Volumes (2015)

Volumes

Acknowledgments

This publication project was initiated by Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer.

Many thanks to them and to the participating curators, writers, artists, and partner galleries for their perseverance through the considerable time span from inception to culmination that this project required.

Published by the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga) in partnership with the Art Gallery of Alberta, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto), MacKenzie Art Gallery, and SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. 2015

Forward Foreword

Christof Migone

This is an epilogue masquerading as a foreword. Not a denouement, rather an addendum. In fact, in literature, there may a time gap between an epilogue and the main content it is referencing. Here there is more than a decade to contend with. The attendant contingencies we must face as editors and publishers given such a timespan spill onto the reader, listener, viewer of this multi-faceted publication. As you explore its various components, the proviso therefore is to approach VOLUMES with cognizance of our conscious decision to pluralize the word. You will pick up threads that extend in surprising ways throughout and others that go nowhere. The lacunas are plentiful here, the plural eschews the slip to any universalizing impulse. The reality is that the territories this publication explores has continued, and continues, to evolve exponentially. The static, arrested features of a publication cannot encompass the breath and scope of such a fertile set of practices.

VOLUMES presents a rare opportunity to adjoin disparate voices (be they authors, artists, or curators) from the early years of one decade to the early years of the next. This prompts the impulse to assess how things have evolved and where we are now. We have largely refrained from such encapsulations, and opted to present each contribution within its own original curatorial and editorial context. The links amongst them therefore will be discovered by the reader rather than determined explicitly by editorial fiat.

That being said, there are blatant commonalities. For one, this incomplete, sporadic, and heterogeneous overview (underview, sideview) is Canada-specific. In many ways it is a compilation of regional activities that happen to share a country. Again, gaps abound here. Think of this as a sampling proposition with critical edges rather than a milquetoast historical hagiography.

This foreword listens forward and hears a plurality of practices paying attention to the sonic within visual art discourses and institutions. These include musical genres and tropes, but also features works that use or reference sound through conceptual and phenomenological strategies. The Blackwood Gallery, as the lead institution for this project, has played a key role in assembling this eclectic mix. First, Barbara Fischer, Director of the Blackwood from 1999 to 2005 initiated this endeavour (along with Catherine Crowston), co-curating Soundtracks: Re-Play in 2003 and gathering the partners (institutional and curatorial alike) to construct an umbrella ambitious in its scope and reach. During my tenure as Director from 2008 to 2014, it became clear that to revive the publication required an update, a return of sorts to the realm of sound-specific curatorial projects, hence Volume: Hear Here in 2013. Finally, Christine Shaw shepherded the project to its conclusion, the publication you have in your hands. This lineage of Directors are but one filter through which to examine the unusual progression of this project.

The artists, authors, curators, editors, designers, and partner institutions are all integral to the mix.

The biographies section is a telling meeting place for this gathering, it juxtaposes people who fought in the First World War to people born in the 1980s, members of the Group of Seven to conceptual artists.

The image foldout will also reveal (and revel in) such contrasts. And it is in the book that the discussions ensue in their myriad ways. All told, suffice to say that without the contributions of all of those involved there would not be anything here to read, see, or hear.

Forward Foreword

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Introduction: This Volume

Martin Arnold

2014

This publication—just a part of which you are currently holding—emerged from five exhibitions, that involved eight curators and which showed at ten different institutions primarily associated with the presentation of visual art. However, this publication is not an art catalogue in the typical sense; it is not an attempt to somehow summarize and document those exhibitions. Nor is this publication some kind of overview, an attempt to circumscribe and coherently connect a diverse gathering-together of sounds, images, and ideas. I suppose it is a kind of anthology, but not the sort suggested by the word’s etymology: from antho “flower” plus logia “collection”—materials chosen, picked by a compiler to form a bouquet, a garland of sorts. If this publication is some kind of a florilegium, it’s a strange one: not tied up tight; loosely held bunches culled by different hands at different times over a span of a decade and a bit. Its weird arrangements arise in part from the radical variety of the many art practices indexed; and also, reading the essays collected here—even those commissioned within the same administrative thrust—it is clear that the writers were not asked to focus in on a given theme or particular works, but rather, were encouraged to follow tangents that fascinated them, that flowed out from or beside different exhibitions. This publication is an assemblage, a montage where new, divergent meanings arise through the abutment of disparate materials along a variety of axes; the splices are never simply linear. Connections and relationships are not asserted; rather they emerge. The stitching is too tenuous and its intended uses too in question for this publication to be a crazy quilt (although, it does bring together found elements with discrete histories to make something idiosyncratically new); and while it can have the kind of all over perceptual saturation that could allow it to be thought of as a portable salon, it does not have the focused evaluative agenda of the Académie or the home decorator. This publication is a volume: it is essentially incomplete, perhaps a part of a hypothetical open-ended series; its proportions, its measure a result of the circumstances of its accumulation. Volume comes from the Latin noun volumen, a roll; but volumen comes from a verb, volvere, to roll, turnaround. Somehow, a verb, this verb, seems apt when thinking about engaging this volume: I find myself inclined to explore rather than receive, throwing my attention in many directions—in front, beside, behind—from a perpetually rolling, unfixed point-of-view. What follows is a traverse, a ramble.

At times it may seem to flow like an argument (maybe slightly drunken), but that is not its purpose.

It’s just one way through some of what this volume has to offer and hopefully it will uncover leads to inspire further explorations.

Three of the exhibitions variously encountered in this volume, Come a Singing!, See Here!, and Re-play, were grouped together under the name Soundtracks, presented as parts of a whole that toured Canada separately and together in 2003-2004. It will surely become evident as you move through the materials at hand that pertain to or were inspired by Soundtracks that these three shows together formed a very precarious whole, an uneasy union that on its own evinced the kind of loosely held-together multiplicity suggested above. Yet the brochure essay that accompanied the exhibition(s) (reprinted in this volume) found a way to connect the shows and encapsulate the project: “Soundtracks is a large multimedia exhibition that explores the diverse influence and cross-fertilization of music and the visual arts in Canada.” The cross-fertilization of music and the visual arts: this statement could more or less apply to

Introduction: This Volume

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1 See all of Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Image 107

2 “Music as part of a multi-media experience is fundamental to the Nigerian culture. The association of music with language (words), dance, religions, social and other extra-musical ideas and activities is a common feature of musical performances in Nigeria. A corollary to this principle is seen in the manner in which music is conceptualized, for example, among the Igbos and the Yorubas.

In Igbo culture, music is not defined in absolute terms.

Indeed, the Igbos have no word for music as it is understood in Europe. Thus, the word Egwu (or Nkwa or Uri) refers not only to the phenomenon of sound but also to features such as drama, poetry and dance.” Olabode Omojola, “Meaning and Communication in Yoruba Music,” Ilorin Journal of Education 9 (1989): 111.

most of what you will encounter in this volume as a whole. However, any exploration of how these intersections, interconnections, and interactions might work turns out to be an extremely complex endeavour. This is largely due to how incommensurable the discourses around music and visual art seem to be in modern, post-European culture (remembering post-modernism is still a kind of modernism).

It’s easy to imagine this incommensurability as having something to do with the apparently divergent relationships the two disciplines have with representation, the often expressed idea that music is the most abstract of art forms. I think this kind of contrast is problematic, and I will return to it later. But whatever problems there might be in positing this opposition, these difficulties are just part of a more basic discursive problem: it is perplexingly difficult to think music in general. What is music’s relationship to representation? Why would one choose to think of music as especially abstract rather than as especially sensually and viscerally material? Almost everything about music is contentious. Even something as seemingly basic as situating music in sound cannot be generalized. Rather, at a given moment in history within a given civilization, it can be: a set of harmonious mathematical relationships, inaudible to humans, that organize the cosmos (for example, the Music of the Spheres); or an ideal image of thought notated in a score, the perfect version of which transcends any sounding interpretive performance;1 or an arrangement of rhythms, phrases, and gestures articulated in time but not necessarily sounded (an instance of this was on view as part of Volume: Hear Here, the most recent of the founding exhibitions of this volume: Ian Skedd’s Sign Singing: Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division, 1979, Deaf Choir, 2009). And for those of you inclined to debate whether sign singing should be thought of as music rather than as dance, it might be worth reflecting on the fact that the very idea of music or dance as categories that have distinct meanings and/or identities is also contentious; the concept does not exist in every culture. For example, in many West African languages there is no word for music as a stand-alone concept.2 Not only are singing, playing, dancing, and poetry perpetually, intrinsically entwined, they are so pervasively bound to every aspect of everyday life—from the most profound religious ceremony to the most quotidian labour, altering, enlarging, expanding every experience—as to make their conceptual extraction from these activities unthinkable: “a long time ago some African stevedores, who had their own songs for their work of loading and unloading boats, first understood a machine to be the white man’s music.”3 And it is significant that even within modern post-European culture, some of the most ubiquitous beliefs surrounding music— ubiquitous to the point of having the aura of being essential, natural—have specific histories. Most significantly, the belief that music is a medium, a kind of language, for self-expression, is European and relatively new (ca. 15504). Specifically, it is bourgeois/aristocratic European (an Irish traditional singer knows that she or he is not expressing her or himself, while covering her or his eyes with a hand or a cap as she or he intricately ornaments the community’s music, making it clear that not only is the song and the singing not about her or him, but that she or he is not even the focus of this activity). Of course, the class that perpetuated this belief (European upper classes; that is, the class for whom classical music was written) developed numerous conventions that gave their music a narrative flow, a dramatic sense of destiny (climaxes and denouements), and unity and closure.5 These conventions became so pervasive as

Martin Arnold

to become pre-conditionings within European and post-European cultures (most fully experienced today in the manipulative powers of film music). However, any close interrogation of the idea of music as an expressive language will expose the contentiousness of this belief as well. For example, as Julia Kristeva contends: While the fundamental function of language is the communicative function, and while it transmits a meaning, music is a departure from this principle of communication. [. . .] It is a combinatory of dif ferent elements [. . .]. If the addressee hears this combinatory as a sentimental, emotive, patriotic, etc., message, that is a cultural system rather than a result of a “meaning” implicit in the “message.” For while music is a system of dif ferences, it is not a system of signs. Its constitutive elements do not have a signified. Referent/signif ied/signif ier here seem to melt into a single mark that combines with others in a language that doesn’t mean anything.⁶

This is just a start at engaging the difficulties of thinking music. I’ll continue to use the term music, in the singular, as a supposedly knowable term because I’m not sure what else I would do; but I’m thinking it’s one of those words that should be “under erasure” (though I’ll spare you the X).

But above, I said almost everything about music is contentious; “almost” because what is never challenged about music, by any thinker I’ve encountered with the will to publically share her or his opinions about it (regardless of historical moment, class, or geographical location), is that somehow music is powerful; that somehow music’s effects and affects have the ability to alter one’s state and change (if even subtly) the lived world of a listener. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:

5 3 John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 35.

4 For an incisive overview of the shift within elite Europe from music-as-math to musicas-self-expression see Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); especially the first three sections.

5 These conventions include: dramatic juxtapositions of slow and fast, soft and loud; moods being ascribed to major and minor keys; melodies being simplified to the point of being recognizable themes, that can come and go and be audibly transformed like characters in a drama; and harmonic relationships that are heard to progress (thus the term chord progression), moving from tension to resolution.

6 Julia Kristeva, Language, the Unknown, trans. Anne M. Menke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989 [1981]), 309.

Music is not in visible space, but it besieges, undermines, and displaces that space, so that soon these overdressed listeners who take the judicial air and exchange remarks or smiles, unaware that the f loor is trembling beneath their feet, are like a ship’s crew buf feted about on the surface of a tempestuous sea.⁷

Plato talks about the power of music in a more (now) conventional manner: Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful.⁸

Significantly, Plato’s statement follows a dialogue that discusses which melodies, harmonies, and rhythms will be allowed in the Republic (to bolster its grace and suppress un-grace, of course). Yes, music is powerful and Plato wanted to harness and use this power. He has not been alone in pursuing this enterprise. How the power of music has been and is represented—reified (from the Latin word res, meaning

Introduction: This Volume

7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 2nd ed., trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), 262. Merleau-Ponty was not discussing aesthetics when he wrote this. Rather he was using musical experience as an example of a different perceptual world one can inhabit when the individual senses work together in a different relationship with a different hierarchy.

8 Plato, “Book III,” The Dialogues of Plato, Volume Four: The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. R. M. Hare and D. A. Russell (London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1970 [trans. 1871]), 170.

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thing; to reify is to thing-ify something that wasn’t previously a thing)—varies wildly; and the substance of these reifications, the way its power is stabilized, formalized, and used as an object of ideology, greatly affects the nature of the impact music can have on a listener and the resonance this impact could have within the listener’s social and political engagement with the world. Reifying music or musical experience, saying what it is (cosmic math; God speaking through human vessels; an essential manifestation of group, social, cultural, or countercultural identity; the direct expressive language of the emotions or the soul; a radiation of the pre-discursive figural or semiotic chora; et cetera), is what allows music to become a thing, a commodity that can be judged and given a tangible value (even if music itself is intangible).

However, while the reifications of music profoundly, ferociously (maybe even decisively) determine the possibilities and potentials inherent in its power, these reifications do not fully contain its effects and affects; music continues to have the ability to change a listener’s mind (if only briefly) in a wayward and unruly manner even if it goes unrecognized or un-understood by the mind that’s been changed. Again, regardless of time or place or the position of whoever is talking, not only is the recognition that music is somehow powerful uncontested, music (and its power) is nonetheless thought of as somehow mysterious.

I find that a friction between exploring the reifications of various musical events and activities— thinking of these events as historical artefacts or bellwethers, expressions of culture (the kind of exploration inherent in much contemporary visual art discourse)—on the one hand and granting music a kind of unspeakable, wonderful, yet deeply felt power—a power that can only be discussed through reifications and yet is not fully defined and delimited by them—on the other hand, exists in one way or another in all the writing and artworks you will encounter (one way or another) in this volume. This friction is not what the essays collected here or the artworks indexed are about; nor do I put forward this friction as some kind of grand unifying theme (let me celebrate again the generous heterogeneity of this volume). It is present here often only as subtext (intentional or otherwise) or can only be uncovered through a deconstructive process carried out on information more discernibly offered. However, this friction is present nonetheless, whenever one attempts to maintain the critical distance involved with thinking music as a complex cultural-historical construction or text while feeling the affective immanence of music as uncannily touching and moving.

In their introduction to Re-play (part of Soundtracks) curators Barbara Fischer and Catherine Crowston focus on the cultural texts engaged and enacted by the works in their exhibition: The artists in Re-play are concerned with the culture of pop music—mainstream and underground.

They are attracted by its themes and sentiments, its versatile styles of communication, and its powerful, generative effects. [. . .] Yet in the end all of the artists share a more ref lective approach to the images and sounds of popular music. The works in the exhibition of fer observant replays, emotional inhabitations, ironic appropriations, and a skewed perspective on glamour, hero-

9 Barbara Fisher and Catherine Crowston in this volume, 120.

worship, and stardom. The replay of popular tunes and the mimicry of its styles are made into a means for these artists to act and ref lect on forms of identity, community, alienation, and dissent.⁹

Martin Arnold

The multiplex criticality, the arrays of engagements played out from various degrees of reflective distance ascribed to the artists involved are certainly significant features of the works, encouraging serious theoretical examination. Sylvie Gilbert, co-curator (with Gordon Hatt) of the exhibition Video Heroes, follows a similar kind of trajectory in the brochure for the show when she discusses the creative “infiltration” of the cultural field of commercial music videos by the artists represented. She asserts that this infiltration is perpetrated through a critical (often ironic, often humorous) engagement with the “figure of the star or the hero.” But then she makes a further assertion:

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The video works selected here also attest to the emotional attachment their creators have to the pop music they illustrate. The element these artists most protectively preserve from television’s vocabulary is the emotive power intrinsic to the music and images onscreen [...].¹⁰

10 Sylvie Gilbert in this volume, 122.

There’s the friction I discussed above: music (and music video) is observed as a cultural phenomenon, material that can be played with (critically/ironically/humorously and/or through any other imaginable creative incursion) by artists coming from visual art practices; but at the same time it is proposed that these artists (maybe some, maybe all) are genuinely attached to music and are bringing it into their practices so as to take part in its intrinsic emotive power. Brady Cranfield, in an interview with Jonathan Middleton published here, pursues this friction further: Pop music’s supposed expressivity and immediacy help to explain its use by artists. Perhaps it’s an ef fective, acceptable way to signify “I really mean it” without having to be fully declarative, which can be awkward. I think this is partly why Kevin Schmidt uses music in his work, such as when he performed his “artist talk” for Fog at the Presentation House Gallery as pop songs.

Popular music helps convey a sense of unpretentious emotion: an un-ironic, if not humorless, sometimes humorous expression of contact, feeling and meaningfulness.¹¹

11 Brady Cranfield (with Jonathan Middleton) in this volume, 24.

This follows a discussion in which Cranfield identifies what he calls a “habitual difference” between the ways in which people respond to contemporary art and popular music: Even when they [popular music and contemporary art] share many features, their juxtaposition is mutually deconstructive. Thoughtful analysis of form and content, claims of deep meaning and significance, elaborate historicization, recourse to expert knowledge—these are on both sides. But in everyday practice, the two are not really held as equivalent, if not without reason. Typically, the one is considered more personal and emotional, the other more cerebral and serious.¹²

I think Cranfield is pointing to the incommensurability of discourses proposed above: “personal and emotional” and “cerebral and serious” don’t really pair to form a coherent dialectical antithesis; rather,

Introduction: This Volume

12 Ibid., 21.

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Images 71-72

13 Rodney Graham in Ihor Holubizky in this volume, 34.

they are disjunct approaches to imagining art and art making. I observe a friction when these two imaginings are brought in contact, as they are in this volume. However (“in everyday practice”), this friction rarely occurs; it seems more efficient to keep the two modes of consideration separate.

