of everything. The living world, he says, is under sustained attack, and only a tiny proportion of the Earth’s land surface can now be considered ecologically intact. Damage to the environment is caused primarily by excessive economic activity; we are squandering too much of everything, and the world can’t bear it. Meanwhile, governments talk about increasing consumption, ‘unleashing our potential’ and ‘supercharging the economy’, but we have no hope of emerging from this crisis, Monbiot continues, unless there are dramatic changes to the way we live . Wealth must also be redistributed, but in order to sustain the welfare of the world we have to live simpler and less wasteful lives. Dreams of perpetual growth and increased wealth are illusions, and they block our awareness of the sufficiency that is already at hand; as a consequence, the world is being hollowed out. It is becoming ghostly.
In a recent exhibition, ‘The Lost Paradise’, the artist Mamma Andersson explored some of these issues, albeit obliquely. Her paintings have always been fairly traditional landscapes and interiors suffused with contemporary moods and uncertainties, both individual and collective, and those in ‘The Lost Paradise’ are no exception; indeed, as she has explained, they were deliberately intended to reflect some of the world’s current quandaries and dilemmas. Their dominant tone is one of melancholy depletion, and the key picture is perhaps the large ‘Wood Cut’, an image of a dead tree set in a grim and lifeless landscape, its colour meaty, its texture - rendered with oil sticks rather than with paint from a tube - coarse and unprepossessing. A similar mood is echoed in ‘Silent Dawn’, with leafless trees on the edge of a lake set against a wan and bitter sky, as well as in the gloomy ‘Pond’, a lonely view of blackened green trees and stale water, and - a little less intensely - in ‘Old Hat’, a painting of the gnarled bark of an ancient oak, which is also the focus of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay in the accompanying catalogue.
Thematically, another key image is ‘The Last Waltz’, an interior that appears to be set in an empty restaurant. Andersson has said that its source was an Eastern European theatre scene, and that the painting once showed a man dancing on the table among the empty wine bottles; now, however, it depicts the aftermath of a party - ‘a representation of our time and what we leave behind’. A similar sense of alienation and spent emotion is evident in another another interior painting, ‘Pull My Daisy’, a cinematic image of a couple in a domestic room, the woman facing away from her companion, who has a glass in his hand. Two other groups complete the show, the first being a series of horses and their female riders, all except one with their backs turned to the viewer, either situated in bleak terrain or set against backgrounds of noxious colours. ‘They are about a time’, says the artist, ‘when we lived in innocence with the future ahead of us, not behind us’. This idea is also taken up in the final images, the three versions of ‘The Lost Paradise’, which focus on women in knee-high boots, turned away and facing into nothingness, which Andersson has described as self-portraits. The women all wear curious gilets or jackets with solar emblems on their backs, as if, the artist once remarked, the sun has moved onto them from the sky. As in all of these paintings, the protagonists seem lost, caught - like wraiths - in temporal ambivalence.
The lyrics of ‘Dead Poplar’, on Cécile McLorin Salvant’s new album ‘Ghost Song’, inspired by a love letter written by Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe and somewhat reminiscent of the tone of ‘The Lost Paradise’, are characteristic of her eclectic approach to music. ‘I’m interested in disparate sources, time periods and techniques’, she has said. ‘I want my music and my art to feel like you’re opening someone’s diary – there’s an old ticket stub for something, a quote, an idea, a frustration, and a secret’. The album is a case in point, opening with a sensitive cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ending with an a capella version of the traditional folk song, ‘The Unquiet Grave’. ‘If you listen to it on a loop, you realise that the first song is connected to the last’, she has explained; ‘I wanted to start with somebody being haunted by the past, and to end with a living person haunting a ghost’. The record, nevertheless, is a collection of love songs. The isolation brought about by the pandemic has perhaps made the need for connection and atonement stronger than ever, and as Salvant says, ‘in great periods of loneliness, fear, and chaos, it becomes almost instinctual to want to talk about love, spread love, and lament it’.
For further exploration:
George Monbiot, ’Green Growth Doesn’t Exist’: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/green-growth-economic-activity-environment
Mamma Andersson, ‘The Lost Paradise’: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2020/mamma-andersson-the-lost-paradise-2020#/available-works
Interview with Mamma Andersson: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/mamma-andersson-museum-interview/
Mamma Andersson - ‘I could be all of those girls’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0MOTpgWpM0
Cécile McLorin Salvant: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/07/jazz-genius-cecile-mclorin-salvant-in-periods-of-loneliness-and-fear-its-instinctual-to-want-to-talk-about-love
Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘Ghost Song’:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luIa4rd_wV0&t=34s
Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘Dead Poplar’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZWginItVnQ
Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘Ghost Song’ review:https://downbeat.com/reviews/detail/ghost-song
Cécile McLorin Salvant, courtesy Shawn Michael Jones