Bataille unleashes ‘How Innocent’ and ‘Grave of Vampires’
Vocalist John Hannah waxes intellectual on the act of creating art and immortality.
“How Innocent,” the first proper song on The Wolves Amongst the Flower cassette, follows a few Baptist snake charmers and a rather eccentric congregation possessed by dance and ritualistic celebration. The old black-and-white clips have been spliced together to highlight the manic fanaticism of an honest-to-God Southern church revival. The result is utterly disorienting, its message unclear. What is the point? Should there be a point — or does the piece’s mystique lend to its power? As disconcerting as the song is, it’s still a toe-tapper, which matches the disarming euphoria captured in the footage.
“Grave of Vampires,” the second proper on the cassette, is a bit more difficult to digest. Gratuitous use of descriptors such as “surreal” or “avant-garde” have rendered them meaningless — perhaps the best way to describe this video is just plain weird. As with the video for “How Innocent,” the video for “Grave of Vampires” doesn’t suppose the pretense of philosophical depth, and yet, there’s a humble arrogance to the art on display here. Still, neither of the two clips are as “transgressive” as the band’s music would suggest — or, for that matter, the radical philosophy of their namesake Georges Bataille, whose influence is all over Wolves.
When asked for insight into the meaning of the videos, vocalist John Hannah brought up the “problematic nature of self commentary,” discussing the idea in his typical erudite fashion:
It may sound kitschy, but regarding art, I generally prefer for all answers to be already present in the work and thus left for the viewer (or reader, listener, etc.) to engage with it on their own accord. This notion is akin to the Barthesian notion that “the death of the author is the beginning of the reader,” however, I feel that there is something much larger that is operating behind the presentation of any creative work.
The willful manifestation of Art is incumbent upon some sort of creative force, and, as such, represents an example of the artist as a demiurge and their art, therefore, being a work of divine theurgy. Despite this religious language, I feel it represents a Nietzschean sense of Art and its potential power a fulfillment of the madman’s demand in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that after our murder of God we must ourselves become as gods in order to be considered worthy of such an act. Therefore, even if we are to say that the author may be dead, this has a larger implication, and brings a question that if the artist acts as a God what does it mean for the author to be dead? There is an assertion from Emil Cioran that God is not a theologian, or essentially that the creator is incapable of contextualizing its own creation. To try and bring these strands together: If the capacity for human creativity to manifest itself upon the world as an extension of will represents a transcendence — taking up the mantle of God to legitimize the murder — and yet, in the creation of art we say that the author is dead, there must be a grounding for this event, one that represents a theothanatological conception of aesthetics. The creation of any art is the willful manifestation into material form of its own sovereign freedom, and as Thomas J. J. Altizer locates the moment of theologically conceived Christian God’s death in the crucifixion event — that the manifestation of the transcendent into flesh was subject to the same limitations of our own materiality — the death of Christ at Golgotha thus represents the literal death of God. I feel in the making of any art the creator in some way engages in a similar act of self-extinction. He did, however, reveal this much:
Music is that which speaks when language fails. It is a scream into the abyss. Georges Bataille expresses that, “We only have two certainties in this world — that we are not everything and that we will die.” Our incapability of speaking on that which exists beyond limits thus necessitates music, one that arises then from the very tension of existence, the alienation of the impotence of our finitude against the backdrop of eternity and oblivion. Bataille is currently working on a debut LP.