7

Card 7. Les Paul, more Jesus.

Owen Land ‘I Grog and its alternatives’ (2003) card 7 Les Paul, more Jesus

Looking around the web, it seems that this joke is thinly recognised amongst some acoustic guitar teachers. A poster of it can be purchased from Etsy, here, alongside rainbow unicorns and Christian fan art:

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/771509717/more-jesus-les-paul-instant-download

Acoustic guitar fans know this joke, as the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar was seen as gold standard of guitars, and 1970s christian sing-ins seem to be documented with acoustic guitars.

The “Father of Christian Rock,” Larry Norman, performing at the Hollywood Paladium ca. 1970. Courtesy of Archives, Hubbard Library, Fuller Theological Seminary.

[P. Adams Sitney, writing for Artforum, described Land’s search for the detritus of commercial culture: ‘the more banal, the more spiritually immanent.’]

But the design of this joke is such that it can be viewed also from the other side (or mutually inclusive other), a theological perspective. I went to Foyles bookshop to look at the theological section, and the Pauline Epistles do dominate! Some of the letters of Paul are debatably not written by Paul, there is a diffusion of naming again, like Owen.

Amongst the recent books on Paul, this anthology stands out as worth the read:

Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles

Edited by Joseph A. Marchal

‘Saint Friday Angel’ Mark Aerial Waller (2022) oil pastel on paper, 21cm x 29cm

Here is a sample from the chapter, ‘Dionysus, Disidentifications, and Wandering Pauline Epiphanies’ by Timothy Luckritz Marquis, following Muñoz’ writing on Disidentification, of the performance and film work of Jack Smith, “whose mission was to “destabilize the world of ‘pasty normals’ and help us imagine another time and place.”(Muñoz, 1999)

This essay follows, with [José Esteban] Muñoz and some other writers as traveling partners, a disidentificatory Bacchic scene less obvious than [Jack] Smith’s—that is, 2 Corinthians, viewing Paul’s writing as a style of performance that makes room for new ways of being. In so following Dionysus, Paul, Smith, and Muñoz, I contend that future study of Paul’s letters and communities should pay more attention to productive moments of misrecognition in Pauline interpretation—from his first communities’ reception of his message and mission to our own attempts to map his rhetoric—since such moments are, in most new social movements, the ones that join to build a previously unseen community. (Marquis)

Avantgarde filmmaker Michael Snow writes about the cinema experience of watching a Jack Smith movie in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, by Michael Snow, Louise Dompierre:

I’m not sure if he is swearing about the noise, or if the audience were all having noisy sex, except for Snow, who was not grooving, but this does highlight a relationship between the screen and what is beyond it. A present tense experience was rubbing up against the timeless, out of time, film.

So, I am ‘more Paul’, but at least the saint brings us back to experimental cinema, via Muñoz. Thinking about Disidentification, there is an important place for Owen Land’s work, to carve out a space for the psychologically queer, where his transformation of the world, a world born though the performance of his characters as a ritual, allows for what Muñoz writes as ‘rich alternative treasure troves of queer possibility’. Here not sexually queer, but definitely giving a voice to crazy, in a way that Dali was less able to identify with:

By Mark Aerial Waller, ago

About LUX residency – Owen Land

At the turn of the century, LUX, Shacklewell Lane office, received a parcel from Owen Land, of a collection of index cards, entitled “I Grog and its alternatives”(2003). Little information was supplied with it, save for an annotated transcription of the index cards, but there was a sense, or perhaps a conversation, that these cards were a film script. Land admitted that his scripts resisted interpretation. The 200 or so cards, each written in neat letter forms, hold a humorous piece of oral literature with connection to historical events and people, etymology, religion, rock and roll, painting and avant garde filmmakers.

Over the next few months I shall be testing the cards, trying the jokes and re-viewing his work, was he an ironiclastic, not iconoclastic artist?

Fleming Faloon, George Landow (1963-4)

George Landow, also known as Owen Land, Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize (1944-2011) could be rearranged as a Woolen Dagger or A Glowed Goner. His work was irreverent, intellectual and dangerous. It remains a key part of the history of avant garde film but has struggled to find its place in a broader cultural history. Landow’s early film Flemming Falloon (1963/64) was accompanied by this statement:

Landow proposes that if we accept the reality offered to us by the illusion of depth on the flat plane of the screen, we can then assign reality to anything at will. A cinematic equivalent of the illusionistic portraiture of the Flemish painters.

I went with a friend to see Frans Hals, the Flemish portrait show at the Wallace Collection last week. The small exhibition space was walled up with cheeky looking men, painted in Hals’ style of wet-on-wet brush strokes, in a limited pallet, with no attempt to hide the mark of the brush, yet still representing his sitters with convincing vitality. Landow’s film, a series of male portraits, were infused with light spills during processing and reproduced picture-in-picture, the material was evident, kind of cheeky in a high humour way, but also deeply serious, just as that Flemish painter may seem.

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624 © The Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

Reproduction Frans Hals Cavaliers found themselves in the front rooms and hallways of working class families in 1980s Britain, coincidently when The Laughing Cavalier was used by McEwan’s beer as its logo. Perhaps a brewer in the next century may use an Owen Land film still.

McEwans Export TV advertisement (1980s) – What’s yours ?
By Mark Aerial Waller, ago