On Arthur Russell and "Virtuous Art"

I never thought much about Renoir until a visit to the Barnes Foundation in December awakened me to my disgust for Renoir. It’s not just that his paintings are corny, or that they offend my political sensibilities more than any other painter in the collection. It’s the way they seem to mummify their subjects in a gauze of eerie serenity. They beg their pleasantness in a desperate, almost volatile way, as if the artist would rather have destroyed his models than let them unsettle his fantasy. These are just my impressions. With respect to the Renoir Sucks at Painting movement, I don’t recommend any course of action. That’s not the point.

By contrast, the Cézannes were very soothing. In rooms filled with the baby-head stench of Renoir’s little girls, they were open windows. Looking at them, my breathing slowed a bit; I felt the absence of that restless, possessive instinct that attaches itself to beauty.

Maybe part of the reason those Renoirs seemed so grotesque is that I felt an uncomfortable sense of recognition — I projected my own tendency to project. Renoir’s vision is almost a parody of how people appear when you’re unhealthily fixated on them. In the wildest throes of a crush, I have looked at people that way, and felt quietly radioactive with my own unstable bliss. I wasn’t hurting anyone, but I wasn’t right.

Most obsessive fixations go unrepresented, and if you keep them to yourself then quite frankly they’re nobody else’s business. In that sense it doesn’t “matter” how recklessly you ingest someone’s image. Still, it seems to me that it does matter, even if nobody else ever finds out, and even if nobody else has the right to censure you for it. It’s hard to articulate why it matters within the structures of modern secular morality, within which we’re free to think whatever we like about whomever we like until it affects someone else. I think that’s the right policy, but policy isn’t everything.

Around the time I visited the Barnes Foundation I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, hoping it might help provide a solid, secular foundation for the moral relevance of crushing. For Murdoch, the way that we hold others in mind — whether we try to understand them as they are, or project our own emotional needs and egocentric distortions — is the basis of moral life. This sort of “inner action” has external, if unquantifiable consequences: if we attune ourselves to the reality of others, and transcend our self-interest, we will act better; if everyone does this, the world will be more hospitable. But the practice of such attention is worthwhile for its own sake, the same way that meditation or prayer is worthwhile for its own sake. It promotes a certain alignment. And it makes death less terrifying.

Disentangling resentment, resisting pettiness, getting over yourself — these things are not easy to do, and much of social life discourages them, including popular morality itself. “Virtue,” in the everyday sense, is more of a public performance than a quiet, constant unknotting, and judging other people, rather than trying to understand them, is thought to be central to moral upkeep. Fortunately, in Murdoch’s view, art is a moral exercise. Great art, she argues, cultivates a direct line to “the real” — to people as they are, and the world as it is — and sets an example for the onlooker. “Great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self.”

One of her examples is Cézanne, who “did not paint ‘I like it,’” she writes, paraphrasing Rilke, “he painted, ‘there it is.’” In other words, he had no agenda: he saw the inner valor in his subjects, and let that dictate their representation. I can think of another example: Arthur Russell.

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For most of his working life, and the decade after his death — in 1992, at age 40 — Arthur Russell was a niche figure, beloved throughout different music scenes in New York, but not widely known beyond them. In 2004, two compilations of his music brought his work to a wider audience, whose affection was so automatic it was hard to believe he had ever been obscure. People loved him with the sort of ardor and devotion that is normally reserved for longtime loves. Part of his appeal was his eclecticism — or “fusion,” in his words, which “could literally be the understanding of the common denominators of two musical styles.” He appealed to fans of dance music, indie rock, and the avant-garde, all of whom found something to love in his published repertoire, which has grown a lot since.

Russell was formally trained in a number of musical traditions: he studied Western contemporary classical at the San Francisco Conservatory; Hindustani classical at the Ali Akbar College of Music; and electronic composition at the Manhattan School of Music. But his style was deceptively offhand. His lyrical themes are simple, almost silly, like placeholder text; but they stick in your head, and they work. His songs were meant to draw moods out of ordinary experiences, like going swimming (“Let’s Go Swimming”), wanting to call someone on a payphone (“Make 1,2”) or admiring a friend’s home renovations (“You Have Did the Right Thing When You Put That Skylight In”). Allen Ginsberg, a longtime friend and collaborator, praised his poetic gifts. In a postcard cited by Russell’s biographer, Tim Lawrence, he writes: “Staying with the real… is a rare art you have.”

