Gringo go-go course module: cris cheek, stranger (CD, sound and language, 1996?; and text printed in Conductors of Chaos, Macmillan 1996)
10.97
"All you sucker DJs you think you're fly, but there's got to be a reason and we know the reason why. You try to put on those airs and act real cool but you got to realise that you're acting like a fool. If it's music we can use it to do our dance, we don't have the time for psychological romance. No romance! no romance! no romance for me. Mama come on baby tell me what's the word? Word up. Everybody say, When you hear the call you got to get it under way."
('Word Up', words and music by Larry Blackmon for Cameo, recorded 1986)
Part of the interest of the career of cris cheek (b.1955) is its near invisibility. A Present, 1980, was a vast A4 stapled job collecting various projects from the 1970s, tendentiously unreadable above all in the physical sense. There was a long poem in Reality Studios 8 (1986?), a selection in the anthology Floating Capital (1991), an excerpt from another long poem, 'Canning Town Chronicle' or 'CanChron', in Angel Exhaust 8 (1992). The nineties saw some kind of emergence, with several CDs with his band Slant, and now Conductors. The main impression left by A Present is of didacticism: the poet is above all instructing himself, in the consequences of breaking various formal rules, and the complete absence of any sense of revolt into expression, or of frustration, leaves the diligent, humble, self-improving, intention uppermost. The content of the "texts" is deliberately banal, as he remarks they were written down on the spur of the moment, perhaps while a car was stuck in traffic. His distrust of anything not immediate is a belief either that thought corrupts or that the middle-class is corrupt, including of course c. cheek; fear of thought remains as precept no.1, and the combination of this with the long-haul didacticism is puzzling and self-subverting. His career is a puzzling trawl in which he simultaneously avoids rationality as bourgeois and accumulates a strong CV as a bought-in course module and arts manager.
Cris recalled, in letters he sent to me after I published a review putting the London avant-garde in its historical context, his activity as a very young man-he was 20 or so-at the Poetry Centre; it seems now that his preoccupations, in the letter, with printing on paper as fetishized, a residue value even without readers or distribution or meaningful text, and with being "inside" the Poetry Centre were part of a single drive towards occupying space. We can compare the movements of a performance occupying space. This bare drive followed inevitably from the de-aestheticisation of art, no longer showing or narrating or characterising or expressing. This sense of space is oriented towards a cultural hierarchy, and is closest of all to the attitude of a teacher in a classroom, intensely preoccupied with establishing a visual order (the pupils look towards the teacher, not at each other) out of which grow legitimacy and power. The first task of a teacher is to prove to everyone else in the room that I am the teacher (with the right to speak) and you are not. The room is being claimed as part of an institutional struggle; the office of the white man; as civil servants fight over a bigger desk. The "atmosphere" wafted out, in the absence of articulate discourse, is related to interior decoration, baffles which subtly reflect and detain the nuances of hierarchy. It is naive to ignore, in the select group of the performance audience, the projection of the punishment image: the academic performance artist makes grab-claims on radicalism, social generosity, intelligence, promise, etc. as if the unconvinced lacked those assets; a specific apparatus of anxiety set up in order to forestall and weaken criticism,.
He is driven mainly by middle-class guilt, yet ends up always in a supervisory, elevated, middle-class role: as priest, teacher, documentarist, clinical observer, entrepreneur. There is an unyielding double-bind which says that: expressing preferences exposes middle-class preferences and so is a betrayal of trust in handling public money, so you can never justify things as being "what I like";
not expressing preferences is detached, magisterial, professional, assimilable to the speech patterns of the educated, and so is pre-eminently middle-class. Anyone who expresses gratification at reading poetry is plebeian and comme il ne faut pas and not worthy of tenure. If he were not obviously an exponent of middle-class culture, he would belong to pop culture and so be ineligible for Arts Council grants. But if he were consciously middle class, expressing pleasure in a m/c array of experiences, he also wouldn't get the grants. The solution is to be middle class and impersonal at the same time; offering didactic aspiration but not lived experience, or pleasure. He is using non-discursive methods to send a message, which can only be received by an audience steeped in literary and academic knowledge, that only experience, and communication, which is non-literary and non-academic, is authentic. The only people who will ever receive his message are those being reproached and humiliated by it. Not only cheek, but large parts of the audience, feel intense guilt about ideas (identified with egoism, alienation, and upward mobility), and only want to hear how wicked they are; poetry which delighted in ideas would meet with moralistic rage from wide sections of the educated public. Taking pleasure in ideas could float an intelligent poetry of pleasure- a natural apex to the literary system which is unoccupied at present. Poems by Roger Langley, Helen Macdonald, and Kevin Nolan spring to mind here.
