Paper Waltz by Greg Shapley
“The arts put man at the centre of the universe whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats men as garbage – and his children, and his cities too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it through the creation of the appreciation of art.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, from address to graduating class at Bennington College 1970.
This quote was Laura McLean’s inspiration for Paper Waltz. It is a curious snippet that at first appears to posit art (or more broadly speaking, humanity) and military science at opposite ends of the spectrum, both vying for the right to hold centre stage. There is one word, however, that confounds this. Perhaps unintentional or subconscious, the conjunction, ‘and’ in the last sentence (instead of ‘but’) infers a more complex, seemingly paradoxical relationship. I contend that it is not as much paradoxical, as a dialectical, relationship.
Joseph Schumpeter coined the term ‘creative destruction’ to describe the nature of unbridled capitalism. Again, this appears paradoxical but it makes perfect sense. In the most extreme cases the old is obliterated – replaced by the new; all that is solid melts into air. But the new is always based on the old – history is inescapable. In the same way we have the destructive and inhumane nature of the Western industrial military complex feeding into the creative and generally humane artistic community. Everything from new technologies to artistic inspiration stems from extreme situations such as revolutions, wars, or paradigmatic shifts in technology and the organisation of labour (‘Fordism’, for example, being a movement that incorporated all of these in one way or another). The mouse, internet and graphic computer interface, taken for granted by most new media artists today, can be credited directly to anti-Soviet research conducted by the US Department of Defense.
In these heady epochs, our perception of time changes in order to keep pace with material realities. David Harvey (after Gurvitch) cites in The Condition of Postmodernity a number of differing types of time, two of which are particularly relevant. Time in advance of itself could be described as ‘big city’ time. It is cutthroat, competitive, speculative capitalism where the ‘future becomes the present’. And the other is explosive time, in which wars, revolutions and other ‘radical transformations of global structures take place’. In explosive time ‘present and past [are] dissolved into a transcendent future’.
Both McLean and Newman have explored these themes in their past works, as they do in Paper Waltz. Concepts of conflict, in which society rubs against itself like tectonic plates leading to pressurised human eruptions – where stubborn cities refuse to bend, but eventually break under the tidal onslaught of progress, permeate their art. In her book of etchings, Heavy Metal (2006), McLean explored derelict and abandoned spaces that were rife with graffiti and vandalism. She sees these spaces as ‘blank canvasses stripped of all pretence’. Like the calm before the storm they are charged with revolutionary possibility and a chance of freedom.
Perception of time necessarily affects memory, a topic that also pervades the work of both McLean and Newman. McLean cites a comment by Tobias Wolf in reference to her work; “Memory… creates shape and meaning by emphasizing some things and leaving others out.”
Time in advance of itself and explosive time are, themselves, full of sentimentality. When the ‘future becomes the present’ or the ‘present and past [are] dissolved into a transcendent future’ we long for the present as we used to the past. There is an immediate sentimentalising of the people and things around us. Sentiment, in this case, becomes a type of instant memory – a contrived deja vu that takes the place of a real memory for future reference. Thus, the memory of this instant memory becomes hyper sentimentalised. This theme is explored extensively in literature; from Miss Havisham’s aborted wedding day in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, to Samuel Beckett’s Krap’s Last Tape in which a series of recordings stand in for memories.
In a recent work, How Are You, Hotel Waterloo? (2006), Newman places words from wartime love letters between the lips of an old time crooner. The crooner jerks awkwardly like a malfunctioning hologram, repeating words and phrases like someone desperately clinging to a fading memory, or a memory of a memory. The music and fashion of the time, and these words between separated lovers have been conflated into an event that never really took place.
If ‘the first casualty of war is truth’ then is it also the case that this truth lies somewhere between the extremities; between right and wrong, good and bad, between being ‘with us’ or ‘against us’?
Paper Waltz explores the binaries that are foisted upon us in times of conflict; how we are forced to make decisions ‘one way or the other’. The middle ground is gone, swept away in the polarisation of fear and suspicion. The ‘sensible option’ becomes an uninhabitable ‘no man’s land’ and desperation seeps into all areas of life, including personal relationships.
The young boyfriend-girlfriend inhabitants of pre-war playgrounds are turned by the insecurity of the battlefield into husband-wife (the stark noir-ness of WWII movies echo these rushed consummations). This ‘war-time’ is accelerated and exaggerated; it is, by its very nature, sentimental. Reminiscences of these moments therefore become hyper-sentimentalised.
McLean and Newman portray this hyper-sentimentality with a series of black and white figures – cutouts that dance like clockwork, on clockwork. They move jerkily to the binary tick-tock of timepieces that count down their impending separation. But this dance never ends, because it never really began. It is a figment of our collective imaginations that is invented in times of dire consequence to humanise these experiences. Despite the fact that they are a lie, these apparitions stick in our minds and in our throats, marking the only bearable moments in otherwise inconceivable circumstances.