What The Matter Is

Last week’s conducting performance is one of my attempts to find productive analogies for the operations at work in reading and writing a text. I’m putting together five sets of these attempts, each set compiled into a booklet of its own. Here are the names of the booklets:

AS HANDLE
AS LINE
AS MACHINE
AS CONDUCTOR
AS PIVOT

At the moment I’m having trouble compiling the AS CONDUCTOR booklet. Three of the experiments are texts, one is Thursday’s performance (or any other iteration of it) and one is a radio broadcast.

The trouble is that the texts work as themselves, while the radio broadcast and the performance appear in the booklet as documents of their originals. This poses a problem because the booklet is becoming some kind of artwork of its own, and it’s important for its elements to cohere so they can communicate amongst themselves. It seems to be difficult for them to do this if some of them are ‘originals’ and some are ‘documents’ (note scare quotes).

Something needs to be done. But the more I think about it, the more complications I find in the distinction this booklet makes between originals and documents. I want to develop those complications rather than suppress them, particularly given that this booklet is specifically concerned with the prospect of reciprocal authorship between reader and writer.

All three text pieces complicate the matter because they are instructional (“you can…”; “you should…”; “you could…”). The effect of this is to background the primacy of the texts themselves: as instructions, they act as documents to some original act, only the original act is potential and in the future, rather than actual and in the past.

The radio piece complicates things because it was specifically designed to be broadcast at a particular moment, and depends entirely on the premise that all the listeners will be hearing it at the same time. The piece instructs all the listeners towards creating a communal piece of music together in real time, which of course nobody – even if they all played along – would be able to hear in its entirety. If you listen to an archived recording of the piece, knowing that nobody else is listening along in time with you in their separate homes, the special productiveness of the piece is deactivated.

You can listen to the archived recording here:
http://homologue.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/listen-t…

This deactivation is a point worth making in itself, and the archived recording of the broadcast is interesting for this reason. But my concern is that the other works in the booklet are self-contained and start from the ground of the booklet itself, rather than elsewhere. I think including a piece written for radio, and which mentions the date, time, and the name of the station in its opening words, would come rather out of the blue.

Horribly, I have a feeling the only way to make the radio piece work in this context is to recreate it as a site-specific piece for the booklet itself, just as the original was site-specific to the radio. Listening to the radio is a private experience rendered communal because the broadcast reaches everyone’s radios at the same time. Reading a book is private and communal too, but the community is not temporal. What is the community then? Spatial? Durational? Intellectual? Or is the communal readership of a text characterized by its not being temporally bound? What would it be like to create a new version of the radio broadcast but given the specific limits of reading? And do I really have time to make this work before my ever-approaching copy deadline? Is this a cliff-hanger?

The conducting performance is a whole nother kettle of fish [sic] which I’ll have to come back to another day. This is quite enough to worry about for now.

I don’t know how it happened, but nothing went wrong yesterday. Nothing broke, no-one was late, nothing got lost. After all the months of planning it would have almost been an anticlimax had the performance not caused ACTUAL DELIGHT.

It caused delight to me, and, to more of my delight, I think it caused delight to other people too. People smiled and double-took and laughed and a bunch of passing men retraced their steps and burst into song. Other people didn’t notice there was anything odd happening, others looked up and didn’t react, one or two people skidded under the sight line of the cameras and tried to avoid it altogether. The aeroplanes, the road drills, the slow boat reflected in the window panes, the trains on the bridge and the sirens on the opposite bank – they all carried on as though nothing was happening.

–

Yesterday’s performance on the South Bank is something I’ve been planning for some time, and I’ve been talking about it with Anthony Weeden for the past few weeks. Anthony is the conductor who was performing, and his job was to observe everything around him and conduct it like an orchestra. As I wrote here on Tuesday, it’s an impossible task if you take it literally: the conductor authors the movements of the environment while the environment authors the movements of the conductor.

The quality of the task’s impossibility is something we worked through together in conversation and largely, for me, during the rehearsal for a concert he was conducting. By piecing together correlations in our respective disciplines we gradually distinguished what would and would not be practically and musically appropriate.

I left Anthony at his podium to check the cameras back down on the riverbank, and when I next looked up he’d become a conductor. It had begun. The speculative private gestures he’d been testing out while we were talking had become the real thing. And in the same move, everything present silently shifted into synchronicities of themselves, more often than not (to begin with at least) quite unaware that they were being choreographed from above.

There’s lots more to think about here, and many possibilities for restagings and developments. I’ve invited Anthony back for an event at SE8 gallery in May, though we’re aware that it will be a very different work in a designated art space.

I’ll try to upload a short video of this first performance in the next week or so.

It was a very happy surprise to find Isaac Muñoz had selected this blog as a ‘choice blog’ for the month! The description in his article of “the grammar of things”, which “is there to be played with”, brings to mind a project I’m currently putting together in preparation for my MFA show in July; a project that also relates methodologically to the circular quality of my work Isaac explained as “the act of finding the way of her practice is her practice”.

Here’s where I’ve got to with the project so far:

Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to the South Bank to direct an outdoor performance for a solo orchestra conductor. ‘Direct’ is probably the wrong word. The idea for the work began as my own, but it’s the expertise and sensitivity of the conductor himself that will make the performance effective. I think it’s well and truly become a collaborative project over the past month, which has been vital since I’m delving into musical discourses that are quite new to me.

My initial ‘direction’ was that the conductor observe the people and things moving around him and conduct them as though they were an orchestra. It’s a proposition that’s impossible to literally put into practice, and so his work will be to watch, pre-empt, and very speedily react to whatever goes on around him, so that he appears to be conducting it all.

What interests me is the coexistent double image of a conductor authoring the movements of the passers-by, and the passers-by authoring the movements of the conductor. I’m developing this piece among a series of projects using diverse analogies for reader, writer and text: other analogies I’m trying are ‘text as line’, ‘text as machine’, ‘text as pivot’ and ‘text as handle’.

Tomorrow is the first time we’ll have performed the work, and after all the thinking through and theorizing, most of all I’m looking forward to the noise in the system: the many unpredictable points at which the analogy between text and conductor breaks down.

With this series of researches I’m keen to put the research into the hands of the practice. I can stare at the computer and edit my thoughts as much as I like, but only by going through with the performance – in all its particularities – can we hope to reach the bits that break down. And I’m sure it’s in the breakdowns that there are grains of chance for new thought.

Click here for Isaac’s original article

Click here for his blog

This afternoon I drew the tip of my pencil with itself and the nib of my biro with itself. I drew them in my line drawing book, which makes them the first traditionally representational drawings on its pages. They continue my exploration of the line as a representational tool that joins word to thing, and here the pencil and biro use the paper as a pivot for representation. There’s a little bit missing from the very tip of the pencil and the very end of the biro nib where they join on to the lead and the ink of the drawing utensils themselves. As I drew, I lined the lines up with the edges of the utensils, and as the utensils moved so did the lines.

I’m not sure what I’m doing by calling them beaks. Beaks speak. They open up. Out of them come whistles, and into them go worms, I suppose. You could peck if you had a pencil for a beak, but you couldn’t eat anything. Could you even breathe? You couldn’t whistle. Maybe you could learn to write if you were desperate.

A line drawn from paper to pencil makes a dot. It’s a dot upwards through space that begins on the paper and travels to the tip of the pencil, but because paper and pencil meet so closely, the upwards projection of the dot from the paper is very slim.