aural quandaries: issue project room's floating points

Synaesthesia becomes me.  I'm all about the significance of the visual, indeed, corporeal, in music performance--too often relegated in critical speak to a purely aural experience--and, vice versa, the possibility of the sonic in visually based work.  Scholars and artists far grander than I have challenged the affective boundaries of disciplinary dissent (John Cage, for instance, describes theatre as both of the eye and the ear), and it seems that one of the foundational aspects of modernism that seeps into the postmodern is the ability to confound sensory order. 

Which is what made last night's two-part opener of the Issue Project Room's Floating Points festival unusually disconcerting: though offered stimulating visual points of reference, I kept wanting to close my eyes.  Even as music, sound, and word floated above, around, and into me, the friction between the senses became an unexpected part of the performances.

The show opened with cellist Tianna Kennedy, guitarist Chad Laird, and an unfortunately unnamed percussionist/noisemaker, whose joyful and chaotic wanderings bumped against and away from the walls of the room a little bit like those pixelated balls in Pong.  Occupying but never being so aggressive as to demand attention, their music seemingly coinhabits the space with the listener.  This is emphasized by Issue Project's hyperdeveloped sound system, a "fifteen-channel installation of hemisphere loudspeakers" developed by Stephan Moore by which, as the space's website reads, "location is liberated as a musical dimension."  The chairs were set up like miniature constellations throughout the space, dispersing our gaze distinctly away from the musicians; and while I miss the silo-shaped room the Issue Project used to have, this was a compelling way to mix up the more conventionally shaped warehouse space they currently occupy.

A collaboration between Vito Acconci (be still my freaky heart), Moore, and composer-performer-artist Zach Layton comprised the second half.  Intended as a headphone piece, the piece involved Acconci reading a text self-conscious of its penetrating capacity via the strange intimacy enabled when we shut ourselves off to the outer world.  His words, spatially manipulated by Moore and Layton, created "an architecture of music... an architecture of bodies."   Our hearts "beat in tune" as we experience the never quite solid space of buildings and as they experience us.  Chairs were this time in a sort of theatre-in-the-round formation and Acconci, standing at a makeshift lectern and lit by a desk lamp, was the focal center, but it was easier to experience the piece as intended with one's eyes closed.  Sections of the piece opened with such instructions -- "Close your eyes," in part one; "Open your eyes," in part two -- but it was the instruction to the third section that was most intriguing.

"Close yourself in..."  When Acconci spoke this instruction I wanted to curl up into myself -- not in a comforting way but almost protective.  I wanted to fit my body into a box, like Kathy Dillon did for Acconci in Remote Control (1971), and hear him tell me what to do, what to feel; I wanted the brilliant creepiness of all those performances Acconci did in the '60s and '70s to happen here; and I wanted to love the experience even as I might not like what it did to me.  I wanted becoming the affect, its past tense significant not because I'm thinking about the performance the morning after as it were, but because the performance itself existed in a sort of past tense for me. 

At one point, early on in the piece, Acconci referenced his work in galleries and museums from the '60s onward, saying they were a "long time ago."  I almost gasped at this moment of chronologic disjunct, a temporal stutter: These performances from that period, including Remote Control, BLINKS, the infamous Seedbed so unsatisfactorily reprised by Marina Abramovic, remain constantly new to me precisely because I didn't experience them, didn't have the chance to see them and to see him. What is a long time ago for the artist performing, is still right now for me reading and imagining.  So seeing Acconci here, his bent body pushing and pulling against the words, was ghosted by the Acconci I've imagined, the Acconci I wrote into my dissertation, the Acconci I've seen onscreen.  Though I wanted to close my eyes to experience the sound of his voice, I could not bring myself to close off the visual sound of his presence.

The juxtaposition of Kennedy et al and Acconci is an intriguing one, not only in that it pairs experimentations in sound and music with experimentations in sound and text, but that it transverses histories, pairing the younger artists doing new things with the new things older artists are doing.  The strange, rendered familiar through documentation and critical record, becomes strange again, and this is, indeed, an eye-opening endeavor.   
 

Comments

[LV]

I wrote about all this in an article in TDR from a few years ago, if you're interested. And it's a discussion I'm welcome to go further into.

[Links of London]

The chairs were set up like miniature constellations throughout the space, dispersing our gaze distinctly away from the musicians,Links London

[sharkskin girl]

Snarky,
You're totally right about how Marina's performances brought out the exhibitionism in the audiences -- Johanna Burton writes about that, too, in Artforum, particularly in re Seedbed.

Love the fact that you were 'caught in the moment' as it were -- you should definitely find the image.

