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âI Made It So Easy for You to Follow Meâ: Making a Case for Dylanâs Revisionist Art (2012)
Nina Goss
In his review of More Blood, More Tracks: Bootleg Series 14 (2018), New Yorker music critic Alex Ross judges the set as âboth more and less than what Dylan obsessives have been tiresomely clamoring forâ (Ross 2018). If Ross archly includes himself among the clamouring herd of obsessives, the archness is too subtle for me. What comes through is the familiar critical register conveying both sensibility and expertise that are uncorrupted by obsession. This kind of hygienic distance is peculiarly common in Dylan studies, in which the condescending and objectionable term âDylanologistsâ is generally used to maintain the normative epistemic hierarchy of popular culture. Obsessives accumulate unvetted quantities of knowledge and experience in an irrational field of desire. The professional critics discriminate, evaluate, provide rational structures of meaning and value and justify/modulate their own ardour, should they bear any.
I choose instead Roland Barthes on obsessive excess: in A Loverâs Discourse, he writes: âI pass beyond the limits of satiety, and instead of finding disgust, nausea, or even drunkenness, I discover ⊠Coincidence ⊠I adhere to the Image, our proportions are the same: exactitude, accuracy, music: I am through with not enoughâ (Barthes 1978: 55; orig. emphasis).
I use Barthes as a companion in this chapter, rather than a methodology, because elements of his work can be a good friend to the swarming, fervent and combative field that Bob Dylanâs audience has made of Bob Dylan. In the passage above from A Loverâs Discourse, Barthes offers a relation to an image â an apprehended face â that certainly differs from the ethical severity of Levinasian alterity, in which facing down the presented Other entails submitting to that Otherâs singular inviolability. Barthes, I hope, restores eros to the confrontation with Image. Beyond the limit of even the most comprehensive and engaged apprehension is âcoincidenceâ of the lover and the beloved: a climactic be-coming of the self and the Image that consummates via âexactitudeâ, and not through a sublime flooding or mingling of the self and the beloved Other. Barthes manages to have his alterity and eat it too. I insist this is the consummation of the art encounter, in which we are revised by the precise lineaments of an exquisite too-much of an artefact or a performance. As Ross demonstrates, critics task themselves with defining where exactitude and eros are permitted to ignite in the listener/viewer/reader, and when the condition of obsession demeans an audience to a clamouring indistinct mass. Bob Dylanâs audience is a special case of exactitude and clamour. Although Dylanâs audience is voracious, expert and minutely attentive, a combination that brings an insatiable and very sensitive appetite to his work, we can be tiresome to those who do not pass with us beyond the limits of satiety. In this chapter, I test satiety and take on what is arguably the most discouraging post-2000 project bearing the name Bob Dylan: Revisionist Art. Appearing in 2012, Revisionist Art comprises silk-screened mock magazine covers, in some cases legitimate publications whose logos are accurately reproduced, as well as fabricated samples. The project entailed gallery exhibitions and an exhibition catalogue produced by Gagosian Gallery, which mounted the exhibition in New York, and which does not reproduce every item from the combined exhibitions. Absent one textual allusion, Bob Dylanâs presence is his name displayed as the author of the project, and to whom âAll artworksâ are copyrighted. Inscribing Bob Dylan into this project ultimately tests only the peculiar gains of the ordeal of inscribing.1
Barthes writes also in A Loverâs Discourse: âThe ego discourses only when it is hurt; when I am fulfilled or remember having been so, language seems pusillanimous: I am transported, beyond languageâ (Barthes 1978: 55; my emphasis).
