A history of background, Essay
A history of background
Alan Dunn
Yoko Ono is in the studio, whispering “I suppose there are some people who are really like that, maybe once every century or something, that, when a meeting is really really good. Probably that happens, maybe, once every two centuries or something.” In the background, The Beatles casually run through the opening bars of Revolution.
I run through Central Park in September, seeing the greys. Why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away? In December 1965, Liverpool poet Henry Graham sticks a piece of black electrical tape on his TV screen, giving presenters moustaches and pushing the media to the background. He tears it off in time to witness The Who burst onto screen with the colossal My Generation, John Entwistle’s bass forcing itself forward from the background into the empty foreground space.
He stays in the background, fighting to keep his name out of the media. He has a pathological fear of limelight, and breaks out in a ... quiet night in. Blow up. Movement in the bushes. He writes prosaically. Behind the bushes is the King Arms Hotel with its fantastic jukebox of Suspicious Minds, These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, Wichita Lineman, Mission Impossible, You’ve Lost That Loving Feelin’, Unchained Melody, La Bamba, Surfin’ USA, Freak Out!, Scarborough Fair, Good Vibrations, Rhinestone Cowboy, Wonder Woman, You Only Live Twice, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Dirty Harry, River Deep Mountain High, Shaft, Can’t Hurry Love, I Second That Emotion, Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves ….
In the background of every one of these songs is the remarkable bass playing of Carol Kaye. Now in her seventies, she sits quietly on a park bench teaching a young girl to play out of the limelight.
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In the early sixties Gustav Metzger paints with hydrochloric acid on propped nylon canvases, slowly revealing the background as the painting’s subject. Richard Haas’ 1975 Prince Street architectural mural blends into the background towards invisibility. Ctrl-Alt-Del as I type and see what is running in the background. David Reed digitally inserts his own paintings into the backgrounds of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Thousands of people photobomb by sneaking into the background of other’s photographs. Background is somehow subversive.
I run, unnoticed, through Central Park in October. Merry Clayton jogs past the bench drinkers, singing her backing vocals from Gimme Shelter. Out of breath. I dream of a cover of The Wire featuring a close up of Ono or Kaye with me in the far distance, blurred. I phone the Arts Council and hear background hold music. The cricket club flag is torn. Heraldry. The blazon is not a picture, it is a short sentence which conjures a shield or flag. Andrew Wilson Lambeth notes that the blazon of the stars and stripes prosaically describes thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white. The greater number of an odd number of stripes is taken to be the background. Hence, deliciously, the American flag is in essence a red flag.
My background starts disappearing in the Summer of 1978, aged 11, while watching the World Cup from Argentina. I notice short-sightedness creeping up and sit nearer and nearer the TV. I later buy the Soccer Classics DVD of the tournament and it has many odd moments, the camera languidly cutting to the background, showing rows of well-dressed locals yawning and chatting.
Michael Craig-Martin runs alongside me, chattering away about Chuck Close “you know, Alan, one of the characteristics of late 20th century art has been the pulling of these processes which underlie art onto the surface. The grid was always there in art but in the late century it becomes sometimes the subject as in Chuck’s work.”
M-m-m-ma generation. At the start of the sixteenth century, Leonardo Da Vinci grids up a painted background for Mona Lisa that is debated five hundred years later. In Outnumbered Sue tries to explain Muzak to Grandad at the airport. Brian Eno dreams up Music for airports sitting in Cologne and Black Dog respond with Music for real airports. Muzak producer Tony Scott calls the thousands of background LPs passive products, not trying to cause a big s-s-s-sensation. In 2010, Sony’s NEX5 promotes background de-focus and Google introduces the option to change the background image.
Background is, obviously, all around us.
During a recent BBC interview with Bristol City Chairman Stephen Lansdown the background music is so extraordinarily loud it is impossible to hear what he is saying. Front Row finds that listeners are exposed to an average of one hour and sixteen minutes of background music every day. Judge Dredd introduces the Muzak Killer whose aim is to kill all perpetrators of that vile aural production.