Best,
sharkskin

[Snarky]

Well sharkskin, you've caused me to realize why I enjoyed MA's SEEDBED so much: because it was deeply uncomfortable in so many ways!

I might be a closet masochist, but I look back fondly now on cringing in embarrassment when I saw people whom I knew at the Guggenheim. I was surprised at how *many* people I recognized. I was also surprised at how many people came out to hear Marina come in general. It felt like the public perverts society for a while, but then I totally started to enjoy being there and watching people react in their own ways to her voice and presence, or whatever (perhaps the cameras)? I think the event brought out a lot of exhibitionism in the audience, so that they became as much a part of the performance as Marina...

I was also surprised to find myself thinking that "being there" *does* matter. Despite the mountains of documentation that people took away from that event, I don't think it was able to capture the experience that I had as I literally *hid* behind a wall for a while when the surveillance became too overwhelming. Or the feelings I had in the circle, when I finally gave myself over to Marina's voice and directions.

Documentation can do a lot of things, but when I reviewed SEEDBED footage on the monitors the night that I came to see another piece of Abramovic's, it seemed so alienated, distant, and divorced from what I had experienced a few nights earlier. The documentation (at least the visual loop that was running at the Guggenheim) did not convey the spirit of that event to me at all.

PS: I learned at a conference last year that a photo of me is published in one of the books documenting the event. I still have not seen it, but am oddly intrigued and unsettled by the fact that my participation was captured by others without my knowledge. But I would so much like to do it again if I could...

[sharkskin girl]

Snarky,
I do agree for sure that recorded materials can be a fascinating part of liveness; and that sometimes the liveness of a piece is predicated on that -- Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, for instance.

For me, though, the constant presence of Marina doing other performances throughout the seven nights via monitors, as well as the overt documentation of each night's current event did undo some of the immediacy of spectoral engagement for me -- knowing each night would be so well documented made it less necessary to attend to, in a way. Though I also agree that the voyeuristic nature during Abramovic's Seedbed was highly intriguing, the constant means of archival documentation going on (of both Marina and her audience) was a little freaky for me, not in a good way.

More to come, I'm sure--
Best,
sharkskin

[Snarky]

I didn't see the Acconci Seedbed, and admit that I am also quite fascinated with it. But I thought that Marina Abramovic's reconstruction (based on surviving documents and her own imagination) was very presence-full (and full of presents).

Sitting inside the circle with her, I really felt that she was giving her audience the gift of time (although time was limited). I also felt that she gave us permission to feel turned on, and to feel aroused by this usually totally un-erotic space of the Guggeneheim. For me, one of the most powerful things about the piece was the eroticized "surveillance culture" that surrounded it, with everyone looking at each other, taking notes, secretly photographing, pointing fingers, staring, lingering, etc...

Being there in the moment, I am pretty sure she didn't "fake it," although I wondered about that possibility a little bit beforehand. Still, throughout that whole time, she sounded totally sincere and committed to being "real." If she was faking it, she probably would have managed to have a lot more orgasms. I recall that she had two or three intense ones right at the start of the night, in the first hour or two. And then after that, things began to taper off till it was mostly her talking.

I didn't go to the first night and don't know about the prerecorded Nauman track, but I will check out your article. I don't think that prerecorded materials should categorically compromise your "live" experience, though. Recorded materials can certainly be a fascinating part of liveness. :)

[sharkskin girl]

Hello again, Snarky,

Unsatisfactory isn't exactly the same thing as shoddy -- a qualification I would never apply to Marina's well-constructed performances. However -- and this speaks to the sense of ghosting I was getting at in the post -- it was impossible for me to experience Seedbed through Marina's real-life performance after I had overimagined it through documentations of Vito Acconci's. It's a weird sort of romanticization of the not-having-been-there, I think.

That said, I think it's also important to compare and contrast the two versions of Seedbed: whereas Vito's was a bit more rough, Marina's was hyperperformed -- and her projected (could-be recorded) voice resonating through the space created, for me, some disjunct with the idea of her actually being there. Was she there? Was she, indeed, faking it? (An important part to remember as well is the overtly present mechanisms of documentation throughout Seven Easy Pieces -- and the prerecorded track to the Nauman that happened the night before Seedbed -- which compromised notions of presence, and presents, throughout the seven nights...)

I wrote about all this in an article in TDR from a few years ago, if you're interested. And it's a discussion I'm welcome to go further into.

Thanks, as always,
sharkskin

[Snarky]

". . . infamous Seedbed so unsatisfactorily reprised by Marina Abramovic. . ."

Wha-wha-WHAT?!

Unsatisfactory!? Well, I never!

What did you find so shoddy about MA's scintillating reenactment/reinterpretation?