(talk delivered by Chris Coles at FCCT Bangkok Oct
19, 2012)
"To Oskar
Panizza” by George Grosz
Tonight, I’m going to talk a
little about German Expressionist art. Not
as an academic or art historian, but as an artist. What it is I find so interesting and like
about it and how I use it in my series of paintings from the Bangkok Night.
Since I can remember, I’ve
always liked Expressionist art and my favorite paintings are pretty much all by
the various Expressionists, mostly German, like George Grosz, Emil Nolde, Otto
Dix, Kirchner, Beckmann, Schmidt-Rottluf, Jawlensky, and also a few others like
Ensor, Schiele and Kokoschka.
I find Expressionist
paintings interesting - the subjects and scenes, the use of strong and often
disharmonious colors, the distorted images and the rough technique.
They’ve helped me in my efforts
to shape my own version of an Expressionist style which I use to convey my
thoughts, reflections and feelings about what I see when I wander through the vastness
of the Bangkok nightlife industry’s settings and people.
"Ratchada
Poseidon” by Chris Coles
I’m often asked what exactly
is the Bangkok Night? The answer usually
depends on who you ask.
There’s the so-called real or
objective version which turns out to be so subjective, it’s difficult to find
two people who would agree on what it is.
Then there’s the mythic
version which doesn’t really describe an objective reality but is more an entertaining
yet hazy cloud of accumulated lore, magazine and newspaper articles, tv
reports, sensational and otherwise, pop music songs like “One Night in
Bangkok”, stories told by friends and acquaintances, and various blog posts,
for instance, the Stickman Weekly Column or the Bangkok Eyes blog which presents
a detailed, chronological history of the Bangkok Night.
The mythic version’s usually a
little out-of-date as the actual Bangkok Night is always in a constant state of
flux in terms of venues, demographics, geography, fashions, fads, people and,
as a result, our accumulated perception always lags behind.
“Self
Portrait” by Otto Dix
Other versions of the Bangkok
Night are presented in the novels of various writers like Christopher G. Moore,
John Burdett, Stephen Leather, Jake Needham and Dean Barrett.
Or in Nick Nostitz’ “Bangkok’s Twilight Zone”, a brutal yet
brilliant Expressionist-style book of photos set in the Patpong District of the
1990’s, and "Bangkok Noir", with photographs by Ralf Tooten and text by Roger Willemsen.
There are also versions
contained in films like the original very gritty BANGKOK DANGEROUS, in the
recent completely dumb and often unintentionally hilarious HANGOVER II and in the
recent, very evocative and powerful short film, TRUE SKIN, of
Bangkok-in-the-brutal-future directed and shot by a young director from LA
named Stephan Zlotescu and a young Korean-American DP who goes by the name, "H1".
There are further versions of
the Bangkok Night contained in the various music videos that play on Thai tv,
especially the Isan music channels, which often feature storylines of young
Isan males and females migrating to Bangkok from the rural countryside and
working in various nightlife venues.
And then there’s the Bangkok
Night as contained in my paintings, which is the version I’m going to talk
about tonight.
“Bangkok
Boys Town” by Chris Coles
To me, the Bangkok Night is a
vast, dark, edgy and noir universe. It
has a powerful density and velocity, a kind of Dark Energy.
It’s full of nihilistic
motifs and themes, populated by many different kinds of people from all over
Asia and all over the world who, in the universe of the Bangkok Night, are
often revealed in ways they might not have intended or wanted to be revealed, in
ways that might contradict the version of themselves, that they project or
present in their ordinary or so-called normal lives, their daytime lives, when
they’re suited up for work, constrained and subdued in all sorts of ways that
are necessary for them to survive, replicate and succeed in terms of careers,
families, financial security.
“Metropolis”
by George Grosz
Like the Paris Night circa
1900 painted by the Fauvists or the Berlin Night early 1900’s painted by the
Expressionists, the “Bangkok Night” is a world without daylight or sunshine.