I run past the clubhouse in December and stop to hide a copy of Grey is the colour of hope. Linz creates Acoustic City to reduce permanent background noise in the city and includes a presentation of Bill Drummond’s No Music Day. The background noise in our art school office while typing this is BBC Radio 6 playing The Cure. In HSBC yesterday it was Born to run followed by an uptown banking DJ waxing lyrical about ISAs.
At a conference in Amsterdam Philips propose a monitor-less future in which wallpaper becomes our screens. In Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, Robin Williams feels out of focus and drifts from background to foreground remaining blurred. Michelangelo Antonioni uses long lenses to film Red Desert, pulling the background closer to the fore and compressing the cinematic space around Monica Vitti. I listen to Musick for two machines by Barry Chabala and Phil Hargreaves, two CDs to be played simultaneously on separate devices, curiously alternating back and foreground. I run as I write, directionless, looking for connections and punctuation points.
Chris Watson tells me of a newly built office block in Dublin that has been experiencing ghostly sightings. A worker with a penchant for fencing stays late one evening to mend his rapier and suddenly notices it quivering. Further investigation reveals a faulty air conditioning unit sending out background pulses causing the blade - and edges of the cornea - to vibrate, creating ghostly peripheral shapes. Karlheinz Stockhausen creates sound swallowers, to neutralize every unwanted noise with its opposite vibration. We live and work in sick buildings full of background pollution and we are aware of it.
Satie screams “Talk during my work!” at the audience during the premiere of his Furniture Music at Galerie Barbazanges. Jean Michel Jarre creates Music for supermarkets and pipedown persuade Tesco and Heathrow Airport to stop playing background music. The Beach Boys’ backing vocals to Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) are some of the most sublime male vocal harmonies of our times and Jan & Dean’s backing track to Ride The Wild Surf is a joyously minimal racing track. Just because we g-g-get around. The number f-f-f-four. 4 string bass. Fender, Entwhistle, Kaye, funk, McCartney, slap bass, Hook, dub, Wobble, dubstep, Vicious.
In 1967 Jocelyn Bell Burnell builds her own radio telescope and picks up the first recording of a Pulsar, known as CP1919, a signal waveform familiar to us from the cover of the Peter Hook bass-driven Joy Division LP Unknown Pleasures. The Vela Pulsar lies near the centre of the Vela supernova remnant, the debris of the explosion of a massive star about ten-thousand years ago. The pulsar, a highly magnetized neutron star, is the collapsed core of this star, rotating. Dr John Elliott tells me of plans to turn the far side of the moon into the earth’s listening station as the location with the least background noise. He then sends me what is considered to be the last recording from space to include possible patterns from intelligent non-human life, from 2004.
On Christmas Eve 1968 Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 8 photograph Earth as a background for the first time from the far side of the moon. Happy Christmas, humans. Publisher Stewart Brand notes that those first photographs reinforce the sense that Earth is an island surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space against a backdrop of a black vacuum.
4th January. I see Alfons Schilling standing in a corner of the park with a small group of tenantspin participants. He is excited about a pair of spectacles he has built from mirrors and prisms salvaged from Russian tanks. When one looks through them, perspective is reversed. Grass shoots to the back as the sky becomes the foreground. I hold my hand up and it becomes background.
Whereas normal perspective operates with a vanishing point at infinity, where does this reversal have its vanishing point - deep within us? In Schilling’s world the opposite of background is also background.
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High up above Central Park in Apollo 11, Michael slips a cassette into the deck and watches Neil and Edwin step on the moon. After forty-four seconds of silence, David Bowie whispers “ground control to Major Tom”. There follows more nothingness beyond the feint murmur of a guitar. Background needs space. After two minutes, a lovely isolated flute refrain floats in the darkness. Background begins with the big bang 13.7 billion years ago. After four minutes the cello goes haywire, spiraling out of control and heading for earth…
Big Bang. Things they do look awful c-c-cold. I run through Central Park in August, glancing across to where the art school once stood. I now see new backgrounds of Mersey Tunnel vents, big wheels and Liverpool skylines.