Music-making is believed to embrace the “personal and emotional,” and apparently many of those trained to make visual art want to embrace it as well. Indeed, Ihor Holubizky’s essay, “The Best . . . of a Hopeless Situation,” delivers a substantial (yet tellingly incomplete) history of students at art schools who left behind making visual art to become rock stars. The potential for fame and commercial success could have certainly been a motivation for this move, but I imagine they also wanted to embrace the “expressivity and immediacy” Cranfield describes. Holubizky’s essay includes a quote from Rodney Graham, one of Canada’s most successful visual artists (whose work Phonokinetoscope was shown as part of Re-play): “One of my dreams is to become a rock star-cum-painter, like Ronnie Wood and David Bowie.”13 This is not a complete pipe dream given Graham’s serious involvement in writing and performing music. He has worked regularly as a pop musician fronting bands. So his dream is not based on a desire to take part in both activities, he’s done that. What he seems to desire then is that the world see him as a musician first, one who also makes visual art. I suppose the crux of this dream could be that an international rock star shines much brighter than a Canadian art star and Graham wants to be a bigger star. But rather, I prefer to think that he wants to say, “I really mean it,” without actually having to say it; that he wants his music to be received as immediate, unpretentious, and un-ironic as opposed to it being potentially apprehended as a kind of meta-music—a cultural readymade of sorts—a critical, conceptual representation constructed by a para-Duchampian visual artist.

There’s more to Holubizky’s Graham quote; the back-and-forth he recounts goes: Rodney Graham: One of my dreams is to become a rock star-cum-painter, like Ronnie Wood and David Bowie.

Matthew Higgins: But surely the down side of that scenario is that your art would never be taken seriously?

14 Ibid.

Rodney Graham: I know. It’s a hopeless situation.¹⁴

Clearly, the suggestion is that if Graham’s production is held to be fundamentally personal and emotional that’s incommensurable with it being also held as cerebral and serious (in the critical, contemporary art sense). However, I think Peter Culley would be okay with this hopelessness. His essay “Let’s Go Away For a While: The High Lonesome of Rodney Graham’s Rock is Hard” is about many things (as are all the essays in this volume). He discusses a number of rock and pop artists, some more famous than others. He talks about the way the evolution of popular music’s commodification and commercialization has effected both the nature of how these artists express themselves as well as how this expression is received. And he talks about Rodney Graham’s music in relation to this history and those forces:

Martin Arnold

Rodney Graham’s emergence as a composer and performer of rock music has taken place then

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not only in the wake of [Kurt] Cobain’s death but in the twilight of rock’s existence as a unifying social force. [. . .] In the years since [Cobain’s death], that industry’s scorched earth commodif ication of every aspect of Cobain’s legacy has helped it [rock music] recover commercially, but with a concomitant loss of cultural capital.¹⁵

15 Peter Culley in this volume, 41.

Culley goes on to suggest that Graham’s identification with contemporary art, his high lonesome away-ness from popular music as an industry, allows his pop music (remembering that “pop” doesn’t actually have to be popular) to be less mediated as a commodity and retain a power that’s harder to achieve for artists directly working within (for or intentionally against) the commercial music complex: Despite Graham’s real musical achievement and the dogged determination underpinning it, it miraculously preserves an air of accident. It is as if in private negotiation of a twilit half-world (plucking tiny mandolins, testing pedals, transcribing birdsong) the artist had tripped across— as if abandoned beside the pathway—a set of gestural skills he had only to master and reclaim.

And if the struggles that had brought these skills forth have passed from knowledge, if the traumas they expressed have been long suppressed, these burnished forms still possess an antique charm. They might still be made to contain new elements, new combinations.¹⁶

16 Ibid.

And further along: Rodney Graham has produced not only a pop record sui generis in its conception and execution, but has advanced with it in his larger career to new levels of directness and intimacy of address.¹⁷

There it is again: greater directness and intimacy through music. Yet, significantly, Culley doesn’t position these attributes as separate to Graham’s visual art practice. Rather, he posits Graham discovering musical practices, skills, as if they were historic artifacts, plastic forms that could be altered or added to, as a visual artist would shape and combine found materials. But Culley isn’t proposing that Graham is making some kind of other art out of music. Graham is making music. In fact he made a pop record. But if it is indeed sui generis, it is because it is less encumbered by historic, conventional pressures exerted by institutions that have an interest in the commodification and commercialization of music; these are the kinds of pressures “professional” musicians have to deal with by virtue of being professional (regardless of whether they embrace or resist the pressures), but that a visual artist making music could slip away from.

At the same time Culley isn’t dealing with Graham’s musical endeavours as some kind of quasi-surreptitious sideline. On the contrary, not only are they a part of Graham’s career, they have taken his practice to “new levels of directness and intimacy of address.” The implication is that by making music, rather than art-that-uses-music-as-a-material, Graham is also able to step aside from pressures exerted by visual art as

Introduction: This Volume

17 Ibid., 45.

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an institutional complex, exerted within visual art as a cultural field. Culley is giving us a taste of one way of thinking past the discursive separation of disciplines. The related ideas of commodification and commercialization have progressively entered this discussion. When Culley talked about the rock music industry’s “scorched earth commodification of every aspect of Cobain’s legacy,” he was indeed talking about an actual industry making money off of the reification of the values Cobain represented. But rock music as a “unifying social force” is also a reification, another kind of commodity, and Culley was right to describe its fading as a loss of (cultural) capital. Music as “personal and emotional” and visual art as “cerebral and serious” are reifications; they ascribe values to those activities that can be given varying worth and exchanged in discourse. In his essay, “Come a Singing,” Andrew Hunter discusses the appropriation of folk music, the idea of Folk Music, as a tool to be used in the attempt by cultural institutions to shape a Canadian identity in the first half of the twentieth century. This is another historical instance of a kind of commodification-commercialization at work (it doesn’t matter that what is being sold and bought doesn’t have a direct monetary value). Hunter’s treatment of this subject is critical and somewhat cautionary (it reminds me of Adorno’s many scathing critiques of the way the Nazis used a version of German volkisch culture—a conflation of folk and popular culture—in their largely successful attempt to produce a unified German identity). But towards the end of the essay he states: I have a long-standing interest in music and what it all means; in its relationship to identity and in the belief that music is a natural, truthful projection of the performer. In the end, however, it is a

18 Andrew Hunter in this volume, 52.

performance, an act, just as making and displaying art is a performance.¹⁸

Hunter clearly knows that “the belief that music is a natural, truthful projection of the performer” is a reification, a cultural-historical construct. But it’s an idea that can nonetheless aid him in exploring differences he feels between various musical experiences even if this exploration also has to make use of problematic concepts like “authentic” or “real.” Hunter concludes: I’m dipping back into music again to find another potential parallel, an avenue of pursuit if you will. I’ve found it in the work of contemporary musicians and producers like Rick Rubin and Jack White who saw in the music of Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, respectively, something real beyond the surface of myths and Nashville over-production. Go back to the standards, strip them down and crank up the distortion. Closer to home, I look to The Sadies wearing the ragged cowboy shirts of their father and uncle’s Country & Western band, the Good Brothers, playing a repertoire of twang that mixes surf, garage, country, rock, and punk. It’s my new soundtrack. I’m following 19 Ibid., 53.

their lead back into Canadian art to find real country.¹⁹

In part, I read this as Hunter hoping for more, believing something can happen when one experiences music—whether making it or listening to it—that can bring change, that can give rise to something new,

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something unknown, “something real beyond the surface of myths,” even if it involves old traditions.

I read it as him hoping that the power of music isn’t limited to a set of potent, pre-conditioned affects employed to help sell a cultural agenda.

There are a lot of references to popular music celebrities above; and as Sylvie Gilbert suggests, pop heroes and their representations are sources of material many of the artists indexed in this volume engage creatively. This observation is closely tied to the discussion here around commodification. A celebrity is a figure who many invest interest in. This gives the celebrity value that she or he can trade on.

But it strikes me that there is a substantial difference in the way that music stars are thought of as opposed to movie stars, a difference that again evinces the friction I’ve been asserting. Movie stars are actors, they take part in producing fiction; they are part of a spectacle in the sense that Guy Debord theorizes it.

As Anselm Jappe says: Everything life lacks is to be found within the spectacle, conceived of as an ensemble of independent representations. As an example here, Debord evokes celebrities, such as actors or politicians, whose function is to represent a combination of human qualities and of joie de vivre—precisely what is missing from the lives of all other individuals, trapped as they are in vapid roles (SS [Debord’s Society of the Spectacle] § 60-61). “Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle” (SS § 25), and individuals, separated from one another, can rediscover unity only within the spectacle, where “images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream” (SS § 2).²⁰

I have no doubt that Debord would include popular music celebrities in his list of surrogates; and certainly, when a listener reifies the impact of the musical experience as being solely due to the greatness of the musician that sounded it, separation is firmly established. However, I think there is a pervasive if tacit belief that runs parallel to those that prop up hero worship, that when a song (to slightly paraphrase Plato), “find[s] [its] way into the inward places of the soul, on which [it] mightily fasten[s],”21 it is somehow a part of the listener and has become something unique to that fusion (the belief that the musician is playing your song). It is not only to be admired and desired from a distance. I don’t suppose many scrutinize the challenge this could pose to separation; I suppose it’s more comfortable to sit back and bask in the brilliance of a star. Will Straw writes about famous movie actors and popular musicians. His essay “Squawkies” does not deal with the difference suggested above but he does bring issues to the table that I think are germane to this discussion. “Squawkies” makes comparisons between changes precipitated by silent movies becoming sound cinema and those that came about, starting in the 1980s, when popular songs were commercially required to become the soundtrack to their tailor-made music video, a visual accompaniment that usually allowed us, in some form, a view of the artist(s). Straw presents an intricate analogy informed by opinions expressed at the times of these developments, both for and against the changes they instigated. I think his conclusion is relevant here; this is part of it:

Introduction: This Volume

20 Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999 [1993]), 6-7.

21 Plato, 170.

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Sound cinema’s public acceptance was hastened by the quick introduction of genres (like the gangster film and the screwball comedy) which deftly exploited sound’s possibilities and helped to reshape the popular cinema’s narrative forms. These genres made the clash of embodied subcultural languages and ethnic accents central to their meaning and appeal. [. . .] Similarly, perhaps, the rise of music video since the early 1980s has accompanied the commercial and cultural ascendancy of musical genres whose core political values have to do with racial or gender identities: hip hop, teen-pop, and, implicitly, country music and heavy metal. [. . .] [T]his turn has naturalized the music video; it has made the visual image a logical site for the enactment of music’s politics. The music video makes it impossible to grasp music without confronting its grounding

22 Will Straw in this volume, 57.

in flesh and blood, in bodies marked with the visible signs of social dif ference.²²

An inescapable confrontation with difference is certainly a crucial component in opening up the politics surrounding the apprehension of popular music. It is especially significant in a culture in which the European aristocratic and bourgeois reification of music as a language that somehow expresses the self of the musician dominates. In this situation, it’s important to know who’s squawking and where she or he comes from. I think Straw is right in emphasizing this potential in music video. However, it posits the viewer-listener confronting flesh and blood rather than receiving an icon. This is a problem, I think. To my mind, the music video more inextricably binds the musician and her or his music to a spectacle; it pushes the pop star closer to the movie star. The song starts to take on the quality of being a number in a piece of musical theatre. What’s at issue is separation, the life-sucking separation Debord ascribes to the spectacle.

Any optimism that could arise from Straw’s conclusion would be based on the viewer using a confrontation with difference as a motivation to make contact with, actively rub up against that difference; it would have to be used as motivation to stop being passive and stop being separate. I’m sure this is not an impossible occurrence, but the capitalist agenda that gives rise to commercial music video certainly discourages its happening.

Significantly, many of the artworks indexed in this volume are music videos of sorts. For me, a notable strength of many of these works is precisely that they undermine the spectacle: sometimes through an incisive deconstruction of the strategies that make it work in this society of the spectacle; sometimes through transmutation, where without a commercial agenda (or the budget to back up such an agenda), appropriated conventions of how sound and image go together get irrevocably altered through the skewed execution of eccentric imaginings (gold transmuted into iron filings at the end of a sparkler, lit up and spraying branching sparks); sometimes inadvertently through disregard, as the artist explores sound and image relationships that have yet to be rendered spectacular. However, what matters about this undermining is not just its act of negation. By disrupting the spectacle these artists disturb the comfort of passive separation, opening up the work and encouraging the viewer-listener to actively engage its possibilities. No one organization is in charge of the society of the spectacle. But Debord is clear that it exists in late capitalism for those with power to grow their wealth and influence through the passive

Martin Arnold

consumption of others. The society of the spectacle has much in common with Marc Couroux’s Control Society. His essay “Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society (with lines of flight)” is a deliriously rich piece of writing. The glossary compiles a list of arcane terms denoting techniques, mechanisms, agents, and initiated situations relevant to the perpetuation or resistance of the desire of institutions of power—administrative bureaucracies, more-or-less actual late-capitalist consortiums and corporations—to grow a Control Society. It can be read as one extension of Plato’s Republic. Plato recognizes the unruly, potentially disruptive power of music but imagines ways to put that power to work: some harmonies are recognized to inspire and encourage warriors in the waging of war; others are recognized to encourage general calm and complacency. Remembering Kristeva, if one hears in these harmonies a “sentimental, emotive, patriotic, etc., message, that is a cultural system” (even if we knew what the ancient Greek modes were, we couldn’t use them; we’re not conditioned to their affects).23 In a sense, Couroux presents this cultural system, rather than being latent, as actively manipulated and perpetually reconstituted. In a way, he is presenting the ossifying, homogenizing affects of reification as possible outcomes in an elaborate, fabulous conspiracy theory where the forces of the Control Society collude to create an actual mass culture, a collective group mind where the event—the rogue happening that can suddenly change everything for an individual or group of individuals—is expunged. Or, at the very least, Couroux challenges listeners to be aware that they are always listening under the influence.

An elephant in the room that is this introduction is the fact that, so far, when we have discussed music it has almost invariably been popular music. There’s a reason for that, of course: most of the writing in this volume and the artworks indexed take their inspiration, in one way or another, from pop music.

Brady Cranfield lends some further perspective to this propensity:

13

23 Kristeva, 309.

[P]opular music is only deceptively simple, obvious and self-contained. With even cursory examination, it becomes more complex. Ambiguously, the same selection of popular music can be both meaningfully personal and anonymously public. Even if vapid, shamelessly commercial, and banal, it’s still deeply held and charged with personal significance, sometimes bypassing active deliberation. Songs are enjoyed despite expressed preferences, and many songs are hated but stir us anyway. [. . .] With popular music, something else is always there—personal, political, economic, and so on. [. . .] It’s easy to appreciate why contemporary theory—and art—is attracted to popular music.²⁴

The ambiguities Cranfield mentions are hot with the friction this introduction has been discussing in different contexts. The artist is positioned (significantly, with the theorist) at a critical distance from popular music, able to experiment with it from the outside looking in, while (ambiguously) at the same time being deeply, uncritically affected by it. But even with this ambiguity, the works contemporary artists are making in reaction to and in contact with pop music are on a very different footing than the pop music they are using. That is, the artists are not making popular art (their practices are in the margins of

Introduction: This Volume

24 Cranfield and Middleton in this volume, 24.

14 25 I recognize that there is no single system one could identify as mainstream culture per se. Likewise, I recognize that popular music used as a single category is massively problematic. In various contexts, in various ways, it can be applied to musics that are extremely, fundamentally different. However, as singular terms they are still useful in suggesting a set of variable relationships to established institutions, money and power.

26 Timothy Long in this volume, 76.

mainstream culture) and the popular music they are experimenting with is not intrinsically critical (by definition, it thrives within mainstream culture regardless of the ideological stance it performs2⁵).

This is not the relationship between visual art and music discussed by Timothy Long or Ben Portis in their essays published in this volume (both related to various aspects of the multi-part exhibition they co-curated, See Hear).

Timothy Long’s essay “Lost in Two Different Ways: John Cage at Emma Lake” primarily focuses on Cage’s co-leadership of the joint composers’ and artists’ workshop at Emma Lake, in central Saskatchewan in 1965. Long recounts a rich, complicated, little known historical moment. In regard to Cage’s influence in this setting, Long writes: “[Cage] brought a practice that challenged a range of modernist assumptions by transgressing boundaries between artistic disciplines and ultimately between art and life.”2⁶ There’s no room to rehearse Cage’s aesthetic politics here, but suffice it to say, his criticisms against the power exercised through volition, through the assertion of value and the performance of ego, and his rejoinder to that exercise through the celebration of chance and indeterminacy posed as great a challenge to the socially ensconced conventions and disciplines of popular culture as they did to modernism. In the context of Emma Lake, visual artists were able to make contact, through Cage’s music, with potentials for resistance and new experiential possibilities. Here the relationship between visual art and music finds itself on equal footing and their coming together allows for an interaction that is not bogged down by, and pushes beyond, inbred arguments around how the development of an art form should progress.

Ben Portis’ essay, “Not Musicians (the Early Years),” uncovers other histories. These involve two groups of (primarily visual) artists, forming bands—the Artists’ Jazz Band and the Nihilist Spasm Band— and making music, resolutely non-commercial music. The former freely improvised music that nonetheless evinced their love for the new thing/free jazz/avant-garde jazz/fire music coming out of various corners of the jazz milieu in the United States, starting at the turn of the sixties. The latter also freely improvised, but on invented instruments playing a kind of punk noise music before those labels had any currency.

