From the Land of Cockaigne to the Big Rock Candy Mountains

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Land of Cockaigne (1567) 

Oil on panel (52 x 78 cm) 

First conceived in the imagination of medieval peasants and poets, Cockaigne is an immanent utopia wherein all desires are realised, sensual pleasures of every description readily available, and the daily restrictions placed upon one's freedom by priests and feudal masters are abolished - whilst they get their comeuppance at last.

Heaven might await the virtuous in some posthumous future, but Cockaigne was the collective dream of an earthly paradise - now/here, rather than nowhere - that encouraged the cardinal sins of lust, gluttony and idleness, thereby challenging the teaching that the good life had to involve constant toil on the one hand and abstinence on the other.       

At it's most carnivalesque, Cockaigne was said to be a topsy-turvy place in which the weather was always mild and even when it did rain, it rained custard; there were rivers of the finest wine flowing freely and ready-roasted pigs wandered about with carving knives conveniently placed in their back. According to some accounts, there was even a fountain of youth. Nobody works and yet nobody ever goes hungry.   

This idea of Cockaigne spread throughout Europe, with some interesting national variations; central to the Italian version, for example, which can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), is a mountain made of Parmesan cheese - which was handy for the people who lived there and spent the entire day preparing and eating pasta dishes.  

Of course, as with the appropriation of anarchic and amoral folk tales and their literary reworking as so-called fairy tales, eventually the myth of Cockaigne was taken up by the prigs and pedagogues of the emerging bourgeoisie and they turned it a fable condemning gluttony and sloth. Bruegel's depiction of Luilekkerland and its hedonistic inhabitants seen above, is intended as a warning against the spiritual emptiness that follows when we fall into a life of sin; whilst comic, it certainly isn't intended as a celebration of Cockaigne.

However, every now and again the idea resurfaces. In Haywire Mac's hobo-punk classic The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1928), for example, which beautifully sets out an American bum's vision of Cockaigne:

A far away land that's fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you can sleep out every night; a land where the cops all have wooden legs, the bulldogs have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs; a land where you never need change your socks and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks; there's a lake of stew, and of whiskey too - you can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe - a land where there ain't no short-handled shovels, axes, saws or picks and they hung the jerk who invented work. 

One might ask if a dream of a better life in a land of plenty isn't the primary factor at work within the ongoing migrant crisis; they cross the seas in little boats having mistaken Europe for Cockaigne ...

See: Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne, trans. Diane Webb, (Columbia University Press, 2001). 

For an earlier post on The Big Rock Candy Mountains, click here. 

In Praise of the Postcard and Correspondence Art (with Reference to the Work of Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl)

To and Fro: Correspondence Art  by Jack Logan and Kosmo Vinyl

The Lyndon House Arts Center, Athens GA, 

June 3 – July 29, 2017 

I. In Praise of the Postcard

There's always something intimidating and depressing about a letter sealed in an envelope. You just know it's going to make a demand upon you, even if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss (especially if it's from a loved one and has been sealed with a loving kiss).

But still today - in this age of tweets, texts, and emails - nothing makes happier than receiving a hand-written, hand-delivered postcard through the letterbox having completed its mysterious journey through time and across land and sea.

Back in the day, one could look forward to receiving numerous postcards - seemingly infinite in their variety - from friends with pleasing regularity. But now, it can be many months before a little fragment of open correspondence perfectly combining the visual and the textual lands on the mat.

Admittedly, I have fewer friends now. But, unfortunately, this doesn't account for the universal decline in the number of postcards going to and fro. The fact is, hardly anyone can be bothered to send 'em anymore - and that, I'm ashamed to say, includes me (although, in my defence, it could be argued that these short texts published here are a form of postcard - they even have a little picture - though I'm sure ardent deltiologists would dispute this).    

So, hats off then to those rare few individuals who keep the practice of making and sending postcards going and, indeed, raise it to the level of a minimalist art form; individuals such as the NYC based artist and former Clash City Rocker Kosmo Vinyl and his correspondent Jack Logan, a cartoonist and recording artist based in Athens, Georgia.   

Their joint exhibition of around fifty postcards with an amusing pop-cultural frame of reference and aesthetic, is currently showing at the Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA) and I encourage all readers who can go, to go and show their support.  


II. On the Politics of Correspondence Art (aka Mail Art)

Of course, whilst the works of Logan and Vinyl are original, mail art itself is nothing new and what they're doing is by no means unique. Ray Johnson, for example, began posting small prints of abstract drawings inscribed with poetry to friends and key figures in the art world during the mid-1950s, giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.

During the following decade, many artists began sharing work in a subversively generous manner, creating networks of free exchange rather than exhibiting or selling their art in the conventional fashion. This cheap and cheerful practice grew into a global phenomenon and expanded to include telegrams, faxes, emails and blog posts as well as postcards and packages.

Sadly, by the 1990s, mail art had peaked in terms of real world activity. Not only was the price of stamps becoming ridiculous, but many artists saw the new forms of digital communication and social media as where the future lay.

And, to be fair, the internet does allow a faster dissemination of ideas and encourage the involvement of a much larger number and greater diversity of people, thereby realising the egalitarian promise of mail art, which is all about openness, inclusion and an anarchic spirit of anything goes. Indeed, even in its virtual incarnation, mail art remains vehemently opposed to all forms of regulation, judgement, and censorship, so one can well understand its attraction for punks like Kosmo Vinyl.

Ray Johnson's remark that mail art has no history, only a present, is absolutely true. For whilst it's a utopian movement, its utopianism is what Deleuze would describe as immanent - i.e., it exists now/here rather than no/where - and is to be found precisely in the bonds of friendship that are formed between correspondents.

It's this fraternal model of democracy that artists like Logan and Vinyl who work and play within the eternal network, invoke every time they send postcards to and fro. As Chuck Welch would say: "Their shared enterprise is a contribution to our common future."


Notes

See: Chuck Welch, Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology, (University of Calgaray Press, 1995). 

Readers interested in knowing more on this subject should visit the web page of the International Union of Mail Artists (IUOMA): click here. 

The Big Rock Candy Mountains

 

I have always been strongly attracted to what we might refer to as the hobo ethic, most beautifully set out in the songs of Harry McClintock or, as he was popularly known, Haywire Mac.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1928) is primarily a bum's vision of an earthly paradise, but its appeal is wide and extensive. For what it offers is not simply a glimpse of a far away and imaginary land full of wonders, but what Deleuze terms an immanent utopia. That is to say, one that exists now/here, rather than nowhere; constituted in the bonds of love and laughter that tie us to other people.

The song thus affirms a radically fraternal politics that Whitman also sings of in his Leaves of Grass and which Lawrence calls a 'democracy of touch'. Such a model exists beyond liberalism, tied as it is to capital and the ownership of property, and it involves more than a sugar-topped apple pie humanism - even if it does have something distinctly American about it. 

It is also very much a queer model of democracy: one that is not, as I have indicated, anticipated as some kind of future historical development won through revolutionary struggle or social reform. The democracy of touch is, rather, fucked into existence between comrades and lovers - just as the flower is fucked into being between earth and sky; born, that is to say, of a new economy of bodies and their pleasures.

Anyway, I'll see you all this coming fall in the Big Rock Candy Mountains ...