It’s all about darkness,
glowing neon, and various man-made and multi-colored lighting: florescent,
blinking, reflected and otherwise.
There are multiple and
constantly over-lapping music tracks and sound effects.
All different kinds of women
and men, and ladyboys, dressed up and costumed for the night, not for the day. Thousands of them, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, over the months and years, millions. Of every size and shape, beautiful, not
beautiful, young, not-so-young.
From everywhere in Thailand,
Asia and the world - Isan, Thai, Khmer,
Chinese, Lao, Burmese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Arab, Iranian, German,
French, Italian, Turks, English, Scottish, Scandinavian, American, Australian,
African.
“Thaniya
Plaza” by Chris Coles
In my view, a key element in
the Bangkok Night, is density and velocity.
Without density and velocity,
kind of like one of those gigantic Black Holes in Deep Space, the Bangkok Night
would lose much of its power, its brightness, its almost irresistible
attraction, its ability to pull in millions of people.
Another element in the
Bangkok Night are the extreme situations, often very personal, dramatic and
acted out in strange ways in full public view, many of which I use as raw
material for my paintings, in which I try to convey not only the illusion of
excitement and desire, but also the poignancy.
“Midnite Bar”
by Chris Coles
The ugliness, the momentary
glimpses of wonder and beauty and the enormous loss of human potentials,
damaged lives and tragedy.
The Bangkok Night is full of
ambiguities, every kind of shading. Nothing
is ever quite clear. It’s complex,
multi-layered. Sometimes, it has an
ironic overlay, sometimes a touch of “noir” humor lurking somewhere underneath.
In my paintings, the men,
women, ladyboys and even the soi dogs are portrayed at their best, in-between
and worst, usually caught up in a Darwinist dog-eat-dog setting,
desiring, being desired, wanting, being wanted.
Compulsively, sometimes mindlessly, devouring or being devoured, consuming
or being consumed.
“Australian
Ladyboy Sex Tourist” by Chris Coles
It’s a world where only the
strongest and luckiest manage to avoid being sucked into the vortex and to
survive completely intact.
A bit like the world of all
those bugs and small reptiles we watch on the Discovery Channel sometimes,
often late at night before we go to sleep, simultaneously horrified and yet
somehow fascinated, hypnotized as the various bugs and reptiles zoom back and
forth between being predators and then suddenly, without warning, becoming
prey.
The science fiction-like
close-ups of the monstrous, brilliantly multi-colored grasshopper devouring the
desperately struggling weevil.
Then suddenly, the
grasshopper itself devoured by the even more frightening giant spider.
And then the giant spider
being consumed by some kind of almost surrealistic insatiable lizard.
And so on.
The Expressionist lens seems
to find a strange kind of pleasure in all this…
In German
it’s called schadenfreude, a kind of
guilty pleasure derived while watching from a detached “outside” perspective,
someone else’s misfortune, unhappy or tragic circumstances.
“Two
Dancers” by Emil Nolde
The Expressionist artists
often portrayed Berlin nightlife early 1900’s with a wild enthusiasm, using a
rugged in-your-face style, with vibrant off-kilter, often startling, colors and
contrast.
Often, especially in the
early days, their paintings were scorned as being way too ugly, disturbing,
disconcerting, and all around unpleasant.
Art critics, government
officials and ordinary people accused the artists of not only being despicable,
degenerate and disgusting, but also in desperate need of drawing lessons.
In my own case, I remember
one particular blogger/critic who once posted, “Coles paints by sticking a
paint brush in his ass and then wiggling around over the canvas….”
And another blogger/critic
who, more recently, wrote, “the absurd paint-making of Chris Coles turns the
red light districts of Thailand into a seedy laboratory for his masturbatory
experiments in appallingly offensive applied finger-painting”.
“Midnight
Patpong” by Chris Coles
Luckily, over time, in some
weird almost inexplicable way, often, unfortunately, after the actual artist
dies, these very same incredibly distasteful, ugly and disturbing Expressionist
paintings sometimes, but not always, became beautiful and even important, and
are suddenly, on a daily basis, presented to an adoring public in some of the
world’s most prestigious museums, and bought and sold at auctions for millions
of dollars by some of the world’s most cunning billionaires.