Both groups were directly taking part rather than performing a subtle incursion. Neither group showed any desire to be rock stars. However, their relationship to the music they made was as unabashedly sincere as Rodney Graham’s has been to the pop music he produces. And there is a strange parallel one could make between the possibilities that Peter Culley describes available to Graham making pop music outside of the professional pop milieu and those the Artists’ Jazz Band and Nihilist Spasm Band accessed in relation to the musics that inspired them. This was a more succinct negotiation with the Artists’ Jazz Band and Nihilist Spasm Band. As Ben Portis puts it: However, what is of more interest here is to appreciate how profoundly each group resolutely followed its own course. As the title of this essay [“Not Musicians. . .”] suggests, a common feature with def inite relevance was their status as outsiders; they were amateurs in the best sense,

27 Ben Portis in this volume, 81.

a limitation they turned into an advantage, giving rise to both groups making unlikely, yet real contributions to a world of creative music-making they variously cherished as listeners.²⁷

Martin Arnold

Michael Turner’s cascading memoir, “Talkin’ Yoko Ono, Mother and Language, Art and Music Blues,” involves truly amateur musicians, with emphasis on the etymological source of the word amateur—amator, meaning lover. He presents listening to music, loving music as an activity as dynamic as making music (these amateurs didn’t form bands). He offers glimpses of two lives wonderfully altered by music, that of his mother and his own. He recounts his mother’s “almost religious devotion to popular song” and how this devotion was challenged by an encounter in Bohemian Vancouver, an encounter that made his mother realize that things could change, that made her realize that the pop music she currently loved wouldn’t always necessarily be as important to her.2⁸ Through this encounter made she became aware that there were other possibilities: that you can think past songs to music and past music to sound (“the echoes of pebbles falling down a well, fingernails over a blackboard, or the texture of Yoko Ono’s voice, full throttle”);2⁹ and that “you can hear more if you know what sound is [. . .].”3⁰ I don’t think Turner is presenting this experience as a corrective to his mother’s love for pop music, that she realized the superiority of engaging more advanced forms of music. Rather, I take this series of anecdotes as a demonstration of how the power of music resides in history—personal and cultural—and that the music that impacts a listener’s life can change. This strikes me as important as it suggests that the validity of the alterations one incurs through listening are not inextricably tied to the deemed righteousness of the politics, the ideological reifications, of the music one is listening to. At different times of one’s life, popular music can be as mysteriously powerful as avant-garde jazz; and becoming engrossed by the latter doesn’t necessarily have to supersede the former. Turner goes on to tell of his mother’s return to more comfortable forms of music-making but that her realization about the polyvalent power of music gave rise to an environment where music became powerful to him; gave rise to a condition where he could tell his mother of “music becoming important to me, important to the way I make my sentences, to the way I make sense of the world, a road that takes me to places other than music, invisible places.”31

One of the most significant aspects of this volume is that it makes available, for the first time in English, a portion of a set of interviews carried out between Nicole Gingras and the artist Raymond Gervais. Gervais’s work deals with music and, in particular, listening to music. Moreover, like Michael Turner, Gervais seems to approach listening as a co-creative endeavour and his work subtly calls attention to this. This may seem like a surprising statement given that, in recent years, Gervais’s work tends to not make any sounds. But it is through this absence that he implicates the listener’s imagination in the listening experience. In the interview, he discusses a photo by Bob Parent of an all-star jazz ensemble made up of major be-boppers that never recorded. Towards the end of the discussion he says:

15

28 Michael Turner in this volume, 89.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 88.

When I look at the photo, I don’t really hear a piece of music, but I’m aware of the potential for exchange, I’m familiar with the sound and phrasing of each of these musicians. I know it could work, and in the end, I never make the definitive record in my head. From that point of view, it’s fertile. It’s never made. It’s always in the process of being made.3²

Introduction: This Volume

32 Raymond Gervais (with Nicole Gingras) in this volume, 95.

16

33 From Michiel de Ruyter’s liner notes for Dolphy’s recording Last Date (The Netherlands: Fontana 681 008 ZL, 1964).

A significant aspect of this statement is that it could be made about music that can be listened to as well: as I listen to a piece of music, it’s in the process of being made; it won’t be complete until it’s finished but at that point it is no longer present. And the memory of it seems always utterly incommensurable with the experience itself. Eric Dolphy, another jazz artist, puts it well: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone—in the air; you can never capture it again.”33 Music doesn’t deliver anything like a fixed, agreed upon meaning that remains to be examined and explained. A description of the physical make-up of a musical event (using a recording, one can analyze what frequencies occurred at what amplitude at what point in time) is never mistaken for the experience of the event. And what Dolphy is saying is, in a sense, true of recorded music as well: every time I put on a record the experience is different; it can’t be captured—it’s always in the process of being made.

Gervais makes work that is like a wild extrapolation of the Bob Parent photo. He makes assemblages filled with the objects—accoutrements and tools—of music-making, images, and words: album covers and metronomes are perched on record turntables; a concert poster announces a performance of duos featuring Claude Debussy and Paul Desmond, Gustav Mahler and Lester Young, Manuel de Falla and Charles Mingus; a series of twenty-five empty CD cases are hung on the wall, each cover containing a text naming a wind of the world, telling what part of the world it blows over and something about its character, each promising a non-existent recording of that wind. This really doesn’t do justice to the extreme variety of Gervais’s offerings. But what is really remarkable about this work is that it never registers as being the work; that always seems to be absent. Gervais’s work (and I’m sticking with this word because they don’t really settle as pieces, as objects; rather they are traces of an action, a work, bringing things— pieces that do not belong to Gervais—together) is radically in-between. By in-between, I’m thinking of the shifting, amorphous space discussed by Elizabeth Grosz in her book Architecture from the Outside: The space of the in-between is that which is not a space, a space without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself, its form, from the outside, which is not its outside (that would imply that it has a form) but whose form is the outside of the identity, not just of an other (for

34 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 91.

that would reduce the in-between to the role of an object, not a space), but of others whose relations of positivity define, by default, the space that is constituted as in-between.3⁴

Formless forms are generated only by relationships between things while being outside of those things; somehow this fits my experience of Raymond Gervais’s work. This whole line of thinking came from the fact that I find being with Gervais’s offerings to be profound, insidiously wonderful aesthetic events, even as I wonder where the art really is. That is, I often find what I’m seeing or hearing with Gervais seems uncannily disjunct from what I’m experiencing. It’s not just that I find myself in-between the various elements that Gervais has brought together but those elements seem radically in-between as well; they and me with them seem to be all together on the outside of some-other-things. By having the viewer reading an array of signs and symbols—all of which are clearly not the artwork but refer to an experience

Martin Arnold

indefinitely deferred and intrinsically ephemeral—he makes it clear that the experience of the artwork does not inhere in the meaning of what is being read. This experience is certainly indelibly connected to those meanings but it is not located there; it is in-between. Gervais is invoking the “expressivity and immediacy” of music even when his works do not sound. But in the imaginary musics that haunt his assemblages what is being expressed—what is being “pressed out”—is not meaning (music posited as a medium that’s carrying this supposed meaning into the world); it is the possibility of music as an event— “always in the process of being made”—that is pressed out. And the immediacy invoked is the direct and instant event possible with music. Music happens in a complex, altered present tense, in a variously expansive now. Remember the besieging, undermining, displacing, trembling, and buffeting put forward as possible actions that can take place when one listens to music. But the music ends and the listener finds her or himself back on dry land.

With Christof Migone’s writing, inspired by the exhibition he curated, Volume: Hear Here, we leave discussions of music and visual art as (supposedly) understood culturally constituted categories.

He is concerned with sound and sounds, silence and silences, not only in a phenomenological sense registered on the level of perception but also as embodied utterances and pauses, as unruly cultural spillages more than representations. He is concerned with how sound art (sometimes called music if it is listened to a certain way under certain cultural-historical conditions) “is not in visible space, but it besieges, undermines, and displaces that space.”3⁵

But Migone describes “the reluctance of the artist, the curator, the writer to be pegged to sound (as an art form, as a discipline, as a sense).”3⁶ I think his essay also evinces a belief (or at least, a desire) that the visual components of the works in Volume: Hear Here also besiege, undermine and displace visual space—that is, visual space as a coherently describable, representable mise en scène. I mentioned towards the beginning of this introduction that I found the opposition of visual art and music based on the place of representation (and abstraction) problematic. Late in his life, Adorno wrote something that is relevant to this problem:

17

35 Merleau-Ponty, 262.

36 Christof Migone in this volume, 112.

It is perhaps not irrelevant that the oldest cave paintings, whose naturalism is always so readily af f irmed, demonstrated the greatest f idelity to the portrayal of movement, as if they already aspired to what Valéry ultimately demanded: the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate, of what has not been nailed down. If so, the impulse of these paintings was not naturalistic imitation but, rather, from the beginning a protest against reification.3⁷

Movement, the indeterminate, a confrontation with “what has not been nailed down”; these are qualities that Adorno requires for any experience of any art event regardless of its materials. Art is not about representations (natural or abstract); rather—in movement, in flux—art is in-between representations.

And it is important to register that Adorno is not talking about the reification of the art event; rather, he is identifying as the defining characteristic of all art the protest against the reification of life.

Introduction: This Volume

37 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970]), 326-327.

18 38 Migone in this volume, 103.

39 Ibid., 107.

40 Martin Seel in Migone in this volume, 113.

I talk about in-between-ness. Migone talks about beyond-ness (although he does say, “Whispers suggest appearance, they don’t impose it, they are insidious insertions of in-betweens”3⁸); but not beyond as transcendental, rather, just beyond (displaced), just outside of my grasp, beyond my control. Migone discusses the production of “rhythmic agents that animate discourse as well as the beyond-discourse, the remainder,”3⁹ the enabling of “forming beyond the formation of forms.”⁴⁰ He speaks of a desire that the works assembled in Volume: Hear Here, engender an exchange “beyond meaning, beyond interpretation.”

I read this as beyond reification. But he also recognizes: The desire I attribute to the works to go beyond meaning and interpretation is an unabashed curatorial imposition. They each have their own volume; as curator, I just temporarily have my hands on the dials. Or more precisely there are more than one set of dials by which to listen to each of

41 Migone in this volume, 106.

the works.⁴¹

I’m sure any of the curators involved with any of the exhibitions referenced and indexed in this volume would find much in the above to concur with in regard to their own work. None of the shows collected work so as to be mere examples, audio-visual aids in forwarding an agenda. All the works indexed in this volume can be somehow beyond.

Beyond and in-between. This volume holds an array of in-betweens; the constellation of words, images, and sounds suggest all manner of possibilities for tracing (lightly) lines between points forming strange shapes that defy easy description (there are no Big Dippers here). The binary tension between terms like visual art and music slips away into the radical shifting in-betweens of aesthetic experience with all its unstable valences. As Elizabeth Grosz says: What does it mean to reflect upon a position, a relation, a place related to other places but with 42 Grosz, 91.

no place of its own: the position of the in-between? The in-between is a strange space [. . .].⁴²

Martin Arnold

Jonathan Middleton in conversation with Brady Cranfield

Jonathan Middleton

2006

JM: In recent years, it has been difficult to speak generally about contemporary art practices on

the North American West Coast without touching on the increasing number of artists who employ the use of popular music in their work. This seemed particularly true of the discussion surrounding the Baja to Vancouver exhibition, due largely to its size and the fact it chose the West Coast, rather than popular music, as its subject yet was unavoidably about music.1 I don’t mean to suggest that these practices are somehow unique to the West Coast—certainly countless examples prove otherwise. However, I continue to be struck by the strong relationship visual artists of this region have with popular music and more specifically how place factors in these works. An interest in geography and landscape is seemingly paired with an emphatic declaration of popular music fandom. I’m a bit unsure whether there is a clear relationship between these two ideas or whether they simply crop up—independently of one another—when artists work with popular music. It is clear that fandom was something you wanted to explore with The Music Appreciation Society panel discussions you organized at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (CAG), and Or Gallery, but I’m curious as to some of your other interests in putting those events together.2 BC: Only indirectly fandom, which is just one possible position. My broader interest was sociological and

epistemological. What motivated The Music Appreciation Society is a habitual difference I see in common responses to contemporary art and popular music. Even when they share many features, their juxtaposition is mutually deconstructive. Thoughtful analysis of form and content, claims of deep meaning and significance, elaborate historicization, recourse to expert knowledge—these are on both sides. But in everyday practice, the two are not really held as equivalent, if not without reason. Typically, the one is considered more personal and emotional, the other more cerebral and serious. This dichotomy plays out in conversation. I find that people are willing to expressively and opinionatedly engage with popular music more than contemporary art. It’s not that this type of discourse never takes place around contemporary art, of course, but it struck me as interesting—and maybe a little entertaining—to help facilitate loose, impassioned dialogue in an archetypical contemporary art context, such as the CAG. For good or bad, such contexts are most often considered hushed, ponderous, and intimidating. In this respect, The Music Appreciation Society performed a kind of cross-transposition, opening each to the other.

I think precedent, which can also be defined by geographic circumstance, partly explains the commingling of popular music and contemporary art you’ve mentioned. Take the cultural logic of a local music scene, for instance. It provides shared motivation and context for its members, even if it fosters relative diversity in practice. In terms of contemporary Vancouver-based popular music, for example, Black Mountain, The New Pornographers, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? are stylistically distinctive bands that nonetheless share a milieu, fostering a shared West Coast sensibility and orientation, however loose. It’s not different with respect to other kinds of artists, who also take from what came before as well as what is immediately around them. I wonder what contemporary Vancouver art would be like without

Jonathan Middleton in conversation with Brady Cranfield

21

1 Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art organized by the CCA Wattis Institute in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

2 CAG, November 2004 and The Or Gallery, March 2006.

22

the influence of the bigger names in this city? Our conversation is surely informed by the fact that Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham, and Jeff Wall were all once in a local new wave band together, U-J3RK5, for example.

So, following the lead of U-J3RK5 and others, it somehow seems to make more sense nowadays and is probably easier, if not unproblematic, for art and popular culture to be interrelated—even to the point of being one process, a joint mode of cultural production. I’m thinking of Fredric Jameson’s comment regarding the centrality of cultural production in the late-capitalist era. The effect is widespread, not just economic. It’s an ordinary part of everyday life, with profoundly mixed consequences. On the one hand, there’s greater cultural mixing, on the other, there’s greater homogeneity—a truly lived contradiction! But the marketplace has long affected popular culture and art, if not always equally (nor equally negatively). More specifically to our topic, I think popular music acts as proxy and handmaiden for popular culture in general. So while the art institutional context is still recognized and there’s still continued appreciation of art historical precedent, increasingly the institutional context and precedent are approached differently: the codes are more obvious, easier to manipulate, and more style-based. In other words, they are treated more like popular culture. Especially for younger artists, such merging is increasingly second nature (with all possible negative “ideological” connotations of that term intended).

The outcome is work that can be read synthetically as both art and popular culture. Wherever it’s leading, I think this development—which is, distinctively alert to its ever-changing context—is as exciting as it is unsettling.

JM: What you describe reminds me a little of Matthew Higgs’s essay in the Rock My World

exhibition catalogue wherein he describes a shift away from postmodern theory; or rather, he observes that contemporary art no longer seeks the “reassuring theoretical embrace” of postmodernism. I wonder though, if this is simply a more matured relationship to the subject matter. That is, we don’t suffer the same high/low anxiety we once did; it has been sufficiently argued that popular music and popular culture are complex and important. So in that respect, I see overtures of fandom made by artists as a logical extension of territory marked by postmodernism. The fan proposes a different relationship to his or her subject of interest than the connoisseur might have. We’re not about to see a crowd of eager connoisseurs lining up at the backstage door for autographs, for example. The fan carries the flag for sincere affinities, but I don’t think this means a critical or theoretical approach is forgone. Rather, this unabashed position is informed in some part—directly and indirectly—by cultural theory of years gone by.

I agree that the U-J3RK5 are an influential example for Vancouver, especially in this respect of combining an interest in criticality with a sincere interest in the punk and new wave music of the time. When I was looking at work for the Western Front exhibition I curated, which ended up being called Pop Song Covers (Music and Landscape), I was struck by the amount of work that dealt rather directly with landscape and generally with the politics of space. It surprised

Jonathan Middleton

me because it wasn’t really what I was looking for initially, but it was really inescapable: hence the slightly awkward two-part title for the exhibition. Even though the idea of a song cover seems a bit separate from its connection to landscape, as suggested by the exhibition, I still felt it was important in that a cover is both an homage to a song and a way to re-examine it, dissect it even, so certainly the tradition of looking closely at urban and industrialized landscapes is influential here. An example from the Pop Song Covers exhibition might be Holly Ward’s Folklore project— reassembled cassette tapes created from the guts of broken cassettes strewn about the country in various urban and rural settings—that looked at diasporas on macro and micro scales. These tapes skip rapidly between death metal, Hindi-pop, hip hop, soft rock, Canto-pop, etc. and provide a kind of oblique portrait of global migration and cross influences, but also portray movement within and between Canadian locations, suggesting that most of the cassettes would have spent some time in a car stereo before being tossed out the window or some such thing.

BC: That’s your modern leisure landscape for you: littered with unwanted, near-obsolete, mostly busted

cassette tapes! There’s something fundamental to the connection you (and Holly’s work) have made between geography—landscape included—and popular music. Popular music is mongrel. It draws from multiple sources, many different geographic locations. It seems to me, the most widely dispersed, enduring forms and styles usually manifest in locations with the greatest amount of cross-cultural interaction, not all of it amicable. One unfortunate but dynamic historical example—and I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s melancholic historical dialectic here, which links civilization and destruction—is how the slave trade and class inequality in early modernizing America globally influenced consequent popular music, from modern rock to hip hop to metal to indie-rock, etc. Genealogically speaking (but admittedly somewhat hyperbolically speaking too) all contemporary popular music is arguably eventually rooted in American country and blues and, consequently, in the older African, English, and European folk and religious musical traditions that informed these already hybrid early forms.

Accounts like Nick Tosches’s Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock and Roll, Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie, and Rian Malan’s Where Does the Lion Sleep Tonight? are examples of the often-surprising complexity of this pattern of historical contact and cross-appropriation, which has had a defining, if not deterministic, influence on the historical present and future. This is something I like about popular music: its ability to seemingly slip around time and space. I’m thinking of Jacques Attali’s notion of the heraldic capacity of music, its ability to mutate in advance of the less flexible codes of society, anticipating future modes of socio-cultural, political, and economic organization. I’m also thinking of George Lipsitz’s notion of popular music’s dialogical continuance, a living historical remembrance carried throughout its diversifying diasporas. Considered in these ways, even the most humdrum pop song becomes a puzzling cipher, which, I admit, may seem to be a lot to claim for the typical Top 40 tune.

It’s not that popular music is some kind of universal language or pacifying intermediator able to benevolently resolve all difference with a song. The reality is simpler: popular music is open-ended,

Jonathan Middleton in conversation with Brady Cranfield

23

Images 7-8; Track 2, side A

24

reflexive, adaptable, and easily transmissible and thus easy to steal, so it gets around. That, in this way, it functionally resembles capitalism to some extent is not surprising. But popular music is only deceptively simple, obvious, and self-contained. With even cursory examination, it becomes more complex.

Ambiguously, the same selection of popular music can be both meaningfully personal and anonymously public. Even if vapid, shamelessly commercial, and banal, it’s still deeply held and charged with personal significance, sometimes bypassing active deliberation. Songs are enjoyed despite expressed preferences, and many songs are hated but stir us anyway. It’s surprising that, according to Shep Steiner, Freud didn’t have an ear for music! With popular music, something else is always there—personal, political, economic, and so on. It’s multimodality proves Stuart Hall’s comment that normalcy is a sure index of ideological implicatedness. It’s easy to appreciate why contemporary theory—and art—is attracted to popular music.