Some of Stranger goes like this:
To fish for and barter Fantasies.
Blend votes with Printed Facing
Ashen through oncoming headlights
Reflecting Nightgown's Blooming in the driver's eyes.
A game of Dash concerning death. An edge
Littered profusely with Bleached Shells
and tiny ones Mounded into fetishes.
Inarticulate and ill at ease Fires in the Valley
Twisted 'up against the wall' Cliches
Gun holding an urge to piss home all Advantage
Prized as turns of phrase.
This clearly has something. It was not until the new abundance of material in the nineties that one could say what this was. In quantity, it reveals itself as flimsy, whimsical, and niminy-piminy. It is heavy-to someone who would call moth brains, sellotape, and the inside of Milky Ways heavy. It moves fast from one theme to another. It does not ask us to feel or think, and so slips down easily.
Cris's letters are a puzzling back-stock catalogue of hundreds of people whom he considers "hot", and whom he was once in a room with, or once saw live; for him, the virtue of all these success figures is liquid and has trickled into his work by osmosis. However little seems to be going on in his texts, for him they bathe in an aura of provenance, grabbing and accumulating the cosmic merit of all these people. The comparison is with a restaurant, enclosing cachet because of who goes there, or an item of clothing, exuding cachet because of who has worn it in the past; or, naturally, of a person who is middle class because they have grown up in rooms full of middle-class people exuding the laws of middle-class behaviour. Whereas an expensive restaurant actually has to serve good food, the results of all this networking are invisible in cris's poems, although of burning importance to him. Insider knowledge is at a maximum and the empirical merits of style and fine writing are at a minimum.
The opposition between people concerned with ideas and jongleurs imposes itself when we come to look at legitimizing myths, as on CVs, fliers, and grant applications. Cris has no line of theorizing separate from self-publicizing; the critical intellect is an organ he does not possess. cris' ideas on cultural history come from other people's publicity material. The idea that anyone might be interested enough in ideas, and the truth, to undertake flights of thought which were not publicity, is quite foreign to him; as indeed to the London School in general. Intellectuals have a self-critical faculty, almost a tragic sense of fallibility, which means they can't write advertising prose or project disc-jockey style enthusiasm. On the other hand, they can distinguish truth from falsehood.
No-one could accuse cris of being an intellectual. There is, however, circumstantial evidence that he once read a book. It was Robinson Crusoe. Skin Upon Skin is a reduction of this novel by picking out key words. The CD Stranger includes the numbers Skin Upon Skin and Stranger, of which the text is conveniently printed in Conductors. This method is not articulate enough to indicate whether, for example, cheek is for or against imperialism. Of course, we know he is right on and against it; to make a statement would be stating the obvious; giving us information we already have is subtly different from informing us. Cutting a text up is different from dramatising it. The appeal of the work live came, I think, from the tension at the anxiety that cris would forget his text; in the local Arts Centre, here in Barnet, with my neighbour Ulli Freer doing the visuals, I was obviously tense, and then relieved that nothing went wrong. The situation and language of the original are sufficiently strong for the listener to reflect on them as cris bangs, athletically, on. He fulfils a personal ideal by vanishing behind someone else's words, like a teacher behind the textbook; but his fear of expressing an opinion limits the project to a kind of d‚gag‚ absurdity. There is no question of him thinking about imperialism or even showing what it was.
