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Christmas is a time of tediously ritualistic, formulaic narrative; homilies, platitudes, family small talk, all stuffed and trammelled into narrow, cosy confines. Christmas is when we need the disruptive strategies of the avant garde the most. So why not stuff a little skewed narrative into your stocking this Christmas Eve?
Production of narrative is going on all the time, it's inescapable, it's what you and I do when we blog, it's what the makers of 'Gremlins' do (the 1984 movie, dubbed into German, was being run last night on Berlin cable... I watched a few minutes for the padded shoulders and the appearance of 'Lord Summerisle' in a gen-tech lab). Narrative is mostly produced in a fairly predictable way; it's wearing the stiff padded shoulders of convention. 'It's the end of the year and here are my eleven favourite records'. 'Here's what I did today'. 'Happy Christmas!' Some people -- they're usually artists -- go out of their way to produce more surprising narrative. Yesterday I was in ProQM, my favourite Berlin bookstore, a place I go specifically to find 'more interesting narratives'. I usually can't afford to buy them, but it's important to me to know that they're out there. The fresh narrative-production strategies I encounter in ProQM keep me sane, and keep me believing in humanity.
I spent quite a while leafing through the new edition of Re-Magazine. This is a Dutch-based, English-language 'magazine about just one person'. They pick someone, a rather ordinary person, and make the whole magazine about him or her. The latest issue is about Hester, a failed London screenplay writer (and already narrative is in crisis, right in the foreground) aged 37. There are interviews with Hester about her depression, her feelings of fatigue and frustration with London, there's a photoshoot on Hungerford Bridge, a trip to her mother's house in the countryside, an interview with her more go-getting (but less likeable) sister about her, a discussion between Hester and her mother, who also went to art school and has always been rather competitive with Hester. Re-Magazine have taken the format of the usual magazine and turned it around. Instead of designing a magazine as a parade of stars and other distractions for a rather depressed 37 year-old woman, they make the depressed 37 year-old woman the focus. The magazine becomes a kind of intensive therapeutic investigation of Hester and her weltschmertz. It also becomes a critical self-exploration by a magazine of what magazines are, and ends up being highly therapeutic in the sense that it restores some kind of humanism, dignity and compassion to the magazine format. It vindicates magazines. It's intensive, it doesn't distract but concentrates. Re-Magazine re-vitalises the magazine idea. It's also bloody interesting.
The rest of the day seemed dominated, subtly, by Vito Acconci. Not only was there a tempting stack of catalogues of the exhibition Vito Hannibal Acconci in the ProQM window, but a 1999 interview with Acconci was being projected on the Art Club 2000 floor of 'Ten Years Later On', the exhibition at Kunst-Werke looking at alternative spaces of, um, cultural production in Mitte and the East Village over the last decade or so. (Confusingly, considering its title, the exhibition seemed to go back to the early 80s, with clips of the 1983 rap movie Wild Style).
Acconci started his career in the mid-60s as a poet (Vito Hannibal Acconci), became the most interesting single channel art video maker of the 1970s, and then moved into architecture (he designed the new United Bamboo store in Daikanyama, Tokyo, for instance), but whatever medium he works in, there's a consistent concern with narrative and the production of space. I ended the day listening once again to a really terrific sound piece he made in 2001, The Bristol Project. It's a narrative which produces architectural space, it's architecture which creates fictional space, it's a verbal specification of space. It's sci-fi, it's fantasy, it's a radio play with sound effects, it's Acconci's deep, objective yet weirdly sensual voice sketching out a virtual experience in what sounds like a very strange world. It's tremendously fresh, compelling and original, one of my favourite sound pieces ever.
More sound, more skewed narrative: here's Tod Dockstader giving a tour of his studio and telling us about 'electronically produced organised sound' as it appeared in 1963. And here's Digiki's new release, Animals Don't Care, free online and available for download. Digiki has messed with the narrative of my song 'Beowulf (I Am Deformed)' amongst other pieces, and the results are... refreshing. Fill your stocking free with strangeness, pirate!
