Kafka's hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art - crowds come to watch him in his cage. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to the live performances, there is the question of who is going to comprise the group (or whether, indeed, it will number more than one), the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of performance, with a run through of the set with participating musicians, all of whom have a considerable input) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the 'studio' albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on - even as there is a large element of improvisation in the performances.
But in another sense, there is no choice when it comes to the performance (and particularly in the studio recordings): at their heart, they have a man in extremity, a man who performs, I think, to give this extremity to song. In live performances, the Representative's face is blank - not a mask but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project nothing (what is feeling? what does he see of the audience? what is he thinking?) but also everything, for does not his blankness invite the wildest of speculation.
A blank face - but the gestures of a guitarist, a bassist, a pianist (whatever he is playing) are also present; we can watch the Representative turn to his fellow musicians, watching them; we can watch him shuffle and dip and crouch over his guitar. He is a physical player. But the face, half hidden by a fedora, is blank. Certainly we can watch the words come from his mouth - watch him lean into the microphone, drawling sometimes, stretching a word, but always wanting to be heard, always precise in his vocalising. A blank face - and no stage banter when a guitar string breaks, and he has to wait for three or four long minutes another guitar to be brought from behind stage. No 'thank you very much' for listeners who might have travelled halfway round the globe to see him.
What do the audience of Kafka's hunger artist watch? A man in extremity. A man who starves. What a feat! What endurance! And Jandek's audience? 'I come to bring you a bit of depression ...' Watching the live band settling into their groove, interacting but following the lead of the Representative's vocal, I wonder whether it is really extremity we see there, on the stage. In live performance, the lyrics change: they become more frank, more confessional; some (Manhattan Tuesday) permit of a simple, autobiographical interpretation. Is he a man in extremity or a controlled man, part of a controlled ensemble who somehow seeks to account for himself, to search for himself, and before an audience?
Often he will acknowledge that audience in his lyrics. 'I don't know why I'm here/ to sing in front of you'. But it is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of what they will see. Why is he here? But it should be admitted, too, that we find another lovely kind of extremity in the speech-song of Glasgow Monday, The Cell - a wholly new style of vocalising in Jandek's oeuvre. A first - a breathy, tentative, suspended speech-song that seeks and searches over the piano - but for what? Some kind of resolution; a provisional answer to the questioning that is his speech-sung voice. And, too, that some performances revel in a muscular thrashing, in power, which has little to do with confession at all.
Perhaps at Jandek's heart is not always a man who starves. But then, with the solo recordings that follow the acapella period around the turn of the millennium, that starving man is there and he is all there is. A starving man - and who starves because what is good for us (romance and work, ordinary sociability) is what he cannot find a way to want. He falls short of what we take for granted; he searches for what we, his listeners, presume ourselves to have. He is a man in exile, a man in suspense. Life, for him, is some kind of mistake, some aberration. And yet he sings. He starves.
I do not mean to imply that, listening to Jandek we are like the spectators outselves Kafka's hunger artist's cage; I don't think we are the well-fed watchers for whom his starvation is an art we can admire, and for which can be exchanged the panther who takes his place when he eventually expires. I wonder whether we listen from a kind of starvation of our own - from that place in us where we are not in place - where the possibility of life, ordinary life, seems to wear itself away. For the hunger-artist, there is an audience of the hungry. How else could we bear what we heard? How could we want it?
Granted, there are those for whom the oeuvre of Jandek is a kind of stunt. Some, like Irwin Chusid, marvel at it - for all his derision (and Chusid is an articulate and funny man - he's hilariously derisive) - there is his wonder that there were ever Jandek recordings at all. Why would anyone want to do that?, he asks, over and again. The fact of their existence perturbs him, and he seems to admire what he takes to be a mad tenacity. This is one of the images of Jandek circulated in the media - of an infinitely perverse man, a curiosity, an outsider, a kind of beast.
For their part, Corwood do not admit to being perturbed. Letters from Chusid are met with friendly toleration. I think the early days were so difficult that Chusid's acknowledgement was already an encouragement sufficient to go on. We find a similar attitude in the filmakers of Jandek on Corwood who admit they were first lured to their subject by his reputation - the 'myth' of Jandek, and we a little disappointed, at first by the music. Doesn't Katy Vine, the journalist who tracked down Sterling Smith in his Houston home admit the same?
