Collage by Joseph Cornell

I was asked last year to quickly come up with a piece to share with a large mingling audience at a fundraiser event some friends were hosting. Having been working on some new texts for other projects, I thought I would experiment with the use of language appropriated from advertising. Advertisements play a convenient and poignant role in a lot of contemporary art (Cornell, Warhol, Prince among others), and the mystique of the advertising zeitgeist contributes to the popularity of Mad Men, which I have just started watching.

This proposed piece (it was never actually performed–due to a sick kid–mine) was to take snippets of written advertisements, or in some cases implied meanings from ads, and attach them to a single jingle bell on a bracelet-sized piece of yarn. Each attendee at the fundraiser would wear their jingle around with them for the evening, along with a single example of modern ad-speak. Here is a partial list of texts I might have used:

connect to your inner self
watch this
consider this ride
need a lawyer?
how about more school?
in case of a fire
cash back
take care of your feet
remain alert
report fraud
beware of bugs
perfect yourself
visit art
travel back in time
it will be fun
listen louder
compete
new shoes better
witness a fight
don’t leave

This morning, though, I read one of these political satire sections and had quite a different experience. The section in question was a transcript of an absurdist puppet show from a film detailing the fictional transition in the US to “subsidized” time (I wish I could do a better job here, but bear with me). On the matter of a (again) fictionalized budget gap, the book’s government officials (Tine and Gentle in the following quote) point out a common political predicament:

TINE: Outflows required, inflows restricted, balance demanded.

GENTLE: The classic executive-branch Cerberus-horned dilemma. The thorn in the Achilles’ tendon of the democratic process.

Hmmph, I thought. What a particularly pointed insight on democracy here in the middle of a book ostensibly about addiction, depression and obsession. Of course, DFW’s analysis (however absurd its context) is striking today because it is being played out every hour in the political discourse of whether we should be spending more money to support a broad progressive vision (and adding to the deficit) or if we should be cutting the deficit (even if it means ending financial benefits to the unemployed and risking stagnation).

Rather than weigh in on which of these perspectives I am partial to, I am more interested in thinking about the relevancy of narrative (satirical or not) to politics. Writing in the mid-1990′s DFW was not referencing directly the political climate of 2010, but he was admittedly influenced by political reactions to previous moments of progressive expansion, notably during the FDR and JFK administrations of the 1930’s and 60’s respectively. Not to mention, these issues must have been in the aether during the Clinton years of “Infinite Jest’s” milieu.

But these historical cycles are not, by themselves, interesting enough to be elucidating. Instead, it took the handiwork of the fiction writer–the artist–to reveal, through his imaginary narrative, the absurd reduction of political perspectives. In this case, DFW’s narrative is a satire, but there are other examples (Picasso’s Guernica sticks out to me) of frank and literal representations that, while of their own time, are also timeless. Guernica is politically ambiguous as it is both a warning and a reflection of violence. Narrative gestures are remarkable for this reason–whether or not an artist intends it, his representations contain the stories (political or otherwise) of a wide history and future.

Audio is downloadable and streaming at the Free Music Archive.

All photos by Robert Pottinger.

Thursday June 3, 2010
9:00 pm

Issue Project Room
232 3rd Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

Don’t miss the premiere performance of the complete Preparing the Past, for 4-hand piano, 2 vibraphones and 2 glockenspiels featuring Emily Manzo, Anna Dagmar and Mantra Percussion (Al Cerulo, Joe Bergen, Mike McCurdy and Chris Graham).

Also, Christy Edwards will be sharing live video made specially for this performance. The above image is a still from one of the videos.

For more information on Preparing the Past click here.

http://tenthousandhourspodcast.com/

This was an interesting experiment in community building (something of a interest for me lately), but what I was most interested in was something that Anthony introduced for the first time: battle-plan modeling. Without getting into the specifics, he asked all of the core group members to model our activities using G.I. Joe action figures before we went out and actually commenced these activities in the real world performance space.

This quasi-militarized activity made me think about the different kinds of identities that artist’s perform as they seek to connect with occupations other than their own. Sol Lewitt is another artist whose work depends upon his role as a “general” of an army of assistants, as does Jeff Koons and any number of other contemporary artists (not to mention countless old masters who relied heavily on their students to complete their work).

Karlheinz Stockhausen

In addition to the “General” or “Organizer” occupation, “Scientist” was a performed identity made prevalent during the post-war avant garde, mostly acutely observed in Karlheinz Stockhausen and his cadre of musicians in black suits and lab coats as well as musique concrete innovator, Pierre Schafer. This occupational connection seemed to be both an aesthetic decision as well as a practical one. In as much as these artists were pursuing pure research into sound, they were also aligned with government-run “laboratories” funded in part by post-war reparations.

And then there are the artists who perform the identity of the “Aesthetic” or “Monk.” Into this category I might clump light artist, James Turrell, composer Morton Feldman, and earthwork pioneer Robert Smithson. For these artists, the performance of intuition and simplicity created an aura of impenetrability.

James Turrell's "Spread" (2003)

For these examples of performed identities and for other performances of “Businessman” (see Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol) and “Shaman” (see John Cage) among others, the artists assume the identity of “other” in order to accentuate the divide between the arts and other professional pursuits (This divide presumably frames an artist’s counterculture tendencies). I also think that these performances are in no way meant to be permanent. Instead, the individual might assume a series of occupational identities as they react to and comment on the zeitgeist.

This gets me wondering about what current occupations artists might perform as they seek to define their work in contrast to societal norms within the twenty-first century. Returning to the example of Anthony Braxton, one occupation that contrasts with the contemporary artist is the Military commander. Certainly Braxton’s performance directions says something about our militarized culture. Are there other occupational performances are out there that would mark similar trends?

When I first heard Laurie Anderson’s “O, Superman” I could hardly have been the intended audience. I was 12 years old and living in the kind of sheltered and homogenous suburbia that Ms. Anderson so sharply critiqued in both “O, Superman” and her epic “United States” touring show. I certainly had no real awareness of the kind of hip, downtown energies from which Ms. Anderson and her aesthetic emerged. And yet, the spare and haunting setting deeply affected me. Her deceptively soothing and controlled delivery infected my pre-teenage state and when she intoned “There’s Always Mom,” I did understand on some level that one could be loved too much.

I still enjoy listening to Ms. Anderson’s work and never really tire of her humor, regardless of the fact that it seems less potent in our irony-saturated world. But these days, when I hear her resigned slogan “There’s Always Mom,” I tend to think less of my agitated regard for authority than the cycles of memories, real or imagined, that grip my life and perhaps others, and that have the potential to paralyze us in a stasis that resembles both comfort and horror.

This work was commissioned by Iktus Percussion Quartet for their concert with the Cadillac Moon Ensemble. This performance was recorded at Saint Peter’s Church on Dec 5, 2009.

(Roy Campbell, Christopher Graham – marimba; Daniel Weinberg – vibraphone; Justin Wolf – glockenspiel; Evelyn Farny – cello; Roberta Michel – flute; Andie Springer – violin )

There’s Always Mom

JENA WALK (MEMORY FIELD) | 2006 by Janet Cardiff

Besides these analyses that highlight the iPods effects in terms of media and digital cultures, iPods may have also played a role in changing our relationships to live, non-mobile and decidedly acoustic music. I am speaking here in response to the number of articles about how the music business has been forced to rely more seriously on live performances as their main revenue stream since record sales are disastrously low. But I am also referring to the continuous buzz about venue-crossing, including how classical music is becoming cool again by playing to new audiences in (gasp) clubs around the country.

I have been privy first hand to these venue-crossing experiments and can say that they are indeed very exciting. But this is no new trend, either. Jazz and Improvising musicians have been bringing their experimental and avant garde music to cabaret spots and night clubs for decades and ever since the Beatles played Carnegie Hall rock bands with experimental tendencies have found their way onto stages otherwise graced only by those in tuxedos.

Anthony Braxton at the Teatro Metastasio, Prato, Italy

There is an argument to be made, though, that as the iPod has made it easier to listen to whatever we like, where ever we like, our understanding of the relationship between music/sound and site has been shifted dramatically. We no longer associate a specific genre of music or artist with a specific performance environment, because we don’t look for the physical space to dictate sounds. Instead, we look to ourselves and our own personal tastes for curatorial decisions. These decisions may be ironic, or simply novel, but they are always our own.

With this shift in mind, it is straightforward to see how venue curators, or artistic directors are really just giving their audiences what they want – some of the same surprising juxtapositions they are accustomed to as iPod listeners. This practice raises the question of what will happen after the novelty of this trend wears off? Will listeners yearn for the authentic experience of chamber music in concert halls and indie-rock in grimy basements?

More interesting, though, is the question of the role this trend will play in the creation of the next generation of works to be consumed by the concert-going public. Already we have seen composers and musicians altering their work to fit in with the assumed identity of a given performance space. Will the new, novel space become the new “site” of their work, or will artists look to maintain the tension between work and site and continue to offer up odd and genre-defying perspectives?

Are You My Community?

Tuesday December 15th
8:00 PM

featuring Joe Bergen, Al Cerulo, Levy Lorenzo,
Russell Greenberg, Sam Sowyrda, Mike McCurdy,
Justin Wolf and Mike Pride

Issue Project Room
At the Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY

Hope you can make it!!