Production of narrative is going on all the time, it's inescapable, it's what you and I do when we blog, it's what the makers of 'Gremlins' do (the 1984 movie, dubbed into German, was being run last night on Berlin cable... I watched a few minutes for the padded shoulders and the appearance of 'Lord Summerisle' in a gen-tech lab). Narrative is mostly produced in a fairly predictable way; it's wearing the stiff padded shoulders of convention. 'It's the end of the year and here are my eleven favourite records'. 'Here's what I did today'. 'Happy Christmas!' Some people -- they're usually artists -- go out of their way to produce more surprising narrative. Yesterday I was in ProQM, my favourite Berlin bookstore, a place I go specifically to find 'more interesting narratives'. I usually can't afford to buy them, but it's important to me to know that they're out there. The fresh narrative-production strategies I encounter in ProQM keep me sane, and keep me believing in humanity.
I spent quite a while leafing through the new edition of Re-Magazine. This is a Dutch-based, English-language 'magazine about just one person'. They pick someone, a rather ordinary person, and make the whole magazine about him or her. The latest issue is about Hester, a failed London screenplay writer (and already narrative is in crisis, right in the foreground) aged 37. There are interviews with Hester about her depression, her feelings of fatigue and frustration with London, there's a photoshoot on Hungerford Bridge, a trip to her mother's house in the countryside, an interview with her more go-getting (but less likeable) sister about her, a discussion between Hester and her mother, who also went to art school and has always been rather competitive with Hester. Re-Magazine have taken the format of the usual magazine and turned it around. Instead of designing a magazine as a parade of stars and other distractions for a rather depressed 37 year-old woman, they make the depressed 37 year-old woman the focus. The magazine becomes a kind of intensive therapeutic investigation of Hester and her weltschmertz. It also becomes a critical self-exploration by a magazine of what magazines are, and ends up being highly therapeutic in the sense that it restores some kind of humanism, dignity and compassion to the magazine format. It vindicates magazines. It's intensive, it doesn't distract but concentrates. Re-Magazine re-vitalises the magazine idea. It's also bloody interesting.
The rest of the day seemed dominated, subtly, by Vito Acconci. Not only was there a tempting stack of catalogues of the exhibition Vito Hannibal Acconci in the ProQM window, but a 1999 interview with Acconci was being projected on the Art Club 2000 floor of 'Ten Years Later On', the exhibition at Kunst-Werke looking at alternative spaces of, um, cultural production in Mitte and the East Village over the last decade or so. (Confusingly, considering its title, the exhibition seemed to go back to the early 80s, with clips of the 1983 rap movie Wild Style).Acconci started his career in the mid-60s as a poet (Vito Hannibal Acconci), became the most interesting single channel art video maker of the 1970s, and then moved into architecture (he designed the new United Bamboo store in Daikanyama, Tokyo, for instance), but whatever medium he works in, there's a consistent concern with narrative and the production of space. I ended the day listening once again to a really terrific sound piece he made in 2001, The Bristol Project. It's a narrative which produces architectural space, it's architecture which creates fictional space, it's a verbal specification of space. It's sci-fi, it's fantasy, it's a radio play with sound effects, it's Acconci's deep, objective yet weirdly sensual voice sketching out a virtual experience in what sounds like a very strange world. It's tremendously fresh, compelling and original, one of my favourite sound pieces ever.
More sound, more skewed narrative: here's Tod Dockstader giving a tour of his studio and telling us about 'electronically produced organised sound' as it appeared in 1963. And here's Digiki's new release, Animals Don't Care, free online and available for download. Digiki has messed with the narrative of my song 'Beowulf (I Am Deformed)' amongst other pieces, and the results are... refreshing. Fill your stocking free with strangeness, pirate!