It’s intriguing that you claim your popular music/landscape connection came to you intuitively, like popular music supposedly does to its inspired purveyors—it’s the royal road to openly affected expression! The truth is that popular music can be a deliberative and thoughtful practice and art production often relies on intuition. Still, pop music's supposed expressivity and immediacy help to explain its use by artists. Perhaps it’s an effective, acceptable way to signify “I really mean it” without having to be fully declarative, which can be awkward. I think this is partly why Kevin Schmidt uses music in his work, such as when he performed his “artist talk” for Fog at the Presentation House Gallery as pop songs. Popular music helps convey a sense of unpretentious emotion: an un-ironic, if not humourless, sometimes humorous expression of contact, feeling, and meaningfulness. Also, it’s entertaining, which shouldn’t be discounted, if not embraced uncritically.

But I have to take slight issue with your offhand fan/connoisseur distinction. It echoes, I’m sure unintentionally, the high/low anxiety you mention before. In my experience true fans are connoisseurs, there’s no substantial difference. Like connoisseurs, fans obsessively study the objects of their attention, if not always in terms of the official language and techniques of proper scholarship. Besides, these standards are themselves hardly clear-cut anymore in contemporary practice, for academics, artists, and dilettantes alike. Looking around my immediate community, for example, Rodney Graham, Kathy Slade, Tim Lee, Clint Burnham, and you—if you'll accept the compliment—are all people I admire, who are fans and proper scholars in equal measure, jumping confidently from ephemeral pop culture to rarified contemporary art with an equal appreciation and rigour. Is this postmodern theory with the contrast turned down?

Or is it just an ordinary way to live, albeit for some communities more than others? Likely both.

JM: Well yes, I should clarify: the term connoisseur still carries a rather bad connotation these

days. That is, I think it is tied to notions of authority and taste-making that are rightly being called into question. So while the artists you mention are dedicated and rigorous, and indeed even obsessive about music, my sense is by and large they’d rather not be called connoisseurs. Their musical interest/obsession is instead contextualized through declarations of fandom. It’s possible that both terms are a tad loaded, though, and provide an all-too-muddy description of the artists’ intent.

Jonathan Middleton

BC: Connoisseurs today, fans tomorrow, and vice versa. That’s the way it goes with the cultural politics of

25

self-identification!

JM: [Laughs] Quite possibly. But I’m thinking there might be a parallel here in the way curatorial

practice has changed, becoming more subjective on the whole, over the past thirty or forty years. The soundtrack projects of both Sydney Vermont and Ron Terada certainly follow a curatorial vein, not really repurposing existing songs, but certainly using their specific connotations to build narrative.

Terada’s initial Soundtrack for an Exhibition project consisted of a large and brooding black poster with jarring florescent type commissioned by the Western Front for the summertime, while the gallery was closed. The poster could easily have been mistaken for an exhibition announcement, and it is likely that at least a few art patrons made their way to the Western Front, eager to see this new exhibition by Terada, only to be spurned by a locked door and a notice that the gallery was closed until September. But this was quite intentional: the list of song titles spells out a similar narrative of disappointment and malaise. The first of Terada’s list is Calexico’s “The Ballad of Cable Hogue,” a song based on the Peckinpah film of the same name—a story of a man who is betrayed by his friends and left in the dessert to die. This suggestion of exodus and abandonment is repeated on the poster through citations such as Tarwater’s “All of the Ants left Paris” and Cagney & Lacee’s “Greyhound Goin’ Somewhere.” Terada also makes a number of weather quips by way of The Russian Futurists’ “The Science of the Seasons,” Calexico’s song “Drenched,” and finally, the poster’s fine print refers to a “Bonus track” from Saint Etienne’s album Sound of Water—another clear jab at Vancouver’s often-rainy summers.

The anxiety that Terada’s project carries is interesting in that we see anxiety popping up in other music/landscape projects, such as Shannon Oksanen and Scott Livingston’s Vanishing Point, Nicole + Ryan’s Mirror, Mirror, and even Kathy Slade’s Please Please Please. I find a certain noir-ish quality to this, as though a friction exists between what “The West” promises and what it actually delivers; or that we might be called to pay for Western largess by way of natural disaster or some other calamity. There is also a question about “correct” usage of western landscapes. I recently read an essay by Thomas Demand wherein he comments on Brian Wilson’s inability to surf and how shameful that was for him. I was reminded of how the “Charlie Don’t Surf ” slur uttered by Robert Duval’s Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now is arguing— apparently—for an imperialism based on American leisure activity. In the 1971 film Vanishing Point on which Oksanen and Livingston’s short 8mm film is based, the protagonist Kowalski tears through police roadblocks in an ill-fated attempt to reclaim the “open road” of the West, all the while being lauded as the “last great American hero” by an omniscient DJ named J. Hovah.

The explanation for Kolwalski’s breakdown is given rather obliquely by way of a flashback scene.

Kolwalski and his fiancée are surfing, and she goes out for that one last wave. Next we see the

Jonathan Middleton in conversation with Brady Cranfield

Image 5 Image 103 Image 97

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Image 86

scene that Oksanen and Livingston recreated for their work: a surfboard washing ashore, standing as both the cause of death and the absent dead body. If it’s not insensitive to mention, the work even evokes an air of Bas Jan Ader’s tragic In Search of the Miraculous project that led to his own actual death. In his case, it was his boat found off the coast of Ireland rather than a surf board and his earlier use of sea shanties and the Coasters’ “Searchin’” instead of Oksanen and Livingston’s morose surf guitar.

BC: Also Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Neil Young’s On the Beach, Kevin’s Long Beach Led Zep,

and Mark Soo’s Is It Any Wonder (1600 Kelvin). The beach can be a moody place!

JM: Yes, absolutely! It gets a bit dizzying keeping track of all of these projects, and I apologize if

this seems like a long series of word associations and non-sequiturs! I find myself skipping around a bit as I attempt to trace these threads. I should try to tidy up what I’m saying by explaining that Nicole + Ryan’s Mirror, Mirror video consists of a single shot of the iconic Hollywood sign viewed through a car rear-view mirror. The video is without sound, but a Daft Punk track played on the car stereo while they were making the work provides a shake to the image, which introduces the possibility of an earthquake or that the video might have been shot by some anxious, overcaffeinated videographer. Slade’s Please Please Please video, which she exhibited as part of her solo-exhibition at the Or Gallery doesn’t carry the same reference to the entertainment industry, and her rendition of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” is a rather gentle accompaniment to the video of the walk from her Seymour Street studio to the Or Gallery.

Still, the video is full of jarring bumps and shakes, and we are left wondering that, if the exhibition— the journey from studio to gallery—is the subject of Slade’s desire, what is left unfulfilled?

BC: I agree with your selections, but I would replace anxiety with melancholy, which I think better

expresses our contemporary cultural atmosphere. Theodor Adorno, apparently less cultural mandarin than canary in this case, was right! To use an inelegant neologism, I think melancholy is an exemplary post-postmodern sensibility, the dawning, bummed-out affective horizon of the times (or maybe just the terminal point of bourgeoisification, both real and imaginary). We’ve supposedly watched subjectivity wash away with the tide of structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Yet subjectivity, with all its concomitant problems, continues, extra-complicated as a result. Deconstructed, it is semi-translucent, not vanished. We’re still on the beachhead, surf at our feet, trying to make sense of the traces. Indeed, the beach-laden west coast, the threshold where the “western” frontier ends, seems especially representative of this sentiment. And perhaps Vancouver in particular is representative, with its mild climate and predominantly high quality of life juxtaposed with some world-renowned problems and deprivations. It’s no wonder Shannon and Scott’s surf guitar is morose! And perhaps also why Vancouver photo-conceptualism is often both aloofly cerebral and beautifully aestheticized. Visual melancholia par excellence!

Jonathan Middleton

I also find popular music to be fundamentally melancholic, which Kathy’s floating, dreamlike Please Please Please video does an excellent, bittersweet job of demonstrating (I find that much of her other work has this character too; I think melancholia is its idée fixe). Pop songs are like flashes of utopia, little exceptions from everyday life that present fleeting alternative universes. As with Kathy’s work, the mechanics of desire are thereby stimulated: part manipulation, part genuine expression, pop music charges our unconscious circuits. To respond to your last question, in Kathy’s work, the exhibition—any exhibition—is never enough. Instead, desire pushes through it, always surpassing its supposed target.

It’s not just unfulfilled but fundamentally unfulfillable. Subjectivity is a problematic, not fixed. Formally, the loop is its native expression, the recurrent return of “the real” of desire, with language being its prime expression. I’m thinking especially here of Kathy’s emblematic Embroidered Monochrome Propositions (O series)—loops made of innumerable loops. Yet every time the loop restarts in Please Please Please, I think we’ve changed, if not consciously. Our symbolic universe is bestowed with another fantastical point of reference, one paradoxically derived from the very failure to fulfill the implacable impulse of desire. An impossible, nonexistent utopia expresses this dynamic, but tragically. More compellingly at a formal level than in terms of content, since even sad songs have this effect, popular music acts as a little hook for our desire to thread through, an articulation point. The short-term pleasure it gives is fantastic; however, the real world returns after the three-minutes-plus duration of the typical pop tune. Even the best songs leave us drained, wanting. Supersaturating our lives, as much by choice as commercial pressure, popular music signifies this other, more manifestly libidinal economy: the melancholic interchange of subjectivity, foundationally detached from the real world it desires, a world expressible only symbolically, by means of fantasy. But like the woeful Smiths song Kathy covers with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar in the soundtrack to Please Please Please, these pop music fantasies, expansive, emotionally rich, however brief, truly are our lives. Melancholia is inevitable—and we love it. In this case, however, it may be more our iPods than our superegos that command us to ENJOY!

Jonathan Middleton in conversation with Brady Cranfield

27

The Best . . . of a Hopeless Situation

Ihor Holubizky

A version of this essay was first published in the exhibition catalogue Extended Play: art remixing music (Plymouth, New Zealand: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2003). Revised and expanded in 2004 and 2014.

Joe Strummer of The Clash outlived many of his music generation’s peers and reached the venerable age of fifty (1952-2002). The obituaries told us that he was more than just another (once) twenty-something iconoclast. Strummer was a politically active voice of his generation in a way that other singers who have evoked their times—Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis—were not. Bono of U2, a far more commercially successful act, said, “The Clash was the greatest rock band. They wrote the rule book for U2.”1

Strummer started his music career while attending art school, as did Clash bass player Paul Simonon. Art school was England’s breeding ground for music in the 1960s. A continuation of an inadvertent movement that began in the late 1950s, it was in the air and washed over the next two generations. There would not have been a British Invasion without art school: students included Beatles co-founder John Lennon; Pete Townsend of the Who;2 Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones; Ray Davies, lead singer and songwriter of the Kinks; Eric Burdon of the Animals; Jimmy Page, guitarist for the Yardbirds3 and Led Zeppelin; and others. Prior to this, England’s contribution to the canon of popular music—Gilbert and Sullivan and Noel Coward—was from a different time and attitude. The second wave in the 1960s included David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, and founding member of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett. By the 1970s, the industry term art band or art rock was spawned, in contrast to what was characterized as progressive rock, or prog rock. From English art schools came the Gang of Four, Mekons, Wire, Ian Dury, Adam Ant, Buzzcocks, Psychedelic Furs, and Ultravox. From America, bands included Devo, Talking Heads, and Chris Stein of Blondie; from Australia, Nick Cave and INXS; and from New Zealand, members of Split Enz (later Crowded House). Bono commented, “every great rock band in the British Invasion went to art school. We [U2] never did, we went to Brian [Eno].”⁴ Eno stated: I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behaviour, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters.⁵

Bryan Ferry, who studied with Richard Hamilton at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, wrote in hindsight: The school was polarized into the hip crowd, who followed Richard [Hamilton] and a Pop approach to art, and others who preferred the more European, older school of painting. [Hamilton] made art become much more a part of my life, to the point that I found it was inf luencing everything I did. I knew

29

1 Bono, comment on The Clash, “Stars' Tributes to Strummer,” BBC News, December 23, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/entertainment/2601287.stm.

2 Peter Townsend attended the Ealing Art College in London: “We were the innocent victims of a struggle between the old and the new [attitudes towards art].” Peter Townsend, Who I am: a memoir (New York: HaperCollins, 2012), 50.

Townsend’s course leader at Ealing was Roy Ascott, who later became the short-lived and controversial President of the Ontario College of Art, Toronto. See note 15.

3 The Yardbirds’ band name was a reference to jazz and bop innovator and alto sax player Charlie Parker and proof that musicians are not bound by adherence to music genres.

4 David Kootnikoff, Bono: A Biography (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2006), 58.

5 Sasha Frere-Jones, “Ambient Genius, The working life of Brian Eno,” New Yorker, July 7 and 14, 2014: 84. Eno, like Peter Townsend, attended the Ealing School of Art during Roy Ascott’s time there: “Ascott . . . taught him the power of . . . ‘process not product.’” Ibid, 82.

that I wanted Roxy Music to be very eclectic, stylistically [but not] wanting to create a particular style.

He once remarked that I was his “greatest creation.”⁶

Other bands took on artful (and obtuse) names, such as the studio ensemble Art of Noise and the British band Bauhaus, as another way of raiding cultural idioms.⁷ Colin Moulding, bass player for XTC confessed, “We've always had art-rock appeal rather than street credibility” (only guitarist Andy Partridge had attended art school).⁸ Art schools and artist-run galleries were often the first performance venues—

The Best . . . of a Hopeless Situation

6 Bryan Ferry, comment in Paul Weller, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” The Guardian, April 19, 2009, accessed July 2014, http://www.theguardian. com/music/2009/apr/ 19/paul-weller-bryan-ferry.

30 7 Art of Noise co-founder Paul Morley noted that he left the ensemble when other members began to assume the profile of a pop band (author conversation with Paul Morley, Bristol, October 2011).

Morley is also a music writer and journalist. He authored Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, a complex and rambling interior monologue that begins with a comparison between “I Am Sitting In A Room” (1969) by American avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier and Kylie Minogue’s techno/dance earworm candy “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” (2001). Morley’s proposition and literary conceit devolves into lists of songs that open up the subjectivities of taste. Paul Morley, Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

8 Roy Trakin, “The New English Art Rock,” Musician #30 (February 1981), http://chalkhills.org/articles/ Musician198102.html.

9 Email to the author, January 10, 2003.

10 “John Lennon Portfolio Internet Beatles Album,” last modified January 20, 2002, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.beatlesagain.com/ bjohn.html.

11 Weekend Australian.

December 28-29, 2002, 13.

12 Simon Poulter, e-mail to the author, January 7, 2003.

Poulter also noted that playing music was accepted in the art school environment.

13 Vega also had a credible exhibition career as a sculptor.

“Alan Vega – Celluloid Records,” accessed July 2014, http://www.celluloidrecords.net/ artists-alan-vega.php.

this was the case for the Sex Pistols—but you didn’t have to go to art school to appreciate the music.

Artist Richard Grayson—he went to art school with John McKay, who later played guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees—commented: In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, there was a very limited and delineated (in social terms) access to further education [in England]. Art school represented the only way that a talented working class kid could get to hang out for a few years thinking . . . and getting arty . . . but not necessarily into art.⁹

John Lennon had remarked on his formative education, “Art was the only thing I could do [but] I found it as bad as maths and science.”1⁰ By the mid-1970s England had lost the lustre of swinging Carnaby Street: it was a period of racial tension, economic instability, and the highest unemployment rate since the 1930s, as much as thirty percent for high school graduates in 1976. Strummer was an art school dropout: “First I passed in art and English . . . then just art [but] Central Art School was the biggest rip-off I’ve ever seen.”11 Artist/musician Simon Poulter commented: I went to art school to be in punk bands in 1979, when I was 16. Many [students] came from a working class/lower middle class background and access to education had become easier. It was a given that there were no jobs and if anything art school ensured that you would be unemployable.

Overall, there was no issue about musical skill, if anything this was an impediment.”¹²

The American scene of the late-1960s and early-1970s was equally tumultuous with increasing awareness of social inequality, race riots, political assassinations, and the divisiveness over military involvement in Vietnam. If fewer American bands came out of art schools proper—Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek of The Doors met at UCLA film school in 1965; Alan Vega of the 1970s electro-industrial duo Suicide studied fine art 1³—the alternative (and art) scene embraced the artfulness of bands such as The Mothers of Invention (Los Angeles),1⁴ Pere Ubu (Cleveland), and the Residents (San Francisco). The de facto American art school was New York itself, a cultural crucible for vanguard composers, musicians, and artists. The Velvet Underground was a focal/flash point of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable media events and performances in 1966 and 1967. Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola, a late-1960s Texas-born psychedelic band, worked as a studio assistant for Robert Rauschenberg and collaborated with the British- and New York-based conceptual group Art & Language in the early-1970s. Artist Robert Longo played guitar for Menthol Wars, designed Glenn Branca’s album The Ascension (1981), and later made music videos for REM and the Golden Palominos. Sonic Youth members Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon attended art school; Ranaldo and Thurston Moore played in Branca’s early ensembles. Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat played in the noise band Gray, and it is purported that artist Walter De Maria briefly played drums for the Velvet Underground. The Del-Byzanteens keyboard player was filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Laurie Anderson crossed over to the mainstream industry while maintaining her art-world credibility. The trajectory of

Ihor Holubizky

Talking Heads demonstrated that it was possible to combine popular appeal with eclecticism and cultural intelligence: band members David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth attended art school, while Jerry Harrison studied architecture.

Toronto had its own wave of art bands in the 1970s and early-1980s. Members of Martha and the Muffins attended the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in the late-1970s, after the tumult of a no-curriculum period at the institution.1⁵ Guitarist Mark Gane wrote about the positive effects during this time: “Art college provided a setting where people were allowed (or even encouraged) to make ‘mistakes.’ In our highly structured lives, there are relatively few environments where this is allowed or even tolerated.”1⁶ The Diodes attended OCA. Their 1979 single Tired of Waking Up Tired has enduring cult-music status.