I want to link to Edward Saidâs On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2007) Barthesâs claim that, in love, we speak when we are not fulfilled, when the beloved forbids âadher[ing]â to his/her âImageâ (Barthes 1978: 55). Saidâs thoughts on âlate styleâ were influenced by Adornoâs writing on Beethovenâs late works. Said takes on the tiny set of supreme artists who in hard old age still suffered intensities of productivity and consciousness that manifest in âan inherent tension in late style that abjures mere bourgeois agingâ (Said 2007: 17). These works â[insist] on the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expressesâ (17). Said cannot merely submit to relishing the âessentially unrepeatable, uniquely articulated aesthetic works written not at the beginning but at the end of a careerâ. Instead, he writes of the âparadoxâ (Said 2007: 17â18) by which these âunrepeatable, uniquely articulatedâ late works can yet be accessible influences for new artists. He further insists on terms of alienation, such as apartness, exile, anachronism, unacceptable, and intransigence and emphasizes the impermeability in the work of, in this case, the elder Beethoven. Said speaks like a lover vexed by implacable potency and appetite in a beloved who has aged out of natural potency and appetite: he pits vitality against currency. Said is not seeking a technical musicological vocabulary for the choices made by Beethoven in, say, 1822. He is theorizing a strangeness in the greatness of no-longer-young artists, which he cannot assimilate.
Bob Dylan post-2000 is prosaically unacceptable, as at this point we must never accept what he gives us as is. Henry Timrod, Abraham Lincoln, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Faglesâ Homer, John Greenleaf Whittier â all of these voices and more are camouflaged in the late style of Bob Dylanâs compositions and we presume they await our discovery and analysis. Christopher Ricksâs elegant benediction that Dylan ârepay[s] attentionâ (Ricks 2004: 311) has perhaps unfortunately come to describe a festering ritual of picking through a new Dylan work for whatever plundered loot heâs hiding in plain sight, and then domesticating this new misbred creation into the canon. In our exhausting toil of inscribing and reinscribing late Bob Dylan, we can identify ourselves by linking Saidâs vexations with Barthesâs now classic assertion in âDeath of the Authorâ that âthe reader is simply that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constitutedâ (Barthes 1967: 6). Bob Dylan sings his songs, paints his paintings, attaches his name to a set of mock magazine covers, and we stand at the ready as the agents of his late-style relevance; we inscribe the âsingle fieldâ that is not Bob Dylan, but inscriptions that we name âBob Dylanâ.
The first image reproduced in the Revisionist Art catalogue is the actual 6 November 1964 Life magazine cover showing actress Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson from the Bond film Goldfinger. The photo and date are authentic (although the scarlet lipstick appears enhanced) and are accompanied by fake headlines including âRevolutionary new procedure turns flesh to gold.â In S/Z, Barthes writes: âMeaning is golden âŠâ (Barthes 1974: 9) â and indeed it is. To confer meaning on anything is the only way to give it life and value in the marketplace of signs; gold has been the marketplaceâs standard of value. Read this Revisionist image against Rembrandtâs DanaĂ« (1636), who raises her hand in a gesture, ambiguously greeting and alarmed, at the cascade of gold in her chamber. DanaĂ« is the elected permeable one for the god who, as transcendent signified, can will himself into becoming the currency of supreme value. The first fake cover, then, is the woman consummated with the showered gold, which makes her the living sign. A golden woman is the best of all possible worlds: sex, illumination, money. Sheâs lit up with the affected rapture of being the gate to Revisionist Artâs ersatz world and the title, Life, becomes an irony both trite and radical. It may be easy to write her as the composite portrait of Dylanâs lineage of frozen idealized female characters. These are the women in his songs who are pinned, inviolable and manipulated all at once, from the self-sufficient artist who belongs to the songwriter, to the ageless girl from the Red River shore whose life becomes a shadow for the restive exhausted singer. Can we begin our inscribing by suggesting that, when framed with the name Bob Dylan, Shirley Eatonâs phony DanaĂ« speaks to Johanna, or the woman who might be in Tangier, or the lover drifting like a satellite, or the girl from the Red River shore? Or, by opening the published text (i.e. the version that is fixed in time and place, as a gallery ...