For those listeners, there was of course also the record sleeves which, after the live performances, we can be sure depict Smith himself, photographed at various ages and in range of situations, often making use of photograph-altering software. Here, too, we find a kind of blankness - the blank face of Six and Six, which matches so perfectly this hard, affect-less recording (tracks that find their way into an affectless state at the heart of great depressive moods; the still eye of the storm), is defiantly - who? The smiling man in a cardigan in front of a barn is the opposite of the singer/intoner of Worthless Recluse ... what speaks by way of the failure of this correlation?
Interpretation breaks down. It runs aground on the record sleeves, which will eventually stop picturing Smith at all. Smith becomes a sufi on two of them. He is outside Mansion House in London, on deserted streets, on another. Each time, with respect to the recordings themselves, there is something missing. Who isn't tempted to read and reread the covers in search for a clue (what is he carrying on the sleeve of Blue Corpse?)? Something missing - and that it is who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek; it is Smith himself; it is the absence in the space of Smith, who cannot find a way to live.
We should admit the recordings are varied; there is a ludic Jandek - a playful, hilarious one (think, for example, of 'Mother's Day Card', where two voices sing the message on the inside of such a card); a spooky one (the multiple voices of 'Om'); a meditative one ('I Sit Alone and Think About You'). for a long time, I think, there were no recordings at all - the acapella recordings seem to come after a break; the voice is deeper.
This becomes especially noticeable on the studio recordings that follow the great I Threw You Away - for my money, the greatest in Jandek's mighty oeuvre. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum, Raining Down Diamonds ... what is being pursued from album to album? My answer, very simple: starvation. The inability to eat, to find a thing to eat. And more intensely than ever; more focusedly than ever.
These recordings, I think, close themselves from Chusid and other, similar listeners - those who are looking for the stunt-Jandek, to confirm or disconfirm the Jandek-myth. How, when you had heard them - really heard them - from your own starvation, could you go out to look for the man who made them. They are forbidding. They push us back, I fancy, as they push Smith back too - doesn't he wonder at them? Isn't he amazed, too at what he has made? How not to feel a kind of holy seriousness around these recordings, which hold themselves, with respect to our listening, at their own distance?
I am always moved to read of the quiet reverentness that, for the most part greets Jandek performances (though it is always fun to read of those who call out, welcome to ... X, and for Smith himself to - briefly - smile). We know seriousness. We know a kind of sacred - a distance - that surrounds the recordings. I'm sure that Smith feels it too. Sure, that is, that they also push him back from what he has done. What must it be to live at that remove from himself? To honour the recordings that made themselves from singing and playing?
I think this is part of what it means to be a hunger-artist who reaches the hunger-listeners who open their ears inside us. I think it demands a paring away, a blankness. The studio recordings have reached moods more terrifying than anything I have heard. Moods of a desolation so absolute - of a despair so refined that ... they escape what I can say of them. How to greet them except by silence? There are few artists whose work I will simply put on and listen to. Few whose work has a drama sufficient to carry that listening, when a hungry man steps forward to listen in my place.
Jandek: hunger artist. Perhaps the distance of the recordings - their rarefaction, their daring - is the double of that which the artist feels towards the world, towards the ordinary possibility of living. He sings in extremity - is it not reasonable to suppose that he lives, too, in extremity? How can he bear what he bears? But he sings, plays and records. He issues LPs. And now, of course, he plays live, too. I think there must be great joy in this. Why not? Hasn't the hunger artist found something to eat?
The live performances seem different to what has gone before. There's less distance around them. And, in the performances, less extremity. Is this what has permitted a kind of autobiographical turn in their lyrics? Is it because the presence of other musicians make Jandek something other than a machine that quarries despair? I admit I listen to the live recordings (with the exception of The Cell) with different ears. Or rather, that my ears are not starving; I do not listen from my own extremity. I enjoy the grooves; I laugh sometimes at the bathos of the lyrics ('Real Wild'); I like the fierce interplay and the surprise of what new collaborators allow. But I listen differently, and from another kind of distance.
December 2007, and it's a full year since the last studio recording - one of the longest breaks over 30 years of Jandek LPs. I want to hear him starve again. And I want to listen again from where I am starving.
Links to articles on Jandek's performances.