The Diodes original bass player David Clarkson spoke of his epiphanic moment: I went to see the Ramones play [at the New Yorker Theatre on Yonge Street, Toronto] in the winter of 1976. It will sound untrue, but I had an instantaneous spiritual and aesthetic awakening—a clear recognition that this event contained important elements of the language I had been unconsciously searching for and that I could use it to structure my creative desires. It was harsh, f lawed, satirical, bold, unapologetic, minimal, and clearly constructed.¹⁷

Dianne Bos was an art student at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, at the time. For her, frequent school trips to New York “meant I went to CBGB to see the Dead Boys, Television, Richard Hell, and the Voidoids . . . and a Laurie Anderson sound-work exhibition.”1⁸ Bos returned to Toronto, and in 1981-82 entered professional music as vocalist and keyboard player for TBA, a Toronto electro-wave outfit formed in 1979. She noted that the band wanted “to be as intelligent as Talking Heads—who didn’t?”1⁹ AA Bronson of the artist collective-trio General Idea met Talking Heads frontman David Byrne in New York in 1976 and brought the band to play at A Space gallery the next year.2⁰ General Idea also did art direction for Toronto bands, including Rough Trade. Singer Carole Pope’s stage persona can be viewed as an enactment of an early General Idea audacity; “We knew that if we were famous and glamorous, we could say we were artists and we would be. We did and we are. We are famous, glamorous artists.”21 This cultural slippage is evidenced in artist Mary Ann Barkhouse’s comments. She attended OCA in the early-1980s and played in bands, with a shift from her classical training in piano to drums, guitar, and finally choosing bass. She continued playing after moving to Ottawa: At most gigs . . . primarily in Ottawa . . . there would often be other things happening like indie f ilms being played in between and during sets, performance art, etc. [One venue was] Splash Gallery [which] was a combination art gallery, hair salon, vintage/punk clothing store, publishing house, and music venue. SAW Gallery also brought in bands like mine to play at openings. So as a teenager, I grew up with this idea of all of these different aspects of art being intertwined: f ilm, performance, visual art, music, and writing.²²

The Best . . . of a Hopeless Situation

31 14 It is purported that Frank Zappa worked briefly in the commercial advertising world.

“Frank Zappa – Wikipedia,” accessed July 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Frank_Zappa#Early_life.

15 The British artist and educator Roy Ascott was appointed president of the Ontario College of Art in 1971, whereupon formal classes were cancelled and departments dissolved.

Artist-musician Brian Kipping, a student at the time, recalls that students “were expected to create their own problems [and] faculty were expected to wait for students to arrive in the studios and assist them in anything they might want to learn.” Brian Kipping: Descriptions of What is Known (Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2002), 3. The experiment lasted for just over one year and Ascott was dismissed. See also Morris Wolfe, OCA 1967–1972, Five Turbulent Years (Toronto: grub street books, 2001), 44-70.

16 Mark Gane, e-mail to the author, January 10, 2003.

17 Davis Clarkson, e-mail to the author, January 31, 2014.

This music moment had an inf luence on Clarkson’s early “photo ruins” work, as much as the work of artists Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol, and theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Clarkson wrote, “I considered [the Diodes as] a sort of media-probe, a kind of selfref lexive case study in mass communication,” and that he quit the band because he did not share an interest in the business side of music. He also noted that he was the only member of the Diodes to graduate from art school, and that he later taught graduate classes.

18 Diane Bos, e-mail to the author, January 2003.

32 19 Ibid. Bos’s first gig with TBA was on a bill with writer William S. Burroughs and poet John Giorno in a Toronto club. A pinhole photograph

by Bos was used as disc artwork for the Counting Crows CD Recovering the Satellites, 1996.

20 AA Bronson, e-mail to the author, December 28, 2002.

21 Glamour Issue, FILE magazine, vol. 3, no. 1, 1975.

22 Carole Pope, e-mail to the author, February 10, 2014.

23 Rodney Graham interviewed

by Matthew Higgs, Rodney Graham (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2002), 76.

24 This is not to undermine the impact of Elvis, who as writer and critic Greil Marcus wrote in 1975, was an “individual of our time [who] can be said to have changed the world.” Marcus Greil, “Elvis Presley Essay by Marcus Greil,” accessed July 2014, http://www.greenbookee.com/ elvis-presley/. The still unanswerable question— derived from art discourse— is that of intentionality.

25 The album cover came into being in 1939 when a young graphic designer for Columbia Records, Alex Steinweiss, saw the frequently bare packaging used for albums as a potential canvas for creative advertising.

The advent of the LP record in the 1950s and more sophisticated printing technologies, further fueled the art of the album cover.

26 Warhol’s album artwork stretches over a 38-year period, beginning in 1949, when he was known primarily as a graphic artist.

Crossovers were evident elsewhere in Canada. Rodney Graham played guitar in the Vancouverbased band U-J3RK5 with fellow artists Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, self-described as “crude low-fi music . . . inspired by punk ethos.”23 Their locally-produced EP was picked up by a major label in the wake of Martha and the Muffins’s international success.

Images, sound, and music

The art world was drawn to the new music because of its culturally transformative potential. The Beatles were talented musicians and songwriters; they were erudite, outspoken, hip, and absurd (the antithesis of Elvis2⁴). Although the avant-garde entered into the Beatles’ story and mythology when Yoko Ono appeared on the scene, it was the album cover that became the visual vehicle for radicalism and entered homes where “Art” did not, and in a different way than noted earlier with jazz and art album covers.2⁵ Artist Peter Blake designed the collage for the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967 (Ian Dury in turn, who had studied with Blake, was commissioned to compose a theme song “Peter the Painter” for Blake’s 1983 Tate retrospective). Richard Hamilton, the godfather of British Pop Art, designed the extreme minimalist cover for the so-called White Album in 1968 and the maximal collages inside, a link between art and advertising that Hamilton had set into motion in the mid-1950s. Swiss-born American photographer Robert Frank designed the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (1972), and Andy Warhol designed numerous album covers including the Rolling Stones’ notorious zippered Sticky Fingers (1971).2⁶ Francesco Clemente designed the cover for Mick Jagger’s solo Primitive Cool in 1987. Artist Robert Rauschenberg was commissioned to design an ambitious transparent plastic package with three overlapping movable LP-sized foils for Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues (1983). The Sonic Youth catalogue is a de facto gallery of art world contemporaries: covers include works by Mike Kelley, Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibone, Richard Prince, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Wool.2⁷

If music had the power to move a mass audience (beginning with the teen infatuation-hysteria for the young Frank Sinatra in the early-1940s), film codified rebellious attitudes. A breakthrough was Richard Lester’s Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Its jump cuts, non sequiturs, shooting from the hip, and being hip was a model for the music video industry that was to come. The Yardbirds appeared in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and band documentaries were elevated to high art: Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968), Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), and Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1984). David Byrne wrote and directed the 1986 feature film True Stories. He appeared as a character-narrator who journeys to the fictitious American heartland of Virgil, Texas, and is witness to the town’s “Celebration of Specialness.” In one memorable scene of this contemporary fairy tale, the townsfolk take turns performing in a karaoke version of the Talking Heads song Wild Wild Life, dressed as Billy Idol, Prince, and other “types.” Byrne also appears in this sequence performing a reflexive-parody of his “twitchy” stage persona. The scene was re-edited as a stand-alone music video.

Although the music video as a promotional device dates to the early-1940s when the film loop

Ihor Holubizky

music jukebox Panoram Soundie was manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company, defining a music video in terms of art is difficult. The radical aspect may have peaked prior to the advent of dedicated music TV channels, with the sixty-second-long ad for Captain Beefheart’s album Lick My Decals Off Baby.2⁸ It is a non sequitur short film shot on 16mm black and white, with fragmentary bursts of music, silence, and an authoritative voice-over. The record company refused to air it, but it found fans in the early video art world at the time. As the video portapack liberated the artist-as-auteur, artist-alternative music band videos could serve a dual art and music purpose without relying on the mainstream music industry.

But contrary to the notion of limitless possibilities, any claims of radicalism for music video was premature, and it quickly formed into three genres: performance, narrative, and non sequitur.

A performance video is where the band or “artist” appears in any form, as identification and promotion, even if there is a song-content link. A narrative video is any interpretation of lyric content, literal or figurative, whether or not the group appears in it. The operating of the logic of the non sequitur is that any image can be used, and the more hybridized and puzzling, the better for entertainment value. Non sequiturs can also be used in performance and narrative videos.2⁹

There are exceptions to every rule. Mark Gane recounted his experience: “While there were great visual “moments” in our videos, most were compromised by either the record company’s fear of allowing an “art student” band total creative freedom [hence “uncommercial”] or by the director’s own needs [and] ego.”³⁰ An uncompromised video was made for the song “Only You” in 1987, because the record label was not prepared to fund one. Mark and Martha Johnson made it themselves using black and white Super 8 footage and “utilizing primitive ‘real time’ effects—such as strapping the camera to a washing machine in the spin cycle, among other things, and projecting the song’s lyrics onto our bodies, buildings, streetcars, etc.”³1 Made with a small budget of a few thousand dollars, the video received airplay and awards. A wry cultural-art crossover work was made by Maori-New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai. His 1999 installation and video titled Ten Guitars, is a reference to the same-titled Engelbert Humperdinck song that topped the Maori music charts in the 1960s. The video component— shot in black and white with a blank canvas background—shows ten guitarists lined up playing the hollow body electric guitars that Parekowhai customized with paua inlays, reproducing Maori kowhaiwhai patterns. They are performing a version of “Don’t Let it Get You” by the Quin-tikis, a Maori rock and roll showband of the mid-1960s. There are no production tricks, but it rocks.³2

The idea that success in the music industry could be an art unto itself did not escape Malcolm McLaren, the impresario of British punk, and who attended art schools between 1963 and 1971.

McLaren’s foray into the London fashion scene with Vivienne Westwood culminated in his fifteen-minute idea, the Sex Pistols. The 1980 film (planning began two years earlier) The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, directed by Julien Temple, “flogged the dead horse” of the Sex Pistols and made clear McLaren’s Situationist leanings. He was the film’s Artful Dodger.33 The culmination of McLaren’s promotional art was a retrospective at New York’s New Museum in 1988.

The Best . . . of a Hopeless Situation

33 27 Other radical album designs of the time were derived from current art practices, such as the Joseph Kosuth-like definition cover for XTC’s Go 2 in 1978. Peter Saville, the in-house designer for the Manchester-based label Factory Records, raided twentieth-century modern visual languages but also used a Fantin-Latour nineteenthcentury f loral still life for the New Order LP Power, Corruption and Lies (1983).

28 There are two versions, made in 1971 and 1972. One can be seen at http://www.beefheart.com/lickmy-decals-off-baby-telly-ad/.

29 E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), 49-88 .

In her book on MTV, E. Ann Kaplan identified a “schemata” of five main types of music videos based on style, love/sex, and authority, wherein all use “avant-garde strategies, especially self-reflexivity.”

Image 76

30 Mark Gane, e-mail to author, July 29, 2002. In an extended art-experimental vein, a 2006 Beastie Boys concert at Madison Square Gardens was “documented” with camcorders given to 50 audience members with the sole instruction to keep it rolling at all times. The raw material was edited into a documentary film titled Awesome, I Fuckin’ Shot That!

31 Ibid.

32 Yothu Yindi, based in a remote community in the Northern Territories, Australia, were the first Aboriginal group to crack the Australian pop music charts in 1988 with their reconciliation song, “Treaty.”

They have made videos to serve a dual purpose of promotion and expressing social-cultural concerns.

34 33 Planning for the film began two years earlier, and was directed by Julien Temple who later directed a 2007 documentary about Joe Strummer subtitled The Future is Unwritten. Flogging a Dead Horse was the title of a 1980 LP compilation of Sex Pistols singles.

34 Rodney Graham with Matthew Higgs, Rodney Graham (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2002), 83.

35 “52nd OEP Category Description Guide,” National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, 2, accessed May 25, 2010, http://www2.grammy. com/PDFs/Recording_ Academy/52guide.pdf. The Academy also created a Best Urban/Alternative Performance category in 2003 for performers “who have been influenced by a cross section of urban music” and again what was defined as outside of “mainstream trends.”

This award was discontinued in 2012. “Wikipedia – Grammy Award for Best Urban/Alternative Performance,” accessed July 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Grammy_Award_ for_Best_Urban/Alternative_ Performance.

36 Ben Ratliff, “Don Van Vliet, ‘Captain Beefheart,’ Dies at 69,” New York Times, December 17, 2013.

37 “Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - Brian Eno/Matrix 44,” accessed July 2014, http://bampfa. berkeley.edu/exhibition/44.

For documentation of his 77 Million Paintings, see “Lumen London – Brian Eno: Official site for his visual work and lectures,” accessed July 2014, http://www.lumenlondon.com/.

38 Neil Spencer, The Observer, October 10, 2002.

The Hopeless Situation, and [a new] hope Rodney Graham: One of my dreams is to become a rock star-cum-painter, like Ronnie Wood and David Bowie.

Matthew Higgs: But surely the down side of that scenario is that your art would never be taken seriously?

Rodney Graham: I know. It’s a hopeless situation.3⁴

This cultural hothouse of art and music—unwittingly fostered by the failure of art schools to “produce” visual artists, and encouraging music by default—reached an apogee by the late 1980s.

The music industry had changed, and continues to transform in response to the impact of unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing and the rise of Internet business (also effectively ending the art of the cover design in decline since the hegemony of the CD). The nomenclature of alternative music—at best a wobbly term—has become simply another way to capture and embrace consumer choices. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences created a Grammy Award category for Best Alternative Music Album in 1991, vaguely defining the genre as being “outside of the mainstream music consciousness.”³⁵

Art schools changed too, with an increasing emphasis on pedagogical professionalism. Many have become universities offering higher degrees.

What, then, may be said of the now-greybeard alternative/art school generation of musicians?

The late Don Van Vliet—the influential and “imperious, uncompromising” musician Captain Beefheart, who did not complete an art education—abandoned music in 1982 to pursue a credible painting career.³⁶ Brian Eno’s “painterly video installations” have been presented in exhibitions since 1979.³⁷ Paul Simonon is now a painter and has talked enthusiastically about Canaletto and the British modernists.³⁸ Nick Cave has expressed his admiration for historical religious and modernist painters.³⁹ Bryan Ferry collects Victorian and twentieth-century modern paintings.⁴⁰ David Bowie made ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors List in 2002, and served on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine. David Byrne, Lee Ranaldo, and Kim Gordon have re-entered the art world—and Byrne authored the discursive tome How Music Works, published in 2012. When Lee Ranaldo was asked “what’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from [John] Cage’s work?”—Cage was an influential bridge between sound and visual art—he responded: Pop gets stuck in your head, and it’s something you want to listen to f ifty times in a row. His music was all about variation and change . . . because he wanted everything to sound radically different every time. Musicians love his scores so much because you can interpret them any way that you want.

You can ignore them, you can adhere to them, it’s all good.⁴¹

It is difficult to come to a conclusion as to how and why this “hope” appeared (and not to be cynical about the use of music world credibility as the entry point), but perhaps the spirit of an art school environment can still be played out as purposeful two-way traffic.⁴2 Scottish artist and Turner

Ihor Holubizky

Prize-winner Martin Creed performed with his band Owada from 1994 to 1999. Since then, he has continued to record and release tracks under his own name, and perform live. When asked about the division between art and music in a 2012 interview, Creed responded: I am just in my own head and I just try to live my life, and at the moment in my life I have been trying to do a lot of work with making noise and making music. Maybe in a song you can tell a story of writing a song, whereas in a visual work what you are seeing is the bit left over at the end, after the person has gone away. If you watch someone singing a song, you are watching them do the struggling and making the thing — it’s a literal example of life happening as you are listening. That’s one of the things that’s different about music.⁴3

Another example of cross-traffic is that of the German ensemble Kraftwerk, who have had a strong art world following and significant influence on the shape and sound of alternative and popular music over a forty-year period.⁴⁴ In 2012 and 2013, they presented retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, respectively. While “retrospectives” of music dimensions and persona have been staged before—the Victoria and Albert Museum’s David Bowie is, for example, examines Bowie’s cultural influence and relationship to art and music—they follow the contour of object/artifact and media value-added gallery displays. For seven consecutive evenings Kraftwerk performed an album in its entirety—their recorded oeuvre—as a complete aural and visual experience. While the legitimization by two of the most important art museums in the world is undeniable authority, Kraftwerk asserted its own credibility, experienced in real time—happening as you are listening and watching—at more than just another music venue.⁴⁵ In an unexpected way, this is a noble objective for a retrospective, even for “static” art.

New York composer-musician Rhys Chatham put down his flute when he heard the Ramones and picked up a guitar as a serious instrument for composition. He has spoken of plans to follow his symphony for one hundred guitars with a thousand-guitar version.⁴⁶ At that volume, it has to be art.

35 39 Nick Cave with Beni Serfati, Maariv, April 1995.

40 Also see Neil McCormick, “Bryan Ferry: in praise of Richard Hamilton,” The Telegraph, accessed July 2014, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/neilmccormick/ 100056092/bryan-ferry-inpraise-of-richard-hamilton/.

41 Elliot Sharpe, “Lee on John Cage,” January 3, 2013, accessed July 2014, http://www.sonicyouth.com/ symu/lee/2012/12/22/leeon-john-cage-january-2013/.

42 Brian Kipping and Linda Jansma, Brian Kipping: Descriptions of What Is Known (Oshawa, ON: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2002), 7.

In contrast, Brian Kipping considered himself “a painter who plays bass, not a bass player who paints.”

43 Martin Creed with Victoria Segal, “Interview: Martin Creed,” Wondering Sound, July 20, 2014, accessed July 2014, http://www.wonderingsound. com/interview/interviewmartin-creed/.

44 Neil McCormick, “Kraftwerk: the most influential group in pop history?” The Telegraph, January 30, 2013, accessed July 2014, http://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/music/ rockandpopfeatures/9837423/ Kraftwerk-the-most-influentialgroup-in-pop-history.html.

45 Sasha Frere-Jones, “How did a pop band end up in a museum?” New Yorker, April 30, 2012, accessed July 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/ arts/critics/musical/2012/04/ 30/120430crmu_music_ frerejones?currentPage=all.

45 Douglas J. Noble, “Rhys Chatham Interview,” July 8, 1996, accessed July 2014, http://www.djnoble.demon.co.uk/ ints/RHYSCHA.THA.html.

