LWiA 4.3: 1. Outside

I can have little a 1700 word digression, as a treat.

(One section to go, I think?)

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Much as he had picked up on the same fluctuation of Ideaspace as Shinya Tsukamoto when crafting “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does” in 1989, Moore was exploring similar conceptual space here with another artist, namely David Bowie, who, just five months after the release of “The best of all tailors” in From Hell #7, released 1. Outside. This was his return, after sixteen years, to working with Moore’s longtime hero Brian Eno, and was billed as a concept album. As with most concept albums, this is a bit of a con—at least one track, the closing “Strangers When We Meet,” is recycled from his soundtrack album for The Buddha of Suburbia several years earlier—another dated all the way back to 1989 and his time with Tin Machine. Nevertheless, the alleged concept is striking: a world in which murder is legal if it can be justified as art.

Any potential priority dispute here is strained—1. Outside was recorded by February of 1995, two months before From Hell #7 came out, so mutual influence on that specific point is impossible. If one wanted to suggest that “The best of all tailors” sat plainly latent in From Hell from an earlier date then one could perhaps construct some sort of strained argument in which Bowie was inspired by the earlier installments, but there’s no reason to imagine he was hunting down copies of Taboo (although he was a fan of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, another literary descendent of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat). Besides, the underlying concept plainly stretches back to 1827 with Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts.”

No, as with phalluses as power tools six years earlier, there was simply something in the air. The real tell comes in “The Diary of Nathan Adler, or The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle,” a work of fiction first published in the January 1995 issue of Q before being recycled as the liner notes for 1. Outside. There the titular murder is positioned as taking place on the then-future date of New Year’s Eve, 1999. Bowie talked in interviews about the idea of some grandiose purging of the twentieth century’s bloodlust in order to make way for the millennium, with the titular art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue being a sort of ritual to end one century and commence the next. Not only is the parallel to Moore’s take on the Ripper murders obvious, the twentieth century that he imagines ending is tangibly the same one that Gull births.

Bowie, of course, had form with this sort of idea; like Moore he had stumbled into making art that had profound magical effects on the world, although Bowie’s were altogether more disastrous. In 1976, a few years after meeting Burroughs and embracing the cut-up method he had released “Station to Station,” a ten minute epic of a song born out of the paranoid depths of cocaine addiction, a blurred obsession with Crowley, Nietzche, and Kabbalah that saw him embodying the character of the Thin White Duke, a ghoulish aristocrat who dreamed of fascism as a kind of rock and roll apotheosis. Two years later, Donald Trump made his first entrance in the real estate business; forty years later he became President, with the house band at one point going so far as to play “Station to Station” at the Republican National Convention. This was notably the same year that Bowie died, his final music video seeing him wearing the same outfit he had on the back cover of Station to Station.

The timing here means that Bowie was unlikely to have ever entirely realized what he’d wrought; nevertheless, it’s not surprising to find him on the same wavelength as Moore. But the particulars of Bowie’s vision are nevertheless striking. Where Moore came to the idea of art-ritual murder from the starting point of looking at murder, Bowie got there through the art world, which he was by that point well-connected to, to the point of having joined the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine. Indeed, at the first recording sessions for the album Bowie greeted his bandmates with an array of paintbrushes and tools, declaring that they were going to redecorate the studio before they started. Once recordings started they consisted of unstructured jam sessions, with Eno assailing musicians with odd sounds or foreign radio broadcasts if he thought their playing became too conventional.