Russell was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1951. He was named after his father, Charles, or Chuck, who owned an insurance agency and would eventually become the town’s mayor. Arthur ended up going by his middle name. His parents were upstanding citizens by the standards of time and place, and they both loved music: Chuck had “a collection of three to four hundred LPs,” according to Lawrence, and his mother, Emily, played cello, which would become Arthur’s instrument too. As a child, he was gentle and intelligent, but introverted and prone to sulking. His father would sometimes call him a “poor sport.” But he always had a certain grace: Lawrence reports that a childhood friend, Kent Goshorn, “had been ‘kind of impressed’ when he saw [Arthur] react with laughter rather than tears after breaking his arm at the high jump.”

He was handsome, but he had terrible acne, and in small-town Iowa he was naturally an outcast. With a tight group of high school friends he shared records, read poetry, dropped acid, and eventually ran away — first to Iowa City, then to San Francisco, at the height of the counterculture. There, he got himself arrested on marijuana charges, and was somehow released into the custody of a Buddhist commune called Kailas Shugendo, led by a charismatic Russian emigre named Neville Warwick. Arthur would follow him for the next two years.

The commune transformed him from a wayward teen into a disciplined young man, and shaped him as a musician: he played cello with the Kailas Shugendo Mantric Sun Band (which is what brought him to Ginsberg’s attention), and at weekly fire-walking ceremonies. He practiced in a closet where, in Lawrence’s words, “he lost the capacity to distinguish between himself and music, and playing became a form of meditation.” He enrolled at the Ali Akbar College of Music, where, to quote Matt Marble — author of Buddhist Bubblegum, a detailed account of Russell’s Buddhist practice and how it influenced his work — “the spiritual discipline he encountered at Warwick’s ascetic commune could now be completely devoted to music itself.” There, he learned “the function of drone, the significance of the syllable, the role of ras or mood, and the importance given to disciplined practice, or riaz.”

Buddhism would also shape Arthur’s creative ambitions. He wanted to make music that promoted spiritual principles, not through instruction but by modeling a certain mindset. And he wanted that music to find an audience. Influenced by pop — the Beach Boys, Abba, Mystic Moods Orchestra — he sought to develop a sound that anyone could connect with. In 1973, he decided New York was the best place to do that.

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The writer Kevin Killian, who had a sort-of fling with Russell in the late 1970s, wrote that “Arthur said it was the quality of the street noise that made different composers write as they did, that John Cage wrote very differently when he worked in San Francisco than he did in New York, and differently than in the other cities. I thought he was projecting… New York was drilling syncopation into his head as it had Lorca and Stravinsky and Piet Mondrian.”

There is probably more recorded music about New York than any other location in the Western world. Most of it represents a time and place in the city’s history that has passed into something else; if you listen on headphones, it casts an emotional shade over public space that is both romantic and distracting. The first time I ever arrived in the city, on a school bus from Toronto, my classmate and I spent a good half hour attempting to queue up the right song for when the skyline finally came into view. Years later, in making a home here, I passed through a number of different illusions, glomming on to one aestheticized impression or another, hoping it could sub in for the place as a whole. Walking around with Russell in my ears is how I developed a feel for the city itself. He didn’t narrativize New York so much as catch a signal.

New York was a good fit for Arthur. Before long, he’d settled into a unit in Ginsberg’s apartment building at 12th Street and Avenue A, and been offered the position of musical director for the Kitchen, then a relatively new, but respected center for avant-garde music. He was already assembling a circle of collaborators, fellow composers whose distinctive sounds would be foundational to his: trombonist Peter Zummo, percussionist Mustafa Ahmed, bassist Ernie Brooks, and pianist Elodie Lauten, to name a few. He staged performances of his orchestral works and got his pop compositions into the hands of major label personnel. There was interest from Mercury and Columbia — John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan, briefly thought Russell could be next in line. But Arthur’s ambitions would always clash with his temperament: as he hissed once at Donald Murk, then his boyfriend/manager, “I will not be defined.”