The Best . . . of a Hopeless Situation

Let’s Go Away for a While: The High Lonesome of Rodney Graham’s Rock is Hard

Peter Culley

To Peter Cummings 2004

Sometimes I think it’s a shame

Hung velvet over taking me,

When I get feeling bitter

Dim chandelier awaken me

And there isn’t no pain—

To a song dissolved in the dawn …

Gordon Lightfoot “Sundown”

37

Van Dyke Parks “Surf’s Up”

But f inally the f igure, which to my thinking most adequately circumscribes Smithson's mind and writing, is not the centreless circle, the spiral or the labyrinth, but rather the meander— a f igure that appears often enough in his work. It suggests a circuitous journey, and a leisurely one, at least, one guided ultimately by the imperative of the site-seer’s pleasure. And the adjective meandrine means full of windings, especially of a rather beautiful genus of coral with a surface bearing an amusing resemblance to a fossilized human brain.1

Rodney Graham

I thought of myself as a statue carved from a block of ice and this mad hallucination made

1 Rodney Graham, “Smithson’s Brain,” in Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation, ed. Grant Arnold (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004), 84.

me proud with an intense pleasure that is truly secret. A box at the opera. There are certainly other types of 2 verse song forms—or as I prefer to think of them, little two room cottages, far removed from the city, with porches, balconies, breezeways, bridles, horse bells . . .

Rodney Graham sleeve note from The Bed-Bug, Love Buzz If someone doesn’t fight me I' ll have to wear this armour All my life. I look like the Tin Woodsman in the Oz Books.

Rusted beyond recognition.

I am, sir, a knight. Puzzled By the way things go toward me and in back of me. And finally into my mouth and head and red blood O, damn these things that try to maim me This armour Fooled Alive in its Self.2

Jack Spicer from The Holy Grail

Let’s Go Away for a While: The High Lonesome of Rodney Graham’s Rock is Hard

2 Jack Spicer, “The Holy Grail,” in My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 336.

38

1.

On the fifth of April 1994—a little over a decade ago—I was standing in line at the counter of the A & B Sound record store in downtown Nanaimo when the row of televisions I had turned to face announced the suicide of the 27-year-old Kurt Cobain. In my hand, ready for purchase, I held the new two-CD reissue of folksinger Tim Hardin’s three Verve albums, which contained the original versions of such hits as “If I Were a Carpenter” and “Reason to Believe.” Hardin had died of a heroin overdose, largely unnoticed, in December 1980, three weeks after John Lennon. And though he had struggled along— helped by a few years of dependable, free, English prescription smack—until his fortieth year, the body of work for which he is best known is contained on the first two of the Verve albums. These were recorded in 1964 and 1965, when Hardin was at roughly the tender age (23-24) when Cobain recorded Nevermind (or at which, for that matter, Brian Wilson commenced Smile, only officially completed as I write this).

And although the punk rocker and the folksinger don’t sound very much alike, both viewed the world with a similarly brittle, wised-up-too-soon young junky solipsism. Hardin’s liltingly melodic synthesis of Dylan, blues, and Tin Pan Alley went down smoothly in versions by the likes of Bobby Darin, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Astrud Gilberto. Hardin’s own less popular, often skeletally brief performances, were as precise in their registrations of haunted emotion as his idol Frank Sinatra’s, but leavened their wistful shimmer with as much bad faith, hostility, and impatience as anything in Cobain’s more obviously dysfunctional oeuvre. The lyrics of even Hardin’s most well-known and commercially successful song, “If I Were a Carpenter,” are a hymn to passive-aggressive equivocation: simultaneously sincere marriage proposal and cruel hipster put-on. After answering his own rhetorical questions (“I’d marry you anyway / I’d have your baby”) he outlines a series of absurd and humiliating marital scenarios (“I’d be carrying the pots you made / I’d not miss my coloured blouse”) and ends with Save my love for loneliness Save my love for sorrow I've given you my onlyness— Give me your tomorrow

In other words, with the subject’s future mortgaged for a promissory note, we get a two-minute glimpse of the narrator’s singular subjectivity. In the words of Funkadelic’s “Can You Get To That”— If you base your love on credit, then your lovin’ days are done— cheques signed with “love and kisses later” come back signed “insufficient funds” . . .

Peter Culley

As Hardin lays it out in song after song, singing in the insinuating instrument he claimed Ray Charles preferred to his own, intimacy will always be a series of ifs, buts, qualifications, and grim tests. Any failure will be yours. This armour of coldness, monomania, and self-pity is manifest even in his titles—“Reason to Believe,” “You Upset the Grace of Living When You Lie,” and “Don't Make Promises” (compare to Cobain’s “All Apologies,” “Drain You,” “Stay Away”). As Gordon Lightfoot—his most careful Canadian student—restated it, “that's what you get for lovin’ me.” There was little to choose between Hardin and Cobain, except that what was implied in the early sixties had by the nineties become angrily explicit.

Hardin’s honeyed “save my love for loneliness” became the hoarsely proclaimed “I swear, I don't have a gun.”

What transpired in the years between the brief careers of these tortured young men—and what I pondered in the days after Cobain’s death, listening to Hardin and silently watching the then-mandatory candlelight vigils and memorials—was a revolution in the social construction of private life. Hardin had honed his craft in a tiny community, the hothouse East Village milieu of ace trickster and dissembler Bob Dylan, where mild disjunctions between musical treatment and subject matter were taken as signs of depth and skill. Both a taste for opiates and a preening contempt for the audience had been inherited from bop. The commodification of hipness—now total—hadn’t really begun in earnest. And due to the prevailing Kennedy-era identification of women as agents of social repression, misogyny was synonymous with progress. The “hip” world played its cards pretty tight, the prevailing masculine mode one of a wary Dana Andrews stoicism in which whining was strictly for squares—or your analyst. But by the time of Cobain’s death, the sense of infantile victimization that hovers, coded as if slightly embarrassed, at the edges of Hardin’s songs, had become central to not only Cobain’s songwriting but to an increasingly therapeutic and confessional culture. If Hardin was Jack Paar—prickly, vain, vaguely condescending— Cobain was Oprah, a big heart suffering for all of us. This tendency toward a culture’s heightened feelings of psychological distress had in part been formed by decades of constant exposure—in every living room and car, at every part and picnic—to generations of songwriters’ anguished subjectivity, in every genre and motley state of being. Never—in sheerly actuarial terms—has any group of humans been so thoroughly heard from, on every subject and in every mood. The catchy refrains, earnest pleas, and furious denunciations sung by the great parade of Parsifals and Pagliaccis have accrued in our brains as gradually and indelibly as successive striations of choral. The songs communicated—as they kept reminding us—what we, tongue-tied, could not—a Dear John mixtape, perhaps, with the original flip side left on, a tribute to better times, with several songs in common. They’re playing our song. Don’t play that song for me, it brings back a memory. The song is you. To be singing along—often under vague social threat—was to be at one moment an Irish revolutionary, the next a wife-killer, the next a loyal citizen of the United States of Baseball. All of it deeply held for as long as a salute and then gone on the breeze. So much carbon dioxide in so small a space. If there is a God, for example, could anything be more repellent to him than the religiosity legions of atheists are so easily able to summon when carried away by a Bach mass, the Golden Gate Quartet, or the Master Musicians of Joujouka? Or our stoned offerings to Jah? Something resembling collective consciousness resides in the potency of cheap music,

Let’s Go Away for a While: The High Lonesome of Rodney Graham’s Rock is Hard

39

40

any music. The certainty with which the Hollywood hack composer can summon for us the concept of, say, “sand and fog” in a few bars—we barely have to open our eyes to see the fast-forward mist pouring over the Golden Gate and to feel the vague omens.

Kurt Cobain arrived and departed as the culmination of a long line of self-proclaimed Ziggy Stardusts, seekers after public absolution, convinced by both their narcissism and the audience’s appetite that the offering up of their selves for “ritual” consumption would in some undefined way further the cause of human liberation and universal truth. A large part of my anger and disappointment at Cobain’s death was that I had thought I had seen a steeliness in his manner, an inner armouring that might have made the inevitable less inevitable. Ignored for a while, he might have, like Hardin, been able to at least crawl politely away from the spotlight, to be left alone with his addiction. But by 1994, the script was cast in hardest granite, and everyone had memorized it. Any nuance, any possibility of escape, would spoil the downward spiral’s clean lines. The broad tattoo outline: “Born to Lose,” “Too Big For His Britches,” “At Least He Tried.” Cheap fiction as potent as cheap music. The sideshow barkers of late capitalism knew this, and worked the story until its handprints on the silverware of authenticity were indistinguishable from our own. “The age demanded,” in Ezra Pound’s words, by which he meant us, working out the legacies of R.D. Laing and B.F. Skinner on reality TV, making lists.

It seemed then—at the end of the brief period of mourning and anguished contemplation that had begun on that grim day in the record store—a good time for me to walk away from the ongoing psychodrama of rock ’n’ roll fandom, to quit cold turkey. Other troubadours would offer themselves up to me with soul patches and luminous Walter Keane eyes, but they would croon—and die—in vain.

I refused to volunteer for any more of their heartbreaking midnight confessions—there would be no more Druid sacrifices on my watch. “Guess you could say I finally had it,” in Rodney Graham’s words. The accumulated weight of shared morbid symptoms, stretching from Hardin to Cobain, would be allowed to naturally recede into history as far as I was concerned—never absent, certainly, but for me absent of urgent connection. I think the ongoing death of rock ’n’ roll has been just such a series of private funerals.

Over the decades, I have seen many opportunities to jump ship to fall into the arms of bluegrass or peek between the beaded curtains of fado. For some, it might have been the midnight disinterment of Nick Drake’s pale shade, courtesy of Volkswagen, “Desperado” at a funeral, or the rolling bass drums of Keith Moon announcing every television weeknight the forensic voids and body horrors of Miami, Vegas, New York … In whatever way they were engendered, the negative accumulation of such refusals has nudged a once triumphant rock culture decisively toward the margins.

Peter Culley

2.

Rodney Graham’s emergence as a composer and performer of rock music has taken place then not only in the wake of Cobain’s death, but in the twilight of rock’s existence as a unifying social force. Much of the hysteria surrounding the Cobain/grunge phenomenon was the contradiction inherent in its being seen as rock’s “last stand” as a core cultural value and as commercial entity. Temporary mutual destruction was assured, with Cobain the first victim, unable to enact the dissonant role of being the saviour of both youth and the industry. In the years since, that industry’s scorched earth commodification of every aspect of Cobain’s legacy has helped it recover commercially, but with a concomitant loss of cultural capital.

The limping monstrosities and weak, hot-house genre grafts that dominate the focus group-led collectivity of mainstream rock rarely attempt to even reflect the culture outside its Byzantine conventions, and are rarely consulted by it. It is hip hop, represented by P. Diddy and 50 Cent—savvy, entrepreneurial, Dick Cheney-style corporate tough—who, wearing the ermines of authority, urge “the kids” to “vote or die.” Bono, Springsteen, and Michael Stipe are by comparison high school counsellors, scoutmasters, pushy parents.

So Graham enters the institution of rock to find it no longer a maelstrom of vital, unassimilated cultural power but a ruined landscape, half-deserted but dotted with abandoned forts and exuberant follies, peculiarly inducive to the kinds of meander that have distinguished Graham’s career as much as Smithson’s. And desire—“the imperative of the site-seer’s pleasure”— has led the way. Despite Graham’s real musical achievement and the dogged determination underpinning it, it miraculously preserves an air of accident. It is as if in private negotiation of a twilit half-world (plucking tiny mandolins, testing pedals, transcribing birdsong) the artist had tripped across—as if abandoned beside the pathway— a set of gestural skills he had only to master and reclaim. And if the struggles that had brought these skills forth have passed from knowledge, if the traumas they expressed have been long suppressed, these burnished forms still possess an antique charm. They might still be made to contain new elements, new combinations.

The melodic, two-verse, three- or four-minute pop song form in which Graham has chosen to work is no longer commercially dominant; it has even become to some degree a coterie form, like Dixieland or madrigals, if on a slightly larger scale. The present Top 10 of whatever genre is dominated by a kind of constructivist laptop pastiche, in which producers like Timbaland and The Matrix fabricate hits— with interchangeable vocalists—stitching the flow of pop and the grit of R&B and hip hop into sleek sonic vehicles with nervously static structures, derived from loops and samples even when emulating rock forms. The inherent narrativity of the classic pop record has been exchanged for an agitated but steady state, perpetually unresolved, largely textural. Thus, when Graham sings, “this is music for the very, very old,” he doesn't describe his own practice as much as state a demographic fact about verse-chorusverse, a practice that his younger colleagues tend to avoid. Those who make pop records in the old style— chastened by the paradox of an uncertain commercial fate at odds with the form’s inherent need to please—tend to do so with a necessary degree of ironic detachment.

Let’s Go Away for a While: The High Lonesome of Rodney Graham’s Rock is Hard

41

42

Images 67-68 Image 81

A number of the musicians with whom Graham has collaborated are also part of Vancouver’s active and comparatively successful neo-pop tendency. Much of the production style and overall feel of Graham’s records—especially Rock is Hard—are roughly aligned with this style. But in Graham’s case, the overall affect is very different. The most successful representatives of this tendency are The New Pornographers, whose albums Electric Version and Mass Romantic have been critically acclaimed. Their producer, David Carswell, also co-produced and played guitars on Rock is Hard. At least two of their songs, “Letter From an Occupant” and “The Laws Have Changed,” both sung with strikingly unusual power by country singer Neko Case, come close to being classic pop songs. Like Phil Spector with Tina Turner on “River Deep – Mountain High” in 1969, songwriter Carl Newman and producer Carswell use the stability provided by the female vocalist’s deep ranging commitment to overload the tracks with so many melodic and production hooks that a kind of giddy suspension sets in, the hand guiding itself toward the repeat button as if unbidden. But in the barnstorming “Letter from an Occupant,” Newman’s usually oblique lyrics (much “artier” than Graham’s, say) seem to openly question the circumstances of their production— the tune you’ll be humming forever, all the words are replaced and wrong, with a shower of yeahs and whatevers, you trade me away long gone . . .

It’s the song, the song, the song that’s shaking me

—until the singer’s operatically immense instrument and the song’s careening build (halted only by a concise but properly Dionysian The Who/Yardbirds style “rave up”) steamroll over such objections even as they are being made. The song becomes the place where distinctions—between means and ends, Orphic power and commercial appeal—are acted out and then absorbed or not. For better or worse, a self-cancelling critique is as much a part of the song as its snare drum track. Reflexiveness is built in. And the weight of rock’s vaunted past, waddling now into at least its sixth heavy decade, presses a little of the air out of any such enterprise. Think of how tired Lennon was on the White Album, and add thirty-five years. For the young musician embarking on a pop career today this exhaustion is the central fact.

But despite, as I said, being both sonically and formally similar to the productions of his colleagues (if with a more pronounced, lighter country tinge), Rock is Hard seems entirely unaffected by such considerations, projecting an air of hard-won serenity entirely at odds with the presently fractious state of everything, let alone pop records. This might seem an odd thing to say about a record whose lyrical content consists almost entirely of vaguely grumpy autumn complaints. And if from the moment of

Peter Culley

Graham’s entrance (dramatically delayed by a sampled invocation to “open the keys of the door / to love” and a series of production flourishes) with the intimate croon of “Why is it bad things seem to happen on my watch?” the listener is aware of hearing, with some gratitude and relief, what is unmistakeably the opening of an album, it also becomes immediately clear (perhaps with the lines “I took a significant whack” or “constant irritation / for quite a lengthy spell”) that the experience of the record will bring one into some form of more-or-less direct contact with the voices and thoughts of the variously goofy, suffering, unconscious, emblematically put-upon selves that have been for some time essential to Graham’s practice: the country bumpkin and his tormentor, the pilled-up backseat passenger, the numbskull shipwreck, the acidhead trick cyclist, Ferrante and Teicher. Their collective resemblances to and divergences from the biographical Rodney Graham is central to Rock is Hard’s unique advance 3.

When I heard that Graham was beginning to perform and record, I somehow took it for granted that the purely musical aspects of the enterprise would magically take care of themselves. I assumed that the person who could, for example, compose, almost as an afterthought—in The System of Landor’s Cottage— a lengthy and remarkable text that remains to this day Vancouver’s most significant contribution to the Oulipian canon (despite, or because of, the fact that most of the few extant copies are trapped in collections, their pages uncut) could do just about anything. I would no more doubt his ability in such areas than I would challenge Ian Tyson’s cow punching abilities. And clearly the professionalism of Graham’s musical collaborators—and here the consistently supportive guitar playing of David Carswell deserves special mention—has been of enormous help. What would be hard would be the lyrics and the singing. Of these, singing was the last element to be securely in place. Graham’s vocals on the numerous recordings preceding Rock is Hard—barring the odd unsuppressed Lou Reed-or-Iggyism—were certainly adequate to the task, but the confidence evinced by the best singing on the new album convinces in a new way. Blessed with neither a very large nor very secure instrument, Graham has nonetheless shown himself capable of the peculiar self-hypnosis, the Stanislavskian method required to use what resources one has to “sell” a song. Good singing requires a technical assumption, however managed, of personal authenticity. You have to learn to mean it or your voice tightens up after ten minutes. Stepping up to the mic as an amateur, Graham has no choice but to believe every note he sings.

Beyond its punning title and chorus, the opening track “High and Lonesome” also invokes the term high lonesome, which is how Gram Parsons used to describe the fragile but clear quality he sought in his own elaborately tentative vocal expression, related perhaps to Dylan’s “wild mercury sound” or what Graham himself called “the mysterious, coppery song” allied to that of birds. That Graham is able to approach the high lonesome as often as he does is not only what ultimately puts Rock is Hard over as a record, but is the quality that brings it most closely into alignment with the prevailingly generous spirit of his work. Thus, when, further on in the liner notes of his earlier record The Bed-Bug, Love Buzz, Graham speaks of song structures as not only architectural details (porches, balconies, breezeways, etc.) but also

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Images 71-72

as potential embodiments of “the senses . . . fused into a single fixed idea” he could be referring to any of his artistic productions. Like any venerated object, the song acts as vessel into which fixed ideas can be placed and then shared.

But it was the necessity to speak and describe, to fill the imaginary “two-room cottages” with usable furniture—as well as porches and widows’ walks—that was surely the most difficult aspect. Lyrics have always been the Achilles heel of art rock precisely because they are so often the literary conceits of clever people, or worse, what clever people think “the fans” want to hear. Thus, the condescension of Roger Waters, the adolescent notebook opacity of Yes or Rush, the Bukowski-and-ginger-ale of American punk. And beside the monumental simplicity of Hank Williams or Blind Willie McTell, even the protean Dylan is quite rightly embarrassed. The triumph of English rock in the sixties was derived from the fact that its practitioners went to art school just long enough to figure out that Muddy Waters was a better artist than Jean Cocteau.