Cheek's texts always seem to centre on a wordless vibe, a groove which is a shared secret among the hip, a fat social wave which one only has to relax into; the answer to the shouted question What's the Word? Disappointingly, the groove never seems to be included in the package. The aura of the work involves historical rightness, a series of exclusive moments vested in chains of authors legitimized by, and legitimating, them; conferring prestige on anyone who consumes and imitates the right artistic patterns, and discreetly amused obloquy on those who assimilate the wrong ones. These are perfectly recognizable as traditional middle-class patterns of status consumption by means of covetable objects; where a class-conscious housewife of 1936 might have written somebody off, socially, because they wore the wrong kind of shoes, cheek writes people off artistically for liking the wrong kind of poets. The "right" decision, around 1972, to imitate Olson, Jackson MacLow, John Cage, etc., was desperately important for the status-conscious litterato around town; within a play of forces where punishment, exclusion, and the sense of authorisation were not exactly elusive. It is the story of cheek's life that he invested in what he thought was the present forefront, and future in-group, whereas it turned out to be, abidingly, one of many out-groups. It is the story of cheek's myth of self-legitimation that he works in a sector with an incredibly small minority audience while upholding a doctrine of collective enthusiasm and anti-elitism: how can he claim historical correctness for his own style without simultaneously claiming elite status for the few dozen people who are interested in it?
One of the criteria for choosing a "right" artist is that he offers procedures generative enough to be recognizably copied, in an act of exhibitory consumption, by hip artists around the world, within the circuit of prestige calling itself the avant-garde. The procedures have to be blatant, grotesque almost; and to be re-usable. That is, they have to resemble the imitable intellectual procedures which teachers inculcate in pupils; and this grammar of artistic prestige arose after the great expansion of the education industry in the Western world, seen either as a key sector in the struggle against godless communism or as a deep source of jobs for an aspiring middle class. The didactic principle was paramount; replacing, perhaps temporarily, the expressivity identified since the eighteenth century as the basis of middle-class taste. The demand for novelty, without which the exclusivity of artistic goods could not be satisfied, excluded the expression of feelings; since these have been present throughout history. The preoccupation with the true voice of feeling present in sixteenth-century Puritan writings, in the nascent realist novel of the sentiments in the eighteenth century, in Romantic poetry, etc., has been written off, although in an inexpressibly tiny part of the literary market. Cris would never dream of expressing a feeling in a poem; I can find no instance of him expressing anyone else's feelings either. It is not possible to represent situations, structured by human beings who are animated by feelings, without tolerating the description of feelings; but such poetry feels no requirement to describe situations other than the fundamental, pedagogic, one, in which the flow of prestige, and simultaneously of obloquy and delegitimization, is loudest.
An art system which excludes personal attractions and preferences at the outset is short of a scale of valuation, which in conventional art is supplied by the intensity of its appeal to the subjective and irrational emotions of a critic rapt by bourgeois subjectivity. These can be replaced by a grammar of legitimation based on historicism (there is at any moment a "right" style, the "cutting edge") and on domination allotted by power struggles within organs of public resort which themselves fight for dominance. Authorization is a privilege of office. These public organs are, for the art world, galleries, as well as significant magazines or TV shows and so on; it is not clear to me where the English avant garde gets its periodically changing scales of values from, but the answer may be American magazines. This is an uneasy market in between the university and the bookshop; an on the pavement trading ground subject to disruption by through traffic and pervasive blurring of signal. It competes with the legitimate market of legitimacy (for example the Times Literary Supplement or The Observer) by angry rejection of its proposed valuations. It takes a specialised ear indeed to distinguish the claims of cheek's art constituency from those of a hundred other tiny pavement markets. Since being with it in one cubicle amounts to being laughed at as fuddy in a hundred others, we are moved to think about the morphology of markets, rather than to pretend, donning robes of office, that cheek's style was legitimate in 1976 and still is in 1996, or is in 1996 but wasn't in 1976, or was for seven months in 1986.
