... Et lumiere.

Photographic views of Paris propose two dissimilar worlds: that of daytime and that of night. . . . The elements of the night are the great stage directors of the social fantastic, which is ingenuous and always easily understandable.

Pierre Mac Orlan, 1930

Photographers, like detectives, often try to capture a subject through repeated visits to the scene of the crime. When that subject is night, as it was for Brassai in Paris in the early '30s, the resulting images are likely to possess some of the crude and revelatory qualities of dreams. In Brassai's night world, shadows reveal more than they conceal, anthropomorphized by the light sources that create them. The Art Nouveau railings adorning the city's Metros assume otherworldly personae, isolated by the photographer's lens against the darkness. Prostitutes and dandies emerge as luminous specters in brothel doorways and at lamp-lit street corners.

When Brassai began his nocturnal Paris rambles, the Surrealists had nearly cornered the market on dreams as material for artistic expression. The fruits of the unconscious, they realized, lay all about, waiting to be plucked by those who knew how to look. As the retrospective exhibition this fall at the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona clearly illustrated, Brassai knew how to look. The first major Brassai retrospective since 1979, this compelling show was notable for reuniting two groups of images that first appeared more than forty years apart, in the books Paris de nuit (1932) and Le Paris secret des annees 30 (1976). The earlier book features charcoal-y heliogravures of cobble-stoned roads, industrial and residential buildings, strikingly illuminated statuary--primarily outdoor Paris; Le Paris secret beckons readers inside the city's back-alley bars and brothels. The photographs were actually conceived as a single project, but the books separate them into two statements, the first romantic and "presentable," the second decadent--so much so that it could not be published at the time. To bring these photographs together was a welcome act of revisionism, restoring the intermingling of the respectable and the risque that Brassai found in '30s Paris. Brassai was friendly with Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Man Ray, and other Surrealists, and his photographs often appeared in Surrealist publications. Yet he turned down Breton's invitation to join the group. What emerged in the Barcelona show were the subterranean links between Brassai's overtly Surrealist work, most of it created for Minotaure, and the nighttime photographs of Paris de nuit and Le Paris secret. While his daytime street photographs still retained their semblance of the documentary, the show revealed the night images as stylized constructions, the output of an artist who frequently demanded full and patient cooperation from the players in what were essentially theatrical tableaux.

Reinterpretations were also invited by some of the prints in the exhibition--the power trio of guitar, bass, and drums. The vocals of leader/guitarist King Buzzo--growling and rumbling, sometimes indecipherable, seemingly not human--are a fourth instrument, adding an eerie undertow to the thunderous pull. The sound is intensely percussive, as if everything were being banged out, nailed down. The new album, Houdini, ends with over ten minutes of drums, and while there are any number of lengthy drum solos in rock history, this is definitely not one of them. The piece sounds like a virtual war zone. Shots ring out, tanks rumble by, bombs rain down, sabers, even, are rattled. Melvins' music is about time-- expanding time, or forgetting time (the same thing?). In punk's heyday, bands like the Ramones could tear through a song in a minute or less; a decent pop band can make two verses and a chorus clock in at under three minutes; and the generic heavy metal band might need five. Melvins, as they touch upon, twist, and quote from punk, pep, and metal, could very well use all that time--all nine minutes--for a number of their own, and there'd be no guarantee they'd be done, or even have gotten it completely going. (The band has joked that they're not responsible for "grunge rock" but for "dirge rock.") King Buzzo may admit that Melvins like to ruin a song, but their anarchic rearrangements of a song's beginning and end, their experiments with speed and duration, texture and volume (hushed tones one minute, roaring the next), and the way they deal with sound as a physical entity have less to do with something being ruined than with something being invented. Melvins have elevated the heavy metal form into an almost intellectual pursuit. They have given it a precisely dysfunctional bent, and, at times, a political dimension. The poster for a concert at the New Music Seminar last summer featured a portrait of Stalin and the phrase, "The NMS People's Revolutionary Council Invites You, Comrade, to an Evening of Class Struggle"--not exactly the party message of the "alternative" bands that play at this hip music-industry event. The high point of the concert was a version of the Flipper song "Sacrifice," with brooding, growled-out lines like "Raising God and State so the nation will live," "It's time to enlist," and "They demand a sacrifice of your life." Given the current state of global conflict, the song functions as nothing less than '90s agitprop. It is anthemic. It is Melvins' "Dark Star," their "Stairway to Heaven"--even if it's more like a stairway to hell. With Houdini, produced in part by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, Melvins have their first major-label release after nearly ten years together. And yet their perverse relation to their career remains intact: their first official press release begins, "To be afraid when you are alone, in the dark, faced with the unknown, the unspeakable; that is understandable fear. To be afraid, mortally afraid, in broad daylight, in a crowded city street; that is to know Melvins." After a bit of the band's history, it continues, "The unearthly sound of thunder, seemingly from within the mind itself, searches. . . . Longing for fertile souls, those willing, yet capable, of irreverence within servitude." The text gives one pause; one has to consider to what extent the band is playing with the signs and conventions of rock (irreverence) even as it is packaged by the music industry (servitude). It would be a mistake to think that Melvins are 50 percent committed and 50 percent at play; they are 100 percent committed and 100 percent at play. That means they have to work twice as hard and play twice as hard as a band that takes one route over the other, which may be one reason they take twice as long to get where they're going. But the Melvins' result is something undeniably, utterly real.

What is this thing called Melvins? Simply to formulate the question, like asking What is philosophy?, is already to have begun one's pursuit.

Jutta Koether is an artist and writer who lives in Cologne. Robert Nickas is a critic and curator who lives In New York.