Arthur had significant relationships with women, but in New York his sexuality expanded, and ultimately shifted toward men; he caught a joyful interim between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis. Around 1976 he started dating a popular hairdresser named Louis Aquilone, who took him dancing at the Gallery, run by his friend Nicky Siano. It was one of a network of discos then flourishing in downtown New York: Beginning with David Mancuso’s Loft parties in 1970, and continuing through to the Paradise Garage, which opened in 1977, they welcomed a racially mixed and mainly, but not exclusively gay crowd, to a soundtrack of predominantly Black American music. The atmosphere was open and ecstatic, and Russell felt an immediate affinity. As Lawrence and others have noted, disco’s hypnotic propulsion shared formal similarities with much of the music he’d studied; the dance floor embodied the kind of free imaginative space he was already trying to conjure with his work.

Russell would go on to record a series of disco epics, starting with “Kiss Me Again,” produced by Siano, followed by “Is It All Over My Face?” By that time, the blissful atmosphere epitomized by the Loft had been co-opted by more exclusive locales like Studio 54 in Midtown. Russell, as Lawrence notes, was trying to capture the messy freedom of downtown discos; his work brings to mind packed, humid crowds and pheromones. One former Paradise Garage dancer, in an interview with Time Out New York, remembered carrying a bag to the club at 4am in order to change from his “night-out” clothes into sweatpants and sneakers, more appropriate for the sort of dancing he was there to do.

To get this sound, Russell brought in top-notch professionals like the Ingram brothers, major players in Philly soul, as well as personnel from New York’s avant-garde and punk scenes, like Henry Flynt and a young David Byrne. The atmosphere in the studio, booked deliberately on full moons, was “free-flowing” and improvisational. Sometimes the studio pros were confused by Russell’s methods, but that was part of the plan. For the sessions that produced “Is It All Over My Face?,” Russell and his co-producer, Steve D’Acquisto, brought in partygoers from the Loft, who sang, and partied, until the wee hours. (Melvina Woods, who sings lead on the track’s best-known version, was a Loft regular.)

These sorts of methods produced the desired energy, but they didn’t translate immediately into smash singles. “If you hit play with Arthur’s music it sounds like the Grateful Dead,” Bob Blank, of Blank Tapes Studios, told Lawrence. “There are moments of brilliance, but you either have to be high or extremely patient, because someone is getting into a groove.” The original version of “Is It All Over My Face?” met with a relatively lukewarm reception in the clubs until DJ and producer Larry Levan remixed it for the crowds at Paradise Garage, wringing an instant groove out of something more sprawling and chaotic. Russell preferred his own version, but Levan’s mix became a major regional hit (it features prominently in the documentary Paris Is Burning) and is still a nightclub staple. Other than “Answers Me,” which was sampled by Kanye West on The Life of Pablo, it arguably remains the song that non-fans are most likely to have heard.

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A pattern runs through Russell’s career and its afterlife: a dependence, sometimes reluctant, on affectionate impresarios to bring his music to an audience. Not only DJs and producers like Levan, François Kevorkian, and Walter Gibbons, but also patrons, managers, and curators: People like Tom Lee, his partner from the late 1970s until his death, who supported him financially, took care of him when he got sick, and has looked after his legacy since his passing; and Steve Knutson, formerly of Tommy Boy Records, who started a label called Audika devoted to Russell’s archive.

One thing that comes up over and over again in accounts of Russell’s life and career is his inability to finish anything. He would go back into the studio to lay needless additional tracks, or remix the same song dozens of times, or just rewrite it again and again — the same tunes emerge in different forms like motifs throughout the stages of his working life. The notion of a “final version” was anathema to the way he thought about music. Songs were vital systems: they had certain characteristics and an essential mood, identities that could be expressed in any number of ways, like living organisms. As Lawrence writes, releasing one version of a song was a bit like killing it. “If I was to reduce Arthur’s musical principles to a single idea it would be his willingness to look at things from every imaginable perspective,” the composer Ned Sublette told Lawrence. This was a noble idea, but it could make him hell to deal with.

When Russell died, as Ben Ratliff has reported, he left over a thousand tapes, a whole book of unfinished songs. Lee and Knutson have overseen the completion of many of them — a delicate, intuitive, and sometimes exasperating operation. “The sheer amount of it overwhelmed me at times,” Peter Broderick, who pieced together the songs that became 2019’s Iowa Dream, told NPR. “I would throw my hands up in the air and be like, ‘What is going on here?’ […But] I never felt any ill feelings towards him. I feel so, so tender towards Arthur.”