There was in the 1950s a wave of concern in the Protestant churches (and the Catholic as well) with being contemporary and relevant and urban and committed and on the spot and testifying. Having populist methods of appeal was seen as crucial to regaining political authority, and this meant getting away from books. The intro to the 1959 Jazz Poetry, the first anthology of poetry in performance, is full of words recognizable to a student of the period as being drawn from liberal theology. The hypothesis to be tested is this: English poetry of the 1950s was utterly dominated by Anglican models and was read essentially by Anglican church-goers, although its models were also acceptable to Catholics and Nonconformists. In the 1960s, English poetry shifted, experiencing a dissolution of continuity; the Church underwent a parallel shift; was the poetry shift set in train by changes in ecclesiastical opinion, being essentially a consequence of these, or was there some other source? Evidence on the dating of the two sets of changes seems quite inadequate. This draws an analogous question on about the relationship between the Counter Culture and the New Left; where the Christian element has been consciously or unconsciously written out by neo-leftist historians, and the remaining traces of the Counter-Culture today seem largely to be practices assimilable to religiosity-the New Age.
Clearly, cris cheek is a successor to the Poetry and Jazz of the 1950s. We mention this because of superstitious beliefs in some quarters that performance poetry is new and, ho ho ho, promising. Doesn't Milton speak of writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antick and dishonest gestures of Trincalos, buffoons and bawds? and also hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits, which I take to be an early dance performance. Whereas the typical Anglican poem of the fifties expressed regret that there was no magic in the public ritual act of the Mass, the typical English poem of the sixties sought a public immediacy and togetherness, and gave this a sacral value. The performance is a revived Anglican Mass, simultaneously reassuring, middle-class in audience, benign, and boring. Apart from public worship, a separate strand of Anglican spirituality was preces privatae and books of private devotion, and permitted doubt, solitude, erudition. I must confess that I find this more sympathetic than the reductive groupiness of the performance, closeted as it is in an exclusively academic and middle-class milieu.
Other poets read and the ideas flying around the room which animate the group unconscious and supply the scripts for psychological events are the poems themselves. With cris, this is never the case; he withdraws from that possibility, as a claim to power (which is Bad), and writes poems which are reactions to a set of unconscious imperatives which come from somewhere else and which he does not describe or evoke. At an extension, these impersonal ideas form the fabric of a history of culture consisting of a series of moments at which a certain way of doing things is necessary; a kind of monarchy of mandates which cris is quite unable to interrogate. We can compare these to the Anglican version of the history of dogma; whereby approaches acceptable in, say, the eighteenth century gradually ceased to be so, in a historic current not controlled by individuals, expressing a collective will of the pious and erudite. The sense of what is right is mainly social sensitivity. Cris is afraid of originality; he elected certain individuals, mainly Americans, to enact the articles of artistic legitimacy (they are the bishops of his system), but is unable to face the idea that he chose these bishops, and so his own fallibility has not been evaded, it runs throughout the fabric of his system. Throwing away choice is not enough; there is no alternative to thinking.
There is one all-music number on the CD, bearing a strong resemblance to 23 Skidoo, a funk band consisting in practice of Eurasian marxists who used to practice martial arts in the front room of a squat in Clerkenwell where a friend of mine lived. Their most famous moment was 'Fuck You GI', a tape of a Viet Cong taunt call, more concretely a satire on the feckless overrating of Charles Olson by certain English Faculties. The 'cold funk" of 7 Songs was about 1980, which is why I'm a bit surprised to hear cris and his chums doing it on CD in 1996. The recreation is not "pop", but dutiful, proficient, pedantic and... academic. 23 Skidoo's finest hour was an agitprop number called 'Just Like Everybody', involving a loop of the taped reminiscences of a torturer, presumably CIA: "I see myself basically as neutral and commercial, just like everybody. With a chair and a pair of pliers you can make life very unpleasant for anybody."
