Four Stars: The Ideal Crew

Art & Language, Sighs Trapped by Liars (Rosalind Krauss), 1996 showing the first two pages of "Art & Language Turns to Painting, A Strange Quirk in the Fate of Conceptual Art"

Lyrics

Look up in the sky And see way out of reach There are four bright stars A waiting world to teach They have scientific truth That's justified in reason Psychology and politics History and vision And if you won't believe it Or just can't make it out You will feel their anger Imbecile, they shout Well, not shout exactly It's more like freezing solid Sure that they are more than clean As you are worse than squalid

Girl with the typewriter How she sings and rhymes Picasso's torn up papers Once gave her shitty times And she will not forgive Perceived humiliation By a dusty woman on a TV station One day in New York City Her head started to whirl And then while never young she was no more a girl But she keeps on going with the same complaints And now that she is old there need be no restraint To her teenage fury That we know theorizes I don't hear what you say And I will keep the prizes

Turn the volume low Never set it ? enough Good luck's children has rarely been shy His collapse backbone can give him such a pain If it's not business class Then he won't get the plane He's been corrupted By Roy Orbison ?, she says Drinks warm water for fun He loves patronizing all four stars do This affirms the radicality One soaked in piss, don't you say he's bad Said the surfing man So happy in the glory of a magic mountain tan He's my real good buddy, often calls me on the phone I know He's a radical right down to the bone With kosher wieners and banana pie The artist doesn't know but the critics know why A clean-cut prick, son of Henry IV He fell in a puddle and went there no more One day, trying hard, he thought this is humor Accepting the truth of professional rumor That arrival he hates made enormous wealth From something he wished he could claim for himself He inquired if a living had best been called killing A smear of coward's dirt to persuade the willing Sitting down to dinner, all tidy and neat And pressed near a handsome woman he suddenly possessed Rose up from the table, mouth beginning to foam I won't stay for a minute, I am going home He's had the bad taste to criticize And in that she's mistaken, you'll see it's unwise I'll say this to you before I go I hope you choke and that death does come slow

The Frenchman said ? But it's broken dolls you will all see They reveal to us all how our minds are made No kind of desire is truth decayed What the typing woman and I have won Is much better than sex and it leaves out the fun All four of the stars then tighten their jaws If anyone doubts that we know the laws Of our ? without flaws We'll find ? ways to certain they burn and crash And throw everything of theirs in the trash In the trash, in the trash, in the trash

Chronology

• Sighs Trapped by Liars
  • Elisa Randazzo - vocals
  • Sandy Yang - additional vocals
• Art & Language Sings a Song

Interpretations

Art & Language presented a fictionalized discussion of the song in Art & Language Sings a Song (2008). On the origins of the song, they state that "the text took its shape from two distinctly related performances. One was a sort of doggerel rant from Bob Dylan ['I Shall Be Free No.10'] [...] and the other one was Ruby Wright's 'Three Stars.' [...] The record commemorates Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper [...] The refrain, which Ruby Wright sings in a sweet, slightly echo-assisted voice is apparently as far from Dylan's rant as you can go. They share a heritage, however, in the development of folk music, country & western, and the blues. The three stars are dead, killed in a plane crash in 1959. The four stars are not dead. They are presumably alive, even if they are fictious [...]"

The second verse (the one about "the girl-with-a-typewriter") is directed toward art critic Rosalind E. Krauss and her article "Art & Language Turns to Painting, A Strange Quirk in the Fate of Conceptual Art" published in 1995. Art & Language published a response in 1996 and they used copies of her article in their series Sighs Trapped by Liars (1997).

Art & Language, letter to Art Monthly, May 1997

Mick Finch claims that Art & Language 'allowed themselves to be savaged by Rosalind Krauss' without responding ('Art Inc.', AM Correspondence, March 1997). Rosalind Krauss's article, 'Art & Language se met à la peinture; étrange aléa de l'art conceptuel,' was published in French in Art Press hors-série No 16, 1995. We leave aside the issue of whether Ms Krauss's attack on Charles Harrison, Art in Theory, the Open University, the BBC and Art & Language can properly be considered a savaging of Art & Language or of anything else. The fact remains, however, that there was no opportunity to publish a response until the subsequent hors-série, No. 17, 1996. If Mr Finch consults that issue he will find a text by Baldwin, Harrison, Ramsden and Wood ('Rosalind Krauss: un pétard mouillé') which should more than satisfy his inclination to play the sportif Récamier.

In 2007, Art & Language again discussed their disagreement with the "girl-with-a-typewriter" in Albert, Joan and Sinbad.