So, while every other aspect of Graham’s musical project could be made to yield to hard work, intelligence, and willpower, lyrics would necessarily require an unprecedented degree of personal exposure.

Although frequently appearing in his own work, Graham has shown little interest in the trappings of either personal psychology or confession. Indeed, a work like Halcion Sleep, which depicts the artist, dreamless after two strong sleeping pills, as dead to the world as Mantegna’s Christ, might seem to argue the opposite. The last track on Rock is Hard, “Theme From Phonokinetoscope,” is the album’s most direct confrontation with the history of rock music’s psychopathology. It is the soundtrack to a film in which Graham, after taking a hit of acid, lies around, gazes at flowers, and rides a bike around an Amsterdam park, partly backwards. Its refrain, “you’re the kind of girl that fits into my world,” consciously repeats that of “Bike,” the closing track of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The writer of “Bike,” Syd Barrett (who is given co-credit by Graham), would become rock’s most famous “acid casualty,” attracting a fervent cult based as much on voyeuristic interest in his audible deterioration as it was on his music.

From Wild Man Fisher to Wesley Willis, the encouraging of mentally disturbed people to make records for the express purpose of amusing the jaded has been one of rock’s unhappy recurrences. In this unavoidably dubious biographical context “Bike” is also seen as transitional, the point where Barrett’s invention begins to unravel, its careening sense of a childlike dread a sign, its collapse into bird sounds a premonition. By taking acid, Graham repudiates these projections, turning the voyeurism against itself.

If one were to generalize about something as wide-ranging as the experience of LSD, perhaps it would be that it tends to administer a strong adjustment to the self, reveals its fictive, habitual nature in often quite stark terms; it allows the phrase “Who am I?’” to be invoked with non-rhetorical seriousness.

The face Graham presents in Phonokinetoscope is, like that in Halcion Sleep, one from which the self as animating spirit seems to have been encouraged to take a little holiday, with a kind of life mask minding the boarded-up store. In either case, the “inner life” of these self-depictions is as unknown to the artist as it is to the viewer. I think that by peopling his oeuvre with these variously mindless clones, zombies, doppelgängers, and automata, Graham is not only tweaking the tired tropes of identity construction—

Peter Culley

the art world’s kinder, gentler but equally bankrupt “star system”—but more importantly actually using his art as a way of peeling off variously fossilized layers of the self’s brittle, ever-expanding coral. These animated embodiments of absence, stupidity, bad luck, and misguided action, once transformed into art, can plague their creator a little less. The generosity of Graham’s work is that this offloading is quite clearly meant to be shared—by disposing so neatly of some of his crotchets, obsessions, and idées fixes— if only as three-minute pop songs—he helps us to identify and dislodge our own.

The disconsolate gloom of the Phonokinetoscope soundtrack’s vocals and lyrics (“drape the dump in shades of grey / declare it ‘I feel fucking awful day’”) is nothing like Syd Barrett’s unnerving over-ebullience (“a basket, a bell, rings, and things to make it look good”)—in Graham’s version neither the girl nor the world seem to have much chance of fitting. Similarly, the music is nothing like Pink Floyd’s broken carousel. It resembles instead in its stop/start, loud/soft dynamics Nirvana and the Neil Young of “Down by the River,” minus Young's long, cathartic guitar solos (Phonokinetoscope’s jams are brought up short just as they start to get going), but with all the spuriously assumed prophetic gravity, the same masochistic wallow. In the context of Rock is Hard the song’s bleak survey of the post-rock wasteland (“I'm the i they failed to dot / from the land that time forgot”) seems to immunize the rest of the album. Having to some degree bookended the lingering miasma of a lifetime’s morbid subjectivity, Graham is free to make the rest of the album (excepting perhaps the Beach Boys cover, “Belles of Paris,” a disquieting and rather mechanically performed relic of Brian Wilson’s worst Mike Love-dominated period) a series of breezily rendered gripes, what the eighteenth-century songwriter Thomas D’Urfey would call “pills to purge melancholy.”

Constantly leaning on and questioning the listener (“whatsofunnyidontgetit? / how does this read to you so far? / shall we slip away discretely?”) endlessly doubting his own sufficiency to be speaking at all (“I'm not one to go on in a social situation / I need a lyricist to summarize my existence / I'm a timewaster”) Graham enlists you in his project, meeting you halfway before you’re quite aware of it. For while the irritations and yearnings Graham straightforwardly confronts are clearly specific (“have I ever told you / how much I hate this fucking town”), their effect is entirely general. It might be our roughly similar demographic, and it is certainly our gender, but there is very little in these songs that might not apply to my life as well as Graham’s, and maybe yours too. Many of them seem already accompanied by an odd feeling of personal relief, a rare gift, like finding a diary under a tree. Transcending pastiche, the songs are airtight and original. The beautifully managed treatment of narrative and musical affect— simultaneously flattening and expansive—is Rock is Hard's most difficult negotiation, one it has proven increasingly difficult for “professional” musicians to carry out. The affectionate celebration of banal commonness, unity if you will, is a project more often proposed than carried out, even as its comforts become more necessary. Rodney Graham has produced not only a pop record sui generis in its conception and execution, but has advanced with it in his larger career to new levels of directness and intimacy of address.

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Come a Singing!

Andrew Hunter

2004

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.1

47 1 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), 169.

Ernest Gellner

There is a used bookstore in London, Ontario, I visit regularly. It’s downtown, on what was the main street, housed in an old store that once sold ladies’ fashions or shoes or hardware or appliances.

I’m not sure what exactly they sold, but I know they were new things. This was back when you went downtown to shop and have lunch at The Bay or Woolworth’s or Kresge’s. You still trusted the local policeman and the teachers at school. You looked to your minister for sage advice and followed the wishes of your parents. Well, maybe.

Anyway, I like this bookstore in London because near the entrance, just past the rack of “New Arrivals,” they have bins of brochures, maps, postcards, and folders, stuff published by local communities, government offices, and universities. No books are in these bins, just ephemera. Most of the material is Canadian, divided geographically and by subject, so there is a section of tourism brochures from places like Black Creek Pioneer Village and Old Fort Henry, a section of maps of Quebec, and a section of auto guide books. Mainly, it is the images and designs that draw me to these items, but every now and then I will come across a card or booklet with a broader message that stands out. I’m always on the lookout for existing material that can function as a guidebook for a new exhibition. Often, these remnants of the past suggest a narrative for an alternative approach to looking at Canadian art.

For example, a couple of years ago I came across a number of booklets (ca. 1920-1950) that were promoting resource development. For each one, the cover imagery was fairly consistent: a backdrop of wilderness fronted by scenes of industry—mining, logging, hydro dams, and urban factories. It struck me that the image of the landscape these booklets projected ran counter to popular notions of the country that most Canadians associate with the Group of Seven and their peers: Canada as a nation of vast, untouched nature. Out of these thoughts came the exhibition The Other Landscape (Edmonton Art Gallery, 2003). Typical of much of my work dealing with historical Canadian art, The Other Landscape deals with myths and the fictions we create about the places we live.

Back at the store in London, I’m sifting through the box labelled “Folk Music,” and I come across Come ‘A Singing! I am instantly convinced that I have found another good guidebook: a book of folksongs, the cover is deep yellow with just a hint of orange. Cheap printing: one colour on matte card stock. Despite the cover’s low-budget production, it speaks volumes. A composite of all things stereotypically Canadian, the illustration by Arthur Lismer presents an iconic True North, one that was being promoted in the first half of the twentieth century and continues to resonate (just visit any Roots outlet or look at an “I Am Canadian” advertisement). It has all the right components: a lone pine tree standing centre-frame backed by a rocky windswept island in Georgian Bay; Western mountains rise in the distance; sailing ships ply a maritime shore with a cluster of houses—perhaps a fishing village, maybe

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Image 1

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Image 4

Images 56, 84, 85, 96, 101, 104, and 111

rural Quebec. No urban sprawl, no industry. A giant halo pulses out from the tip of the monster pine.

Perhaps the image is a foretaste of the hovering spiritual forms of Harris, Brooker, and FitzGerald; or is that halo made up of radio shock waves radiating across the land, broadcasting “from sea to sea”? But then I look a bit closer. On the bottom right, I spot two tree stumps, evidence of man’s harvesting and altering of the landscape. This is not a natural scene, but an altered space, a highly scripted and crafted image.

Published by the National Museum of Canada in 1947, Come ‘A Singing! was compiled by the influential anthropologist Dr. Marius Barbeau with the assistance of musicologist Arthur Bourinot. It was meant for “practical use,” according to Barbeau, meaning that it was to be used in schools, by scouting and church groups, at summer camps, and in the home. But it was more than this. Illustrated throughout by Arthur Lismer, Come ‘A Singing! represents the convergence of powerful streams of intellectual activity that were, by that time, well-established in Canadian popular culture: the Group of Seven’s model of Canadian art, the project of collecting and documenting folklore, and the defining of Canada as a northern nation of European heritage.

In the first half of the twentieth century, numerous government bodies, academics, and cultural organizations were composing a picture of Canada out of select “authentic” items in order to create, in the words of John Murray Gibbon, a “Canadian Mosaic.” Folk songs and popular artworks, with their related themes of rugged wilderness and rustic authenticity, were critical components. The songs in Come ‘A Singing! were meant to be received as more than just light entertainment. They were significant tools in a cultural program that included a clear definition of who Canadians were and where they came from (first France and Great Britain followed by a more diverse spectrum of Europeans) and what the essence of the country was (a hybrid of wilderness and the inhabited rural, of virgin nature and vast resource potential). This program was aggressively pursued for decades, and its core ideas continue to inform popular definitions of Canada. This is highly problematic for members of First Nations communities and immigrants from countries not part of this ‘traditional’ founding narrative.

The exhibition Come a Singing! followed the lead of the original booklet by pairing folk songs with works of visual art. The installation also included samples of other forms of cultural production that were equally influenced by folklore and that promoted a nationalist vision, such as tourism promotions, souvenirs, and books. Following an introduction to the work of John Murray Gibbon and concepts of the folk, the exhibition was organized into thematic groupings based on collecting areas popular among folklorists: The Maritimes, Quebec, The West, Lumbermen, and Northern Rural and The Great Outdoors.

The exhibition also included a selection of films that either documented or were influenced by folk music including: Ukranian Dance (Directed by Laura Boulton, 1943), Alouette, C'est l'aviron and Là-haut sur ces Montagnes (Directed by Norman McLaren, ca. 1945), Old Songs, Young Hearts (Directed by Gil LaRoche, 1949), and Songs of Nova Scotia (Directed by Grant Crabtree, 1958). The National Film Board, an organization that played an active role in promoting an idea of Canada through art and folk material, produced all of these films. What the exhibition proposed was fairly simple: that many of the ideas that informed the collecting and promoting of folk songs were echoed in the subject matter and ideologies found in the artworks produced at that time. Both reflect a select and narrow vision of the country.

Andrew Hunter

Canadian Mosaic The Canadian people today represents itself as a decorated surface, bright with inlays of separate coloured pieces, not painted in colours blended with brush on palette.2

John Murray Gibbon

John Murray Gibbon’s Canadian Mosaic was a highly influential book. Published in 1938, it defined a new vision of the country that expanded the idea of who was Canadian. Yet, while it has been hailed by many as the blueprint for multiculturalism, Gibbon’s “mosaic” was missing some significant pieces, as can be seen in the collection of portrait “types” included in his book by Kathleen Shackleton and N. de Grandmaison (the Scottish-Canadian Type, the Italian-Canadian Type, the Hebrew-Canadian Type, etc.). Native people are absent from the puzzle, as are the established communities of Chinese-, Japanese-, and Afro-Canadians, among others. In retrospect, however, these omissions are not surprising as only a romantic vision of the Native past was valued and immigration from non-European countries was certainly not encouraged. There is a kind of hierarchy within the representations of Gibbon’s accepted Canadian types, the English-Canadian Type is a young woman who appears in modern, urban dress, while the French-Canadian Type is an elderly man, a classic habitant. The Hungarian-Canadian Type, like most “ethnic” peoples, is garbed in a traditional costume. In Canada, being modern and progressive was a role reserved for only a few.

John Murray Gibbon was arguably the most active promoter of folk culture as a tool for defining the country and promoting national unity. As Publicity Director for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Gibbon organized numerous folk song and handicraft festivals drawing on the collections of academic folklorists, most significantly the National Museum of Canada’s Dr. Marius Barbeau. Gibbon published his own collection, Canadian Folk Songs (Old and New) (1927), and even composed an entire book of new songs, New World Ballads (1939). Like other folklorists, such as Mary Black in the Maritimes, Gibbon was not afraid to fabricate the authentic folk culture he felt should exist. Folklore’s central role in the popular culture of Canada can largely be credited to Gibbon, whose influence can be seen across the country from the marketing of rural Quebec to the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies (a club that organizes horseback rides through the Canadian Rockies).

Like many folklorists, Gibbon held a conservative view, promoting stability and traditional values over progress and change; he saw this as the key to integrating new European immigrants into the Canadian mosaic. For Gibbon, as Ian MacKay observes in The Quest of the Folk, the “retention of age-old Folk customs would indirectly aid patriotism by removing the risk of the immigrant’s children rebelling against their parents and destabilizing the institution of the family.”³ This perspective also applied to workers and the rural poor.

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2 John Murray Gibbon, Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1938), viii.

3 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 57.

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Ideas of the Folk

There were two dominant threads that ran through the modern folk-based obsession to define Canada.

One was the demographic breakdown of the country into definable racial groups with specific cultural traditions, as seen in the work of John Murray Gibbon. The other was the anti-modern fascination with rural or simple folk. This perspective is reflected in the paintings of artists like A.Y. Jackson and the song collections of individuals who hunted the hinterland for genuine nuggets of pre-modern life, with the aim of using what they collected as evidence of a region’s true nature. Important examples are found in the work of Dr. Marius Barbeau in Quebec and Roy MacKenzie and Helen Creighton in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. What needs to be remembered is that it was primarily academics of the middle and upper classes who defined the folk.

When the twentieth-century intellectuals described rural backwardness, they did so with the effusive fondness of grown-ups describing a childlike world they had already left behind. When they looked upon a f ishing family’s humble abode, they saw not rural poverty but the simple life. They rarely distinguished between a voluntarily chosen simplicity and that which the rural poor were 4 Ibid., 226.

compelled to adopt because they lacked the money to live in any other way.⁴

The strongest shared focus of folklorists and many of the artists represented in the exhibition Come a Singing! was a romantic engagement with rural and wild environments. The disciplines often crossed paths. Publications such as Come ‘A Singing!, Canadian Mosaic (with images by a number of well-established artists including W.J. Phillips), and George Bouchard’s Other Days Other Ways (1928) (with Edwin Holgate’s woodcut decorations) are just a few examples. In Gibbon’s Canadian Folk Songs (Old and New), it is Franz Johnston who provides the decorations.

Andrew Hunter

The Folk Song

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The musical symbols of an imagined community are many: an identifiable corpus of folk song, usually printed for wide distribution; national songs and national anthems; folk songs that spell out the history of the nation in overt and subtle forms; and, in general, the equation of folk music with national music.⁵

Philip V. Bohlman

The scholarly interest in folk songs in Canada can be traced to two primary sources. One is the European nationalist concept of the folk as a country’s true people. An example of this is the folklore collecting of the Brothers Grimm in the early 1800s. The work of the Anglo-American ballad scholar Frances James Child, whose The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1898) became the bible of folk song collecting, is the other. Child was an English professor at Harvard University, and he saw ballads as primarily a literary genre (he didn’t see the need to document the actual tunes of the ballads).

Child’s project was to make as comprehensive a collection as possible of extant British ballads that pre-dated mass publication (culled from notebook transcriptions, manuscripts, broadsides, etc.).

His idea that “real” cultural production by the folk predates mass culture was significant. It led to his view that the folk were basically simple people who were mere conduits of culture, not creators of culture. Furthermore, mass-produced or mass-distributed songs were not to be considered part of folk culture, even if such a song became an integral part of a community. In North America, Child found his largest untainted source of ballads in the Appalachians. In Canada, Helen Creighton discovered a treasure trove of “Child Ballads” in Nova Scotia. In Quebec, Dr. Marius Barbeau would identify a parallel history, a wealth of “pure” songs from old France. Child’s purist position, however, would not last.

Under the influence of John and Alan Lomax of the Archives of the American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (who pioneered the use of field recordings and the promotion of folk music through records and concerts) and John Murray Gibbon’s aggressive popularizing program, song collectors in Canada largely abandoned Child’s ideological approach. The focus shifted more to the way songs were connected to a location and how they spread. The industry that emerged to promote folk music through songbooks, recordings, concerts, film, and television resulted in folk music’s shift from obscure academic pursuit to popular entertainment. As a result, the concept of folk music swelled to include many popular songs, including Western Ballads and Cowboy songs and newly crafted folk songs, such as those written

by John Murray Gibbon. But while Child’s purist, literary approach was left behind, his social agenda that saw folk songs as evidence of the spread of British culture, has survived in Canada. The dominance of Celtic folk/roots music in Eastern Canada and the pure white face of New Country are the most compelling contemporary examples.

Come a Singing!

5 Philip V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 54.

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And the band plays on…

Much of the above is a reworking of the text that appeared on panels throughout the exhibition, Come a Singing! I thought it was important to give the reader the same material I provided the viewer, who moved through a rather dense hanging of paintings and archival images, as well as the cases of brochures, maps, and songbooks I’d assembled. Had this publication been produced as a catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, my text may not have moved much beyond this. Now, however, with the opportunity to reflect on what was done (the show is now long closed and dispersed), I wanted to explain why I think I did the show and where it leads because, for me at least, one project always flows into the next or its fragments into many others.