The culmination of this process came at a session in which Bowie arranged a table with various pages of books, magazines, and pre-generated cut-ups and began grabbing pages to produce lyrics, developing an entire setting, Oxford Town, New Jersey, characters to populate it, and the outlines of a story involving murder. The result, named Leon after a man falsely accused of the murder, was a three hour suite of rambling spoken word pieces over strange and dissonant backing. But, being comprised largely of cut-ups and improvisations, little about this plot was coherent—lyrics included things like “I was sitting there at the Laugh Hotel the other night looking for window demons and up comes this Leon in the jungle wing. He modeled a slouch unreal maybe a trip of the tongue from a slug male.” Perhaps understandably, record labels were skeptical, and Bowie, Eno, and the band regrouped and began reworking the project as a more conventional pop album with more traditionally structured songs, albeit ones rife with cut-up verbiage like “Poor dunce / He pushed back the pigmen / The Barbs laughed / The fool is dead” and “White boys falling on the fires of night / Flesh punks burning in their glue.” The result was, inevitably, his best since Scary Monsters.

“The Diary of Nathan Adler” was part of this effort to tame the unhinged sprawl of Leon into something with elements of coherence. Parts of it describe real artistic performances, such as Ron Athey’s self-injury performance art 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life. Others are plainly still cut-ups: “The caucasian suicide center, naked and grimy, silhouetted by fungus yellow street lamps female slashing way out saints for a dollar a time thrown downstairs if you can’t take any more.” Add a narrative that careens from 1970s Berlin to the millennium and you have one of the more bemusing efforts at rendering something more coherent ever taken. Bowie’s treatment of the actual murder within all of this reads like some kind of cyberpunk surrealist take on Mary Kelly’s autopsy report: “The limbs of Baby were then severed from the torso. Each limb was implanted with a small, highly sophisticated, binary code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory info-transplant substances, revealing themselves as little clue haikus, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids.”

What is crucial about this approach to art-ritual murder is, in the end, Nathan Adler, the detective reimagined as a critic, with the solution to the mystery not strictly speaking being who did it but rather whether the murder was a provocative and avant-garde piece of art or just pretentious and blood-spattered nonsense. It will not escape attention that this parallels the underlying creative tension within the album—Bowie’s contradictory desires to do a quasi-coherent three hour spoken word piece and to record some halfway decent pop songs (of which, for all its strangeness, 1. Outside still has several), and, ultimately, his efforts to find a middle ground between the two. This was a complex and at times downright wild balancing act; at one point guitarist Reeves Gabrels had to stop Bowie from saddling “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson”—an industrial-soaked stomper that ended up being the album’s first single—with a verse about English landscape paintrs. It also, of course, parallels the underlying discourse around the avant garde—the sneering “my five year old could have painted this” rejection on one side, the art world’s farcical embrace of childish pretension on the other.

Approaching from this direction Bowie finds a very different perspective on art-ritual murder. On the one hand, with much of the underlying content of his psychic landscape being cut-up pseudo-gibberish, Bowie was spared the harrowing effort of accounting for the fine technical points of mutilation; at no point did he have to instruct Eno to reposition a severed breast for aesthetic effect. On the other, however, Bowie saw an aspect of the topic that Moore did not: the fact that art-ritual murder necessarily implied a coherent aesthetics of the act, and more to the point that these aesthetics would derive most comfortably from the avant garde, a concept that is almost wholly absent in From Hell. Sure, he paid lip service to Burroughs, though this seems more for the grim joke of describing dismembering a woman as the cut-up method (a joke that Bowie is plainly nodding at as well) than a coherent description of Gull’s artistic epistemology. But for the most part, wading through the gore of Victorian Whitechapel, Moore has no need for the concept. His literary instincts always trended towards modernism, and with From Hell framed by a pair of scenes in 1923 that was more than sufficient for From Hell.

It is perhaps churlish to call this an oversight on Moore’s part. It is not a topic that flows directly from From Hell; Bowie did not so much hit on the avant garde as start there and work his way towards murder. And it is not as though Moore, blitzed by magical visions, personal upheavals, and a genuinely fearsome stack of research material, did not have other things to pay attention to. From Hell is not a comic about how to murder someone and make it art—that was merely a particularly thorny problem Moore had to solve for one of its sixteen chapters. He had no reason to go probing the aesthetic implications, little yet to think about how those implications might apply to mediums other than gruesome violence. But that fact did not make the questions less important, nor his failure to consider them less consequential.