No one quite knows why, not
even the art historians or famous art critics.
It’s kind of a mystery.
Which sort of begs the
question as to why it is we’re interested and attracted to these bits of paper
and canvas smeared with various colors and shapes which we call art?
I think it’s a bit like our
fascination at seeing those photos of exploding galaxies and star fields - the
brilliant colors, the violent destruction and creation on such a colossal scale
that it kind of transfixes us, makes our brain stop in its tracks, causes us to
wonder, even take a few moments from the daily routine of our lives to ponder.
All of which fits in with my
own effort to create a series of paintings that capture the settings and people
that make up the Bangkok Night in the early 21st century, a mixture
of what’s actually there and what I imagine to be there, sprawling across miles
and miles of an immense, diverse, multi-layered and complex metropolis, employing
and servicing hundreds of thousands of people, in the course of a single night,
millions in a single year, from all over the world.
“Soi Cowboy”
by Chris Coles
The whole thing so huge, it
puts off a pulsating glow and seen from above, resembles one of those gigantic
galaxies or starfields in Deep Space.
But, whereas Deep Space is 65
billion light years across and has billions and billions of twinkling stars, the
Bangkok Night, especially very late, say around 2am on a Saturday night, is infinite,
with no precise beginning or end, with tens of thousands of neon signs, and
trillions and trillions of those little fairy lights, all of them, twinkling.
As a final thought, let me
say that, at least to me, many of the Expressionist paintings from early 1900’s
Berlin seem to have an intersection point with the early 2000’s “Bangkok Night.
I think it’s interesting that
Expressionist art in the 1900 to 1930 or so time frame in Germany blossomed
amidst a period of social chaos, dis-integration of traditional structures and
the large-scale slaughter that took place in and around World War One.
Which, while not perhaps
exactly the same, is not completely unlike the often violent transformation and
rapid change that has occurred and is continuing to occur, in Asia and
Southeast Asia over the past 70 or so years.
“Explosion”
by George Grosz
High-velocity
industrialization, immense capital formation and wealth accumulation, massive
population shifts from rural areas to cities, rapid structural changes and the
globalization of millions of previously somewhat isolated people and cultures.
In my view, there are clearly
links between Expressionist art and the social and political circumstances of
the world within which it was created.
Just as there are links
between my own paintings, as well as the paintings of other artists, Thai and
“farang”, working in modern Bangkok, and the social and political circumstances
of Thailand and Southeast Asia in our present time.
“Siamese
Smile” by Chatchai Puipia
I don’t think these links
between art and the broader society are necessarily didactic, straight-forward,
explicit or completely clear, nor should they be.
Part of what’s interesting
and valuable about art is that it explores and makes accessible areas of our
lives, world, feelings and perceptions that might be distasteful, ambiguous,
hidden or partially hidden, not easy and, perhaps even impossible, to fully
understand in a rational, conscious manner.
At the end of the day, art
provides us with a place where, for a few moments at least, we can put aside
our words, daily worries, various fixed ideas and viewpoints and absorb the colors
and shapes, the relations and implicit meanings between all the colors and
shapes, and, without physical risk or danger, let ourselves be drawn into the
world of a painting with our thoughts and feelings free to wander, wherever,
even into and through the sometimes disturbing and socially disdained world of
the Bangkok Night.
***For a French translation of the German Expressionism and the Bangkok Night talk at FCCT, go to the following link: http://navigating-the-bangkok-noir-gope.blogspot.fr/
Labels: Boys Town, Chatchai Puipia, Chris Coles, Emil Nolde, FCCT, George Grosz, German Expressionism and the Bangkok Night, Ladyboy Sex Tourist, Otto Dix, patpong, ralf tooten, Roger Willemsen, soi cowboy, Thaniya Plaza