Russell wanted to make music that could speak to anyone. The irony is that this could sound pretty abstruse. The one cohesive album he completed in his lifetime, 1986’s World of Echo, is particularly hard to crack open. Many of its tracks could be power-pop anthems, but reconfigured in a strange, parenthetical space with its own physical laws. Most albums are events, passing through stages; the really good ones are self-sustaining worlds in addition. World of Echo is primarily the second thing — “a space of free and constant mutability, a place in which ‘any input’ was welcome,” writes Marble. The album feels more spatial than temporal, not so much advancing through time as showing more of what it is, a little like roaming around in a video-game realm after the game has been completed.

That same year, Russell tested positive for HIV. His health would decline over the next half-decade; he started to develop dementia, and he got throat cancer. Throughout it all he kept working, and the fate of that work fell ultimately to Lee.

Russell frequently undercut his own chances at popular success. It wasn’t self-sabotage so much as an existential tension between his desires and his principles. He understood that reality is in constant flux, and that fixed ideas are deceptive. This foreclosed anything like effective self-marketing — presenting his “thing” in a legible way was no more within his capabilities than contenting himself with a final mix. It would have been substituting the instance for the concept. Avert your eyes if you hate astrology, but in the spirit of Russell’s own interest in the pastime, he was a true Gemini–Taurus cusp: he had the Gemini’s longing to communicate with everyone, with the Taurus’s stubborn inability to do things any way other than his own. This foiled a lot of projects during his lifetime, but the music emerged from the tension — this interplay was the project after all.

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Russell is an odd subject for this newsletter. He’s one of the few artists I adore but don’t feel particularly close to. As a person, he seems really cool. But I’m not part of his cult of personality — really, for an artist with such a zealous cult following, he doesn’t seem to have much of a cult of personality. Compare him with Laura Nyro, an artist whose work I am fanatical about. On the Laura Nyro Facebook group I am part of, people call themselves “Nyrotics” and post rare photographs along with rare demo tracks, along with poems about how beautiful and special she was. I love that Facebook group. I feel really comfortable there. “Laura” is an entire identity, but Arthur fandom is looser, if no less committed. We seem to need less from him personally. “Arthur” stands more for an ethos, an approach; there’s an impulse to let him be.

The writer Lucy Schiller, describing Russell’s following in The New Yorker, says that “several fans have told me similar things: that they feel, listening to Russell, as if he is in their skulls, sharpening the world they see in front of them.” One of his early orchestral compositions, a performance piece integrating poetry and music, was designed to allow its audience freedom to roam — to “plug out and then plug back in again without losing anything essential,” as he told Melody Maker. The piece was called City Park, and I think that’s a good metaphor for his fan base. It’s like we’re all sitting in the sun, looking at different things.

Despite his famous introversion, contemporary accounts make Russell sound very magnetic. “He seemed to be enormously popular,” Killian writes. “At a coffee shop we’d be eating and our table would get filled one by one by guys he’d worked with or danced with, and I remember having to introduce myself once because he was too high to remember my name.” He had charisma, and still does — a soft charisma that compels a certain attention while suggesting its terms. Consciously or not, he was good at making people want to look after him. “Arthur really wanted to be a popular composer, but he didn’t do anything to make that happen except write brilliant music,” Philip Glass, who would release two albums of Russell’s work on his own labels, told Lawrence. “He didn’t have a plan to make that happen in the way Frank Zappa had that plan or I had that plan. He just seemed to feel that the music should be popular. I was very interested in helping him.” When I read this quote I thought, there is a good chance that your interest was part of the plan.

My favorite Arthur Russell song, and probably his best loved, is “That’s Us/Wild Combination,” which, according to NPR, was edited down to pop format after his death. For years I assumed it was a simple song about going on a road trip with someone you love. Turns out that’s true, in a way — as Schiller writes in The Iowa Review, it was inspired by Russell family car trips to Gull Lake in Minnesota. It even contains some midwestern dad-isms (“We’re leaving at five in the morning/We could get better mileage”) which in Arthur’s phrasing become poetic. “I think he was conflicted about how to spend time with his family,” Lee says in Matt Wolf’s 2008 documentary, Wild Combination. I take that to mean that they loved each other, but they were different people, which made it hard to be close. So “Wild Combination” is a love song about a love that can’t settle — that endures without a stable form. So the form is the song.

Throughout Arthur’s life, he seemed to long for Iowa: the “Corn Belt,” as a concept, makes its way into a lot of his work. He wore trucker hats in press photos, and played in a band called the Flying Tractors. But from the moment he left, he never wanted to live there again; it was a place he preferred to miss. As Schiller writes, the doctors in Oskaloosa wouldn’t have treated him when he was dying. His parents recognized Lee as his primary caregiver, and deferred to him on medical decisions; in the years afterward, the three remained close. In Wolf’s documentary, Chuck Russell recounts his last visit to see Arthur in New York. His hair was falling out from chemotherapy, and Chuck began to comb it. “I said, Charley, you’re a good sport,” Chuck says. “And he was out of it, and he opened his eyes and looked at me, and he said, Are you sure? I said, Yup. I’m sure. Those were the last words I heard him say.”

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The term I use most often to describe Russell to people who’ve never heard him is “grace” — as in, “he was in a state of grace.” I have a distinct idea of what “grace” is, but I don’t think I know what it literally means. My working definition comes from Leonard Cohen — another Buddhist in popular music, though I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not — who used the term during a roundtable discussion on Canadian TV in the 1960s. Asked by the moderator, Pierre Berton, what he meant, he replied smoothly: “A state of grace is that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you. It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order. But having that kind of, uh, like an escape ski. Down over a hill. Just going through the contours…” Here, Berton cuts him off: “Oh, you have lost me.” When I first saw the clip, I took Berton’s side, but over the years Cohen’s definition has become second nature.

What makes Russell’s work “virtuous,” by Murdoch’s criteria — its cable to “the real” — is its flow, its commitment to irresolution, its lack of agenda. It demonstrates an understanding that love, along with everything else of real value, is a mutable constant, taking and losing one form after another. Maybe grace, in addition to a sort of equilibrium, is a certain power of recognition.

I’ve been citing Murdoch as though I fully agree with her, but my copy of The Sovereignty of Good is full of margin arguments. Her aesthetic theory chafes me: a lot of what I think of as great art is bad art by her standards, hatched from an artist’s obsessions or abject needs, or else a rejection of shared reality for a private alternative. The reason I hate Renoir is because — and this itself is sheer projection, of course — his work seems unconcerned with the tension between his preferred reality and what’s really real. The aura of peace in his work is “arrogant and warlike” — it eliminates conflict by obliterating all trace of opposition.

I think I relate most to tension — the moral anguish of falling in love with ideals while longing to really be close; or living under the thumb of one’s own ego. Much of the time I am stuck in the morass of need and desire, trying to find something worthwhile in the experience.

Murdoch cites a letter from Rilke to his wife, praising Cézanne for his impartiality, saying he paints what is there, whether he likes it or not. But “I think there was a conflict,” he wrote in a letter a few days earlier, “a mutual struggle between the two procedures of, first, looking and confidently perceiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what had been perceived… the two, perhaps as a result of becoming conscious, would immediately start opposing each other, talking out loud, as it were, and go on perpetually interrupting and contradicting each other.” That feels like a truer and more honest account of what striving for “the real” feels like.

Russell’s art accepts the mutual struggle; it’s at peace with the unholdability of longed-for things and the is-ness of what is. It elevates me, lifts me out of bad habits of mind, and helps me to meet the world on its own terms, if only for a bit. That makes it virtuous, and I think virtue in art is a characteristic, perhaps, like color palate or key signature — a quality, not a judgment of value.

It’s not necessarily my favorite quality. A theme that feels more vivid and relatable to me is the pathos of distance — the wild longing I hear in Laura Nyro. I would call this kind of art “romantic.” Renoir might fall into a third category, of art that substitutes reality for a false beacon. But I like a lot of that art, too: work that lives in its own preoccupations — with sex, drugs, adrenaline — without forcing them on anyone else. Sometimes I relate to it, and sometimes I don’t, but it holds my attention; I want to understand.