Stranger is an account of a trip to Madagascar, financed by the Arts Council, to experience being a stranger in a foreign culture. Reporting events in other cultures is fraught with difficulties, since the physical aspects of behaviour are quite meaningless without the cultural kit of intentions and classifications that goes with them. Native informants can only explain this kit insofar as they can stand back from, and outside, it, and phrase it in a new language whose concepts are common between them and the anthropological listener. The anthropologist can only take in alien meaning by switching off the personality functions which embody his alienness, Europeanness; when switched off, he can understand nothing, because the real meanings only exist when being, energetically and scrupulously, constructed by a responsive, identifying, watcher. Even an anthropologist who, after decades of brilliant participant watching, understands the human events, cannot pass them over to a listener who lacks this knowledge without radically, and massively, building a semantic context in which the new meanings and classificatory underlay of words can be defined before the words are used. There is no trace in Stranger that cris has even registered the existence of these problems, much less dealt with them. His method apparently effaces the observer and really effaces what is being observed. The style goes on being skittery-whittery. The malgaches remain as mute, cut-up, exotica.
My notes refer to Sandy Arbuthnot dressed as a fakir. Arbuthnot, in John Buchan's thrillers, was an undercover agent who impersonated characters from a various ethnic groups in order to protect the integrity of the Empire. Cris has a similar yearning to forfeit his old-boy English middle-class identity and to be redolent of various picturesque atmospheres. The critic says, perpetually, Hello gringo and cris says, equally inevitably, Yo no gringo, gringo. Soy bandido. This social embarrassment went along with a political doctrine of making decisions by popular acclaim, because it was felt to be wrong for a minority to hold delegated power. The vacuity of cheek's linguistic organisation invokes the myth of an intangible group feeling specific to places and scenes. It evades the individual; says you had to be there; is a cheery, parlour bar alternative to the lonely searching of the intellectual. This is altogether a crusade against the intellect, against the writer, against reading, against the place where writing comes from.
The metrical and syntactic rules followed bear some resemblance to those applied by Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Ulli Freer, and Maggie O'Sullivan; an affinity which can be conveniently observed in Floating Capital, edited by Sheppard and Clarke, and which I reviewed at the time (in fragmente). Common to this group is the momentaneous style, where there are no large-scale patterns but a "continuous present" which has the memory span of a TV camera but also avoids stored and organised knowledge. Things decay; we are to understand that memory does not work and there are no large-scale patterns in human society to be mirrored by large-scale, periodic, linguistic structures.
Following the Churches' shift, during the fifties, away from erudition and towards inspired utterance and face to face charisma, the educated class began to hold, in the sixties, that anything else is more authentic than words.The organisation of language into rhetoric and formal argument is deceptive, whereas bodily gesture is inherently true; this is the legitimizing myth of performance poetry. For me, the reverse is true. The schools of rhetoric taught pupils how to manipulate speech melody, facial expression, and gesture, as well as logic and figures of speech; if we are being deceived, this is being done by actors and rock musicians as much as by lawyers and academics using rational discourse. Cheek very often seems like a football supporter waving a scarf to and fro in frenzied response to the events of a game, and a crowd, which he has neglected to write into the text or performance. He is moved by a group feeling which he is unable, given his neglect of verbal techniques, to evoke. The negation of an individual set of perceptions incidentally abolishes disagreement, discussion, interaction, and politics, and bumps up against the obvious objection that the voice of a manager, accountant, Cabinet politician, teacher, or judge is neutral by command, and claims to represent, neutrally, a "group feeling" which mysteriously manifests itself in the office-holder as if his quality were that of transparency.
The absence of a central figure to identify with can offer a critical intent, as is supremely the case with Tom Raworth. Faced with incomplete patterns, we are induced to make conjectures about the rules governing the pattern; to ask what is language, socialisation, suggestibility, what is the code of rules being followed by English people in a room. The cheerful upfront quality of cris's delivery stifles this resonance. Anxiety about dissent within the audience, jollying them along, erases the critical and alienated impetus which sustains the avant garde. Actually, Raworth's poetry does offer us a strong central figure, just that we are attracted to, and copy, his violent dissociation and tireless curiosity, rather than some emotional state. We cooperate emotionally with alienation which is the denial of ccoperative emotion. Live performances pit the pressure to conform of an intimate gathering of audience against the desire to be dissident of temperamental rebels. How much I dislike the agape feeling of minority-taste poetry gatherings, so much like being in a church with a tiny congregation, with so much blare of light on you. With a set of chairs and a performance artist you can make an evening very unpleasant for anybody. If you leave the room, the poet may send you a letter asking why (this happened both to me and to Adrian Clarke).
