Kanye West’s Great Unfinished
The best thing I’ve read about The Life of Pablo is Jon Caramanica’s piece in the NY Times in which Caramanica posits that Kanye West has essentially created the perfect album for this digital age. Which is to say, an album that is maybe not really an album, but rather just an ongoing narrative/experiment/art project that maybe will never have any end and will never really be finished.
The result is an exemplar of modern celebrity musicmaking: a dramatic, rococo, continuous (and possibly still continuing) narrative that spans music, fashion, theater and politics. Mr. West has turned the album release process — historically a predictably structured event, and lately rewritten by stars like Beyoncé as precise, sudden assault — into a public conversation, one taking place on Twitter, YouTube, Periscope and in Madison Square Garden as much as in the studio. With flux embedded in its DNA, “Pablo” is crisply alive, like water that’s still boiling even though the flame is off. Pay close attention to the multiple iterations and you hear an artist at work, as well as a celebrity tending his image. It’s everything bared — process as art.
So it’s possible that Pablo is a living, breathing thing that’s going to keep changing and growing. It reminds me of Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, which he worked on during his entire life as a poet all the way up until he died. What this meant is that Leaves went from a first edition of 12 poems into a book that now has over 400 poems. It wasn’t until he was lying on his deathbed that Whitman finally declared his book to be finished. This final edition of Leaves is thus appropriately called the deathbed edition.
There was an article that appeared in The New Yorker last month where Calvin Tomkins detailed the Met’s plans to finally embrace contemporary art, which includes the opening of a new branch dedicated to modern work. This new wing, called the Met Breuer and located at the Whitney’s old digs on Madison Avenue, will open in March with an exhibit called Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. Tomkins writes that this exhibit “spans more than five hundred years of art works, from the Renaissance to the present, which, for one reason or another, have been left in a state that could be considered incomplete.”
The show is the curatorial brainchild of Sheena Wagstaff, who was brought in from London’s Tate Modern four years ago to assume the role of chairwoman of the Met’s new Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The show, which opens on March 18, will feature some undeniable modern heavyweights, including Manet, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, etc. These are artists even people with a cursory understanding of art know to be modern masters. But why have an exhibit displaying work that even the artists perhaps deemed incomplete?
More from the New Yorker:
Although unfinished works have come down to us from ancient times, Wagstaff explained, the concept of an art that was intentionally non-finito emerged during the Renaissance, to describe paintings whose technique did not conform to traditional notions of composition and “finish.” “When it gets to the twentieth century, there are a whole lot of other issues attached to the idea of unfinished,” she said. “Does it matter that something is unfinished? Is process more important than choosing a goal?”
Who knows if Kanye West is familiar with art movements that date back to the Renaissance - and this concept developed by artists of the era that broke from traditional ideas of what is considered finished; but, really, we shouldn’t put anything past him at this point. Kanye is now operating on such a different level and in such a different head space that maybe he is pulling all the best ideas from the past and present to create a singular, hyper-modern album that is somehow so ahead of its time as to be a message from the future.
When experimental filmmakers or writers talk about breaking from conventions to create a different kind of film or novel - something weirder, more human - they talk about wanting to deconstruct the art form until it becomes something new, even if once you dig down into its roots you see that it is in fact still rooted in the traditional forms. But by breaking through - or breaking apart - the surface of conventional narrative, they’re showing us that this wild new way of seeing the form was always there to reveal itself to anyone brave enough to look for it. The director Harmony Korine has often spoken about how he started making movies already burned out with how movies always get made - namely, with a beginning, middle and end. And so he set out to do it differently. When he makes movies, Korine recently told Vice, he is “trying to get to a point where the movie-making is more inexplicable—an energy, rather than anything steeped in narrative. I was always trying to do something that was closer to a drug experience, or a hallucinatory experience, or something more like a feeling.”
So maybe what Kanye has created is not an ‘experimental’ rap record in terms of song structure; but what he’s created is a rap record that is experimental in its form so that he’s challenging our reflex notions of the form, and to reconsider how we consume it, how we think about it, and ultimately how we form an opinion on it. When a critic reviews Pablo, the review is already outdated because Yeezy’s changed up what songs appear on the album, who appears on the songs, what order they appear within the track list, etc. Maybe The Life of Pablo really isn’t an album, but rather something more interesting: the process of a brilliant artist revealing itself to us, free from the conventions of narrative so that what is being created is a feeling.
And if we’re lucky, perhaps Kanye will keep adding and subtracting and - as Whitman said about his approach to Leaves of Grass - keep hacking away at Pablo. And maybe he’ll do this for years, decades, until he’s an old, feeble man and on his deathbed, like Whitman, he’ll finally say: I’m finished.