I look to the past to understand the present. I’m not a historian but consider myself a contemporary curator who engages historical material through the lens of the present and through parallels found in diverse cultural forms. Back in London, I was looking through that box marked “Folk Music” because I have a long-standing interest in music and what it all means; in its relationship to identity and in the belief that music is a natural, truthful projection of the performer. In the end, however, it is a performance, an act, just as making and displaying art is a performance. Country music, especially, has truly interested me because it is the most widely popular extension of the cultural construct that is folk music and because it continues to exhibit that battle between what is “real” (No Depression and Roots Country— think Gillian Welch) and what is “inauthentic” (New Country—think Shania Twain). I see a parallel in the dialogue around Canadian art. For the majority of Canadians, the Group of Seven and their peers (Carr, Thomson, et al.) are the “real” Canadian artists, and anything that breaks from their narrow and traditional understanding is not. But the Canada depicted by that generation of artists was much more complex than the idea that has been popularized. Tom Thomson has become just a painter of lone pines, not an artist engaged with the post-industrial landscape that he traversed. Emily Carr is simply a painter (to many an “appropriator”) of Native imagery, not a painter who considered a radically transformed landscape of shifting peoples and resource industries. And the Group of Seven, well, they’re just mountains, rocks, and autumn foliage. As with country music, the majority of individuals and institutions presenting and consuming Canadian art are ultimately conservative.

I once wrote that I believed Lawren S. Harris was burdened by the success of his 1920s vision of Canada to the point that it has taken years for his later work in abstraction to be appreciated. This is true, generally, for a whole generation of artists, and while some deserve to be framed by a limited focus (A.Y. Jackson for one), many developed more heterogeneous approaches that suffer from this narrow vision. It is not just the general public that has forced these restrictions; the contemporary art community has been equally guilty of accepting, and rarely questioning, this traditional reading. With Come a Singing! and projects like The Other Landscape (2003), my goal has been to broaden the framework within which these artworks are considered, to map a more complicated terrain of the period, and to see where certain ideas come from and, as in the case of the folk, continue to persist. I believe the enduring popular

Andrew Hunter

embrace of certain ideas of Canada are firmly rooted in concepts of the folk; our consistent projected fantasy of a nation of vast wilderness masks our guilt over the growing dramatic transformation of this landscape, something that should be painfully obvious to all. Through media that continue to grow in reach and pervasiveness, folk concepts of Canada continue to be perpetuated, creating a highly problematic political terrain that camouflages the country’s history. As their work was once used to promote a particular vision, the art of the Group of Seven and their contemporaries continues to be employed as a form of disinformation about the present.

Come a Singing! was less about the intention of each artist and more about the context of reception for their work. Many of the artists gathered in the exhibition (Jackson and Lismer, for example) embraced and contributed to the dominant ideologies embodied in the nationalist folk movement.

Many others could be seen to have been simply caught up in its wake or to have accepted, as peers or students of the Group, a particular model for Canadian painting. But there were many artists included whose work, while appearing to conform to traditions, contradicted and even subverted these ideas.

Carl Schaefer, with his ominous rural landscapes, scenes of a terrain under threat from the Depression, urban and industrial growth, and the dark clouds of war; Paraskeva Clark’s equally dark interpretations; and Phillip Surrey, whose works are often just, well, creepy, spring to mind. I’m looking to these artists now, to that generation of painters often lost in the shadow of the group and the daunting nationalist myth that has infected their legacy. In these artists, I see a real Canada—a little out there, on the edge and teetering on the brink of breakdown and decay. This is a different soundtrack than the gosh-golly-whiz of the traditional folklorists. It runs parallel to the often hidden history of the folk that flowed into the blues, outlaw country, and early rock ‘n roll; this is the music people now like to define as “Lost Highway,” songs about death, decay, and murder. What was it Steve Earle once said?: “The reason country music sucks today is you can’t sing songs about killing people.”

I’m dipping back into music again to find another potential parallel, an avenue of pursuit if you will. I’ve found it in the work of contemporary musicians and producers like Rick Rubin and Jack White who saw in the music of Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, respectively, something real beyond the surface of myths and Nashville over-production. Go back to the standards, strip them down and crank up the distortion. Closer to home, I look to The Sadies wearing the ragged cowboy shirts of their father and uncle’s Country & Western band, the Good Brothers, playing a repertoire of twang that mixes surf, garage, country, rock, and punk. It’s my new soundtrack. I’m following their lead back into Canadian art to find real country.

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Image 60

Squawkies

Will Straw

2004

When talkies replaced silent f ilms, the careers of many squeaky-voiced movie stars plummeted.

These days some rock ’n’ rollers are worrying that homely mugs and pot bellies might send their careers into a nose dive.1

Laurel Leff

Two key transitions in the history of audio-visual media stand as parables of the anxiety that mixes of sound and image can provoke. The best-known of these arrived after 1927 with the rise of the talking picture. In a widespread reaction, sound-on-film was accused of shattering the much-vaunted humanist universalism of the silent cinema. The pastoral and metaphysical impulses of silent cinema, it was felt, withered under the onslaught of the talkies, whose penchant for “noise and crime” was widely taken as a corruption of the cinema’s noble aspirations. The sense that sound cinema might be over-expressive (and thus oppressive) shaped a wide range of aesthetic responses to its introduction. Brecht and others called for a practice of sound-film that set sound and image against each other, as if the talkie’s greatest threat lay in the overpowering unities of sense and meaning it would inevitably produce.

Brecht may have been right to note the way that by 1930s sound and image were working together to reinforce and naturalize each other, giving the coherent realism of classical narrative and editing. Elsewhere in this debate, however, the problem was inverted. From another perspective, sound tended to diminish the power of images rather than to enhance it. Sound, it could be argued, fragmented and belittled narrative worlds, rupturing the illusory fullness associated with the spaces of silent film.

It did so, in part, by giving images a specificity of time and place that silent cinema had often lacked.

Background sound, for example, locates an image in a given moment; an accent endows a character with a distinct history. Sound and dialogue would most often seem to come from a specific point within an image, rarely as the expression of its wholeness. More important, perhaps, dialogue and noise were more directly dependent than images on culturally specific codes of intelligibility. What if sound, rather than adding to visual images, diminished them through the noisy intrusion of social difference? Sound brought with it the markers of division and heterogeneity. Characters in “talking pictures” spoke in tones that the contours of their bodies and their social histories had imprinted upon them. Noises, most of the time, served as the markers of tension or difference, or they evoked off-screen spaces different from those before our eyes.

Analyzing contemporary responses to sound film, in France and elsewhere, Chris Faulkner notes that speech and language made films of the early 1930s expressive containers for social distinction.2 The slang, regional dialects, and speech patterns of sound-film characters suggested that the films they appeared in were about social class and ethnicity (even when they claimed to be about something else).

Likewise, the gunshots, screeching tires, and verbal banter, which seemed to dominate films by the early 1930s, nourished the sense that film narratives had become more conflictual and less noble in purpose than those that came before them. Most of these accents, voices, and noises, it may be noted,

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1 Laurel Leff, “Record Firms Test Market in Video Music,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 1981: 23.

2 Chris Faulkner, “Rene Clair, Marcel Pagnol and the social dimension of speech,” Screen, vol. 35, no. 2 (Summer, 1994): 157-170.

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3 Wireless to New York Times, “Australian Film Board Sees Americanization, But Calls Our Talkies Better than British.” New York Times, April 16, 1930: 10.

4 Virginia Pope, “The Changing Cycle of Entertainment/After a Long Era of Shadows and Voices Comes a New Call for the Actor,” New York Times, October 16, 1932: SM7.

were the markers of an urban modernity expressed most forcefully in newly-popular genres, like the gangster film or the backstage musical, which flourished in the early years of sound. The loudly expressed social heterogeneity of early talkies was often more obscene to critics than the crimes committed within their narratives, and the voices of sound films were more alarming than their vices. For instance, the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board wittily claimed in its 1930 report: “It is remarkable that the public can tolerate such large doses of prevalent slang, especially modern girls singing and speaking.”³

In 1932, critic Virginia Pope noted the death of silent cinema and its dreamy “shadow lands.”

In its place, talkies, radio, and vaudeville had come to exploit the flesh-and-blood physicality of show business performers who moved between all three media. “Perhaps that helps to explain why, as some showmen think, a new era of flesh and blood is being born. . . . The consolidation of radio, talkie, and vaudeville interests has doubtless done much toward increasing the interchange of artists.”⁴ Here, Pope is proclaiming the ongoing value of live stage performances and explaining the popularity of sound films, which join the shadows of silent cinema to the voices of the radio loudspeaker. From today’s perspective, we might say that Pope had diagnosed the intermediality of talking films, their reliance on figures and forms that circulated between radio, cinema, gramophone records, and the vaudeville stage. Sound— speech and song—was the common substance that made this intermediality possible. Sound encouraged a promiscuous intermingling of expressive forms, as if it were through sound that cinema could escape its formal purity and rejoin the broader chattering of popular culture.

Virginia Pope found much to welcome in sound film’s descent from shadow land into the worlds of everyday speech. Others exploited that descent in order to ridicule the cinema. In the early years of the talking picture, the satirical term “squawkie” circulated in magazines and newspapers. “Squawkie” expressed contempt for the talking picture, of course; more broadly, it captured the noisy cacophony of a popular culture wherein movies had become one part of a media complex that also included radio, gramophone records, and fast-talking Broadway journalism. A noisy talkiness was a broadly disseminated sign of cultural degradation and not merely a feature of the new sound films. Singer Rudy Vallee, hounded by celebrity gossip columnists, imagined starting his own magazine, Squawk (he even had a prototype of the first issue mocked up in 1936), as a vehicle for stars to respond to gossip written about them. In Squawkies, a cheap, “spicy” film-oriented magazine of the 1930s, it was taken for granted that sound had degraded the motion picture, dragging it down to the level of idle prattle and cheap sensation.

A half-century later, with the popularization of music videos, many of these themes re-emerged in popular criticism. The relationship of sound to image was now inverted, however. For so many observers of cinema, sound had served curiously as an agent both of specification and of contagion. On the one hand, sound worked to reduce the rich ambiguity of silent film imagery. People spoke with distinct accents or styles of speech and situations had very specific ambiences. At the same time, sound had opened up cinema by hurrying its integration within a broader commercial entertainment culture.

Because of sound, the cinema could not escape ongoing interaction with the broadcasting and music industries and, by implication, with the tawdry worlds of advertising and celebrity scandal.

Will Straw

On the other hand, for critics of the music video, sound was the pure, expressive form upon which the corrupting forces of the visual would do their work. Video imagery, a popular argument went, made literal the meanings of otherwise ambiguous songs; it specified identities and situations and, in so doing, limited the interpretive freedom of listeners. Just as it constrained interpretive possibilities, however, the music video was seen to open up chains of association, which led each image back into the promiscuous clutter of a visually dominated media culture. Here again, one expressive form was seen as having dissolved the purity of another, dragging (or seducing) it into a chaotic intermediality, which was itself the sign of a degradation. In 1985, Sally Bedell Smith wrote of music video that it had produced a “kind of frenzied cross-pollination, with rock stars such as Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, and the Pointer Sisters appearing in films and commercials, and images from one form of entertainment popping up in another.”⁵ The rootless circulation of disjointed images across the surfaces of mid-1980s media culture seemed equivalent to the loose chatter of early-1930s media, whose noisy talk moved from movie to radio broadcast to telegraphic tabloid gossip column.

Sound cinema’s public acceptance was hastened by the quick introduction of genres (like the gangster film and the screwball comedy), which deftly exploited sound’s possibilities and helped to reshape the popular cinema’s narrative forms. These genres made the clash of embodied subcultural languages and ethnic accents central to their meaning and appeal. Ever since, the possibility of community has been the thematic preoccupation of popular cinema (rather than, say, the fate of personal innocence), as if the conflicts opened up by speech have become its concern. This is, it might be argued, a legacy of sound, of the fractures which sound brought to cinema and the drives towards reconciliation that have followed.

Similarly, perhaps, the rise of music video since the early 1980s has accompanied the commercial and cultural ascendancy of musical genres whose core political values have to do with racial or gender identities: hip hop, teen-pop, and, implicitly, country music and heavy metal. The age of music video is one in which issues of race and gender have been central to virtually all, important debates over popular music’s meaning and purpose. Music video is not wholly responsible for this turn towards identity and away from the concerns with commercialism or expressive freedom that marked an earlier politics of popular music. Nevertheless, this turn has naturalized the music video; it has made the visual image a logical site for the enactment of music’s politics. The music video makes it impossible to grasp music without confronting its grounding in flesh and blood, in bodies marked with the visible signs of social difference.

Squawkies

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5 Sally Bedell Smith, “There’s no avoiding music video,” New York Times, March 10, 1985: H29.

PREEMPTIVE GLOSSARY FOR A TECHNOSONIC CONTROL SOCIETY (with lines of flight)

Marc Couroux

2014

PRIMERS: Earworm distribution system. The outcome of research carried out in the mid-1990s at an

institution of higher learning (in a major Canadian city) involving the mobilization of biosonic propensities of select individuals—musicians with perfect pitch—converting the latter into hosts for a continuous production of abductive melodic tropes through embodiment and externalization. The implantation of an algorithm qua recombinant tune machine in the primer-subject ensures continued submission to a phonoegregoric will. These subjects, temporary way stations for a symbiant intelligence, were programmed to irrepressibly surface these self-generated superearworms—which, from their perspective, were seemingly occurring spontaneously, without motivation—by humming them in public places, thereby donating them to unsuspecting, temporarily adjacent bystanders (perhaps in the vain hope that the latter’s attenuated aptitude for phonographic incorporation might neutralize the bug).

Indeed, an affectively valenced, flexibilized, boned hum lubricates transfer considerably; the inhuman made appealingly human. The surfacing process is likely jump-started by an environmental stimulus of some kind—another sonic fragment, an embedded verbal directive. The public spreading of inscrutable melodic tags might be better understood in terms of later developments in priming, indispensable to the cyberaf fordant model, involving a slow, background introduction of information that becomes creepingly pervasive, such that the figure—or product—that eventually emerges against this inscrutable canvas appears inevitable, logical. The egregore’s preference for embedding a program to generate embodied variations rather than simply implanting a robustly immutable earworm is readily explained via the twin concepts of preemptive self-distortion and the incongruity index : instead of running the risk of a melodic trope decaying into ineffectiveness, better to constantly induce variations displaying sufficient incongruity to force automatic pullback and redoubled implantation. When a melodic figure in the same lineage eventually emerged in the context of an advertisement, it would appear as new (incipience effect), and yet distinctly primed for by a multiplicity of same-but-different entities. This avoidance of a too crude ground-to-figure correlation might explain the success of the phonoegregore at covering its tracks.

Extraction of these superearworms proved to be excruciatingly difficult and only possible through the design of a recontouring machine (though this method occasions other dangers that make it a risky endeavour at best). Subjects who believed they could neutralize the superearworm through the common technique of replacing the fragmented hook into its original context by listening to the entire piece from whence it came (thus recovering the integral whole, an overall structural picture in which every element is in its place, pace Adorno) were surprised to discover the worm’s lack of affiliation with any previously extant entity.1 In effect, these slogans were not synecdoches for greater totalities, but simply splinters that referred to nothing but themselves, lying in wait for future associations. (Not to mention that in a colloidaudial environment of total electrification, any notion of an unscarred whole that might have remained sheltered from the fragmental imperative, and that could be unproblematically conjured in a vacuum, remains a suspect vestige of a long-forgotten time.) (Information donated by an experiment subject who wished to remain anonymous.) Charles Stankievech’s Get Out of My Head, Get Out of My Mind (2008) simulates the earworm’s feverish reiteration and mantric incitement to externalize, through

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1 Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Culture Industry: The Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 29-60. Adorno lamented the manner in which the listener is absolved of the responsibilities of structural listening through newfound abilities allowing ingress to a unified work outside of its linear (irreversible, ephemeral) unfolding, resulting in its fragmentation into islands of “sensual pleasure torn away from the functions which give them meaning”; the greater concern being the depletion of the individual’s ability to patiently construct a long-term narrative by negotiating discrepancies, contradictions, polarities.

See also fractal listening.

60 Image 70; Track 4, side B

its looping of the titular slogan. Notably, the coincidence of the close-miked, centrally positioned schizophonic voice with internal monologue echoes the confusion experienced by primers as to the genesis of the auditory bug. (Hosts, confounded by the hyperrealistic contours of the hallucination— for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from typical hi-fi headphone immersions—for the most part remained oblivious to the worm’s internal origin.) Moreover, the technoprosthetic supplementing of reality afforded by mobile auditory virtual reality systems exponentially increases on-the-fly production of psychedelic adjacencies , given judicious foldings and möbiusoidal short-circuitings of intensive headspace and extensive physical space.

PHONOEGREGORE: An occult, corporate cabal seeking control over a given population through the

2 Schizophonia = split sound, referring (especially) to the electronic decoupling of sound from its source both spatially and temporally.

Coined by Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer.

3 From mètis, cunning intelligence in Ancient Greece.

According to Detienne and Vernant, mètis “implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine f lair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years.” Mètis functions in situations that are “transient, shifting, disconcerting, and ambiguous…which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic.”

Because of its essentially deceptive, resourcefully stratagematic character, mètis was “thrust into the shadows, erased from the realm of true knowledge,” though it is enjoying a renaissance in contemporary times. See Marcel Detienne & Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des grecs (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1974).

See also these recent publications: François Jullien,

use of schizophonic magick.2 Edison is said to have expressed his fear of such a shadowy phonic consortium gaining access to the disembodied, objectified words of an individual, ripe for circulatory contamination. His anxieties were well founded. The schizophonically mobilized effects of recording and transmission technologies were indeed appropriated by the few to gain power over the many—see Hitler’s use of radio (and Roosevelt’s fireside chats), as well as the fake broadcasts (ferried by a CIA-run radio station, overseen by future Watergate co-conspirator E. Howard Hunt) that accelerated the fall of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 (the Árbenz Effect moniker applies to any mètic (cunning) leveraging of technological predispositions to achieve maximal results).³ The CIA may well have been inspired by Orson Welles’s 1938 hyperstitional War of the Worlds broadcast, a möbius-event that began as a standard Mercury Theatre realization, slipping into what appeared to be a real-life invasion (see technoablation).⁴ Pierre Schaeffer, a French telecommunications engineer and anti-nuclear activist, believed the world could be altered by coding its sounds into the musical realm, developing the technique of reduced listening after WWII to empty out the semantic register of sound, the linguistically corrosive, while maintaining intact its affective, psychosomatic valences. In sympathy with the post-Darmstadt tabula rasa generation of composers—but in a far more powerful fashion, for having the insight to employ the technology of his time as medium for psychic transformation—Schaeffer sