A spooky shaman and a peacock
Jun. 26th, 2005 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAnybody who's ever made something will recognize the mysterious moment (or perhaps it's a place?) when nothing turns into something, when structure and content suddenly appear. It's the easiest thing in the world, and also the hardest. Easy because form and content seem to come from nowhere, from outside of you, from the tools you're using, from your unconscious or (if you're religious) from God. Hard because you're deliberately out of control, receiving this stuff from who-knows-where, and yet you have to make decisions on the fly, order the material as it comes in, work with what you get and what you have. You listen to your instincts and to your "primitive prompter", then you scrabble around making sense of it, making it sound like you're in control, doing a smooth presentation, moving on to the next bit. If you're fluent and slick, open to your unconscious and yet good at giving conscious decisive form to what arrives, you can do all this in real time, on the fly, improvising.
The first day of "I'll Speak, You Sing" was a success. Three tours came through the gallery, some people sat there for two hours listening, art world celebrities (Takashi Murakami!) dropped by and listened, chuckling, and the two most important critics of the New York art world came by and seemed to leave impressed: Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice and Roberta Smith of the New York Times. Saltz told me afterwards the show was great, and Smith stayed for 45 minutes taking notes. She also asked for pictures, so it looks like we may get a lead review in the Times next Friday or the one after. We shouldn't count chickens, but the reviews may well be good.
I know all this because gallerist Zach told me later; for the five hours of the performance I was completely oblivious to my surroundings, in a sort of trance, concentrating only on the stories I was murmuring into my head-mounted mic, or the strange music (Harry Partch tones) I generated with the laptop by my side. I was aware enough of Mai's singing and pacing to give her the space she needed, though. Mai is so magnetic, so confident and childlike! Everyone loves to watch her, and she handles the attention well. Together we're like a spooky shaman and a peacock. Although my face is covered by a red veil, and I can't look at the audience (the spell, the concentration, would be broken if I did), I can hear Mai rotating around me, moving around the 3D space of the gallery. She surprised me later by saying "I was so nervous!" I was surprised because Mai seems so confident, but it's true that her role is more difficult: she has to walk around and sing in the real physical space of the gallery, with the people. Meanwhile I'm off in some netherworld where I feel safe, hidden and protected by my red veil.
When I conceived this show I thought I was just going to be narrating landscapes, but on the day, there in the gallery, I found I was telling stories. The stories started off as descriptions of levels in imaginary computer games but quickly developed characters and plots. They were very, very odd. I can't remember everything I invented, but it started off with a thing about a king who needed to be activated by colours, then became a story about a man who works in a marble quarry on the top of a mountain, then concerned a war between travelling detergent salesmen and sugar salesmen, then turned into a story about a man who rides broadcast waves from the top of a TV tower down into someone's TV and has to perform in a soap opera, then became a tale of an ice skater who could reverse time by skating backwards... The stories just came continuously into my mind as dreams do when you're sleeping. I've always known I could do this, and been a bit surprised. In the past I've only done it with lovers, whispering these stories to them as we fall asleep. Now I'm sitting in a gallery doing it daily for strangers. I'm not doing it for money—nothing is for sale in this show—and it's not even being documented; there's no recording, no web-streaming. It's like experimental theatre: Mai and I are there walking the high-wire of improvisation, and if you're there in the gallery you might share some extraordinary moments of magic, or you might catch us falling on our ass (there were moments towards the end where my brain got tired, my speech slurred, I lost my poise and my sure-footedness, the stories fell flat).
But this show works. It's somewhat extraordinary in the context of a gallery, the oldest thing in the world (a vaudeville double act, someone telling a story, someone performing and singing). And yet, in the context, it's something quite new. Of course other people have done things a bit like this—in a sense it's one part Spalding Gray, one part Laurie Anderson—but I believe we've really captured the moment of creation, where nothing (an empty concrete gallery, an empty head) turns into something (a gallery full of rapt listeners, a story, a landscape in your head). And the reason it's not really boasting to say that I know this show works is that it's not really me there, slumped in a robe and headscarf by the pillar, cross-legged on the concrete floor. It's everybody who's ever told a story, everyone who's ever said something that surprises both the speaker and the listener, it's our collective unconscious, it's the process of creation itself. Mai and I have made ourselves the portal nothing squeezes through when it becomes something. The success of this show is that we managed to locate that simplest, most basic thing—that portal between nothing and something—and put a frame around it.
(Main photo courtesy Brian Fee, others by Lord Whimsy.)
The first day of "I'll Speak, You Sing" was a success. Three tours came through the gallery, some people sat there for two hours listening, art world celebrities (Takashi Murakami!) dropped by and listened, chuckling, and the two most important critics of the New York art world came by and seemed to leave impressed: Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice and Roberta Smith of the New York Times. Saltz told me afterwards the show was great, and Smith stayed for 45 minutes taking notes. She also asked for pictures, so it looks like we may get a lead review in the Times next Friday or the one after. We shouldn't count chickens, but the reviews may well be good.
I know all this because gallerist Zach told me later; for the five hours of the performance I was completely oblivious to my surroundings, in a sort of trance, concentrating only on the stories I was murmuring into my head-mounted mic, or the strange music (Harry Partch tones) I generated with the laptop by my side. I was aware enough of Mai's singing and pacing to give her the space she needed, though. Mai is so magnetic, so confident and childlike! Everyone loves to watch her, and she handles the attention well. Together we're like a spooky shaman and a peacock. Although my face is covered by a red veil, and I can't look at the audience (the spell, the concentration, would be broken if I did), I can hear Mai rotating around me, moving around the 3D space of the gallery. She surprised me later by saying "I was so nervous!" I was surprised because Mai seems so confident, but it's true that her role is more difficult: she has to walk around and sing in the real physical space of the gallery, with the people. Meanwhile I'm off in some netherworld where I feel safe, hidden and protected by my red veil.When I conceived this show I thought I was just going to be narrating landscapes, but on the day, there in the gallery, I found I was telling stories. The stories started off as descriptions of levels in imaginary computer games but quickly developed characters and plots. They were very, very odd. I can't remember everything I invented, but it started off with a thing about a king who needed to be activated by colours, then became a story about a man who works in a marble quarry on the top of a mountain, then concerned a war between travelling detergent salesmen and sugar salesmen, then turned into a story about a man who rides broadcast waves from the top of a TV tower down into someone's TV and has to perform in a soap opera, then became a tale of an ice skater who could reverse time by skating backwards... The stories just came continuously into my mind as dreams do when you're sleeping. I've always known I could do this, and been a bit surprised. In the past I've only done it with lovers, whispering these stories to them as we fall asleep. Now I'm sitting in a gallery doing it daily for strangers. I'm not doing it for money—nothing is for sale in this show—and it's not even being documented; there's no recording, no web-streaming. It's like experimental theatre: Mai and I are there walking the high-wire of improvisation, and if you're there in the gallery you might share some extraordinary moments of magic, or you might catch us falling on our ass (there were moments towards the end where my brain got tired, my speech slurred, I lost my poise and my sure-footedness, the stories fell flat).But this show works. It's somewhat extraordinary in the context of a gallery, the oldest thing in the world (a vaudeville double act, someone telling a story, someone performing and singing). And yet, in the context, it's something quite new. Of course other people have done things a bit like this—in a sense it's one part Spalding Gray, one part Laurie Anderson—but I believe we've really captured the moment of creation, where nothing (an empty concrete gallery, an empty head) turns into something (a gallery full of rapt listeners, a story, a landscape in your head). And the reason it's not really boasting to say that I know this show works is that it's not really me there, slumped in a robe and headscarf by the pillar, cross-legged on the concrete floor. It's everybody who's ever told a story, everyone who's ever said something that surprises both the speaker and the listener, it's our collective unconscious, it's the process of creation itself. Mai and I have made ourselves the portal nothing squeezes through when it becomes something. The success of this show is that we managed to locate that simplest, most basic thing—that portal between nothing and something—and put a frame around it.(Main photo courtesy Brian Fee, others by Lord Whimsy.)
"Further from you"..
Date: 2005-06-28 11:07 pm (UTC)I would have seen more of the show on the opening day but the gallery told me that it would be better to come late in the day, so I basically caught one of the last performances of the day. I briefly introduced myself between performances. We were unable to stay for the party ( as this was the tail end of our NY visit). Anyway here are some of the thoughts that the piece evoked and I have since had time to digest, and actually find easier to put in this form then in person. It's a bit of an essay....
I think what I saw raised the eternal problem with timebased work. The very fact that in order to really appreciate something, one needs to be present as it unfolds which means spending time ( rather than money in a city where money is time) I felt that that by not recording the show or turning it into a commodity you have returned to one of the things that performance work was very much about in the 70's and seems to be forgotten today. I felt that the ephemeral nature of what you were doing was also questioning what narrative is (rather than what I thought would be disorienteering narratives in a landscape). The gallery is a landscape but it is somehow more of a hermetic glass cube in this context.
Equally, I felt that the fragmentary nature of what was happening with the narrative actually showed that as a spectator one is very conditioned into wanting to impose a sense of logic . Some of these fragments stuck in my mind . I remember the character who was got lost in the computer desktop and one day might turn up in a one of our folders ; there was the guy at the bar relating his experiences with whisky and sherry ( coloured liquids) that morphed into the flower man selling substances which all relate and are derived from colourful flowers. It's all very much about disembodiment in some way or another.
Whether after a week of doing this common themes will occur and re-occur and perhaps it will be possible to see some kind of overriding conception (although you must have started with some story elements ) However for most of us that won't be possible so maybe the fragments we saw and remember are the essence ( less is more as opposed to time is money) and seeing a part of the creative process does not necessarily mean you understand it anymore. The fragments might be more meaningful..
Although I know you are not documenting this I do feel that trying to put the thematic findings together might be worthwhile. Perhaps others can post the stories they remember as a kind of oral history by web; that way the Japanese whispers component that comes about might be an interesting form of documentation ie "you only know this as it was well documented"..
I was reminded of Paul Klee and of being close to the very heart of creation as you once put it "In Closer to You". The act of creation is certainly fascinating ; It's a difficult subject to get across and not easy to discuss.
I find myself recounting more of what you did and ignoring Mai. At the moments I was present she seem to be improvising sounds with the Harry Partch instruments on your laptop, or she was dancing, or whispering things. I am not sure what other things she is doing in the piece, however it seemed to be very much a role of counterpoint. Perhaps the roles change and she dictates the sounds and you respond to them (as it seemed that her role was more of a response to you like a jazz musician). While she was very much present and eye catching you were very much hidden. What we hear is the familiar yet disembodied voice of Momus radio or music, a voice that was in the room but by virtue of the headset, a voice that is acoustically modified and thus far way. The acoustic space was very brittle and the sounds of the fans in the air-conditioning sometimes added a kind of disorientation. This is a work where you do a lot of listening, which is not the case in most art galleries so the details become amplified. In a way you could be video-streaming this to the web as it can work in both 2 and 3 dimensions being very superflat. This is not a criticism but certainly was the feeling I was left with. I look forward to seeing how the work develops and reading your NY observations, I have a few of those too!
Richard