Heading West

This is a collection of works by Picasso which feature a guitar in some form. Most of them were done in the cubist period, between 1910 and 1920. 

As I was looking at the pieces, in particular the cardboard sculpture, I was inspired to pick up my guitar and write some music. What I wrote was "cubist" in nature--a piece with all minor chords which had the working title of Maquette--a prototype. At first, it was only solo guitar, but then I added a string quartet part, then replaced it with an ethereal choir sound. This immediately sounded "Spaghetti Western" to me and so I "headed west" and added a twangy lap steel part.

[In art, doing this is being "touched in the original", where a copy of a painting is made sitting in front of the original so as to absorb its essences].

I have always been an audio/visual writer. Even on the pieces that are almost C&W, I am hearing the music cinematically. 

I made this 90-second "film" based on the police procedural/film noir film Highway Dragnet from the mid-50s, which served as the "reverse scoring" (essentially a "music video"). Music video as a genre has its roots in silent avant-garde filmmaking, such as the work of Maya Deren and others, so the process is in some ways avant-garde, even if simply through inheriting its vibe.

One of the great things about the Internet that we don't realize is that it has allowed us to be "keyword" thinkers. This is something artists do intuitively: The use of metaphor is almost a given, at least in the initial phases of creativity. Single words are very often the first expression of conceptual thinking. In this instance, the words I was thinking of were primarily "desert", and somehow "Salton Sea", a popular tourist destination in the Mojave Desert in the 1940s and 50s, now the victim of urban overgrowth as ecocide, as the country "headed west" to Southern California after the war. (The Highway Dragnet film was shot in the Mojave and at Salton Sea).

This passage from W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn also describes the degradation inherent in packing up and heading west:

"A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time when the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even as their eastern districts were falling apart. In Brazil, to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when the land is exhausted by overcropping and new areas to the west are opened up. In North America, too, countless settlements of various kinds, complete with gas stations, motels and shopping malls, move west along the turnpikes, and along that axis of affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarized."

Keywords as inspiration for titles

Typically I work using working titles (title "maquettes") and change them later. The final title assigned was In the End, even before the visual elements were added. "In the end" is a common colloquialism:("In the end, this is what we wanted all along.")

In the video, I put "The End" at both the beginning and at the end as a riff on the title. I didn't re-title after doing that, although it may seem suspicious. 

In the end, it was Picasso that started it all and it "headed west" from there.