On the CD, cris' vocal abilities are grossly limited and tendentiously inexpressive. Expressivity, realism, and identification, the principles of Western art, have been thrown away as out of date. We could add argument-the play of ideas. Verbal signals implying a human agent having feelings have been erased, to prevent such implications. I heard the CD first at the home of a friend, an actress, as I didn't have a CD player. She thought it was comic and boring, and said he was "signalling" all the time. This is a technical term for sounding stagy. He does not vary the tempo or tone of voice within a piece; once he gets going, it just rolls on, one minute being like another. Since dialogue and expression have been excluded, it would be difficult or irrelevant to introduce vocal nuances. Just as the voice does not inflect to comment on the text, so also the music does not inflect to comment on the text; they are quite unrelated to each other. One would have thought the point of getting away from the printed page was to have music and vocal quality work with the text in some way. The staginess is the over-clearly enunciated, affectively blank, voice of the clergyman or a Radio 3 presenter, unselfish and authoritative, its tone signalling the rules of the situation, that we have to be silent and listen; it foregrounds the frame of the work of art and not its content. At the same time, it is signalling the absence of presence; the on-display numbness is exhibiting detachment as if this meant noble resignation of power, or civilised overcoming of primitive drives. This self-mastery is the economic virtue of the middle-class employee, paid to be objective; neutral and commercial. However, she (my associate) listened to the CD again and said it had something; although we don't know what. Although the form of the poetry is different from the poetry which prevailed until the 1960s, and so is original, the CD itself is very predictable, because of its monotony and lack of fine variations of tempo, or counterpoint. Because of the solo voice's lack of interest in the material, we appear to be listening to a void. The monotony gives away to us that the source of the material is not a life being lived by a living person, but a theory, drawn from nowhere and repeating because it connects with nothing outside itself. On the page, the text does have a movement; but if we read a whole page, it repeats and gets stuck. Arbitrary procedures are loyally and laboriously applied many times over.
I have seen cris perform about 20 times, including, I think, hearing Stkin upon Skin four times. Frequently, the set consisted of what looked like warm-ups, accompanied by what I now recognize as voice exercises. These were so totally uninteresting as to be relaxing; the explanation for their presentation is that they are the didactic moment par excellence, the common drive in an audience drawn from the pedagogic professions, socially defined by its exam record. The performer goes through training, a guarantee of professionalism, but arrests the use of training short of anything else than an exhibition of that training by a repetition of its procedures, because any other use would become expressive and therefore not up to the highest social standards of the academic neo-bourgeoisie. The didactic situation is par excellence authoritarian, repetitive (ten slow neck stretches and ten deep breaths please Andrew), merit-accumulating, impersonal. One goes to a kind of art whose appeal is, supposedly, that it frees you from the expectations and covert imperatives of moralising art, and it subjects you to a series of keep-fit instructions. So, one evades a set of arbitrary commands by sitting in a room being subjected to a set of arbitrary commands. A baffling experience.
The central appeal of the work is a kind of muscularity. It is rapid, incessant, fluent, self-assured. It is the psychological double of a gym where someone is obstinately going through monotonous exercises as part of a project of acquisition, the solicitude of the self. Its lack of bravado about the fact gives a lower-middle class tonality: the sacrificial evenings of someone ungifted but dogged, soberly building up the course credits in order to rise, unspectacularly, another notch up the class system. This ground gesture is bound to appeal to an audience which has spent so much of its life-whose relatives spent so much of their lives-in just such projects of self-correction and merit accumulation.
After twenty-five years, this line of work has failed to crystallise. It offers anticipated profits on the market of prestige and historical correctness, but in itself it slithers and creeps away from attention, it is mysteriously not there. Where the logic of institutions meets a historical conjuncture formed by the anxieties and imperatives of grant-awarding and degree-validating bodies, it seems likely that many young students will follow the same path in the next twenty-five years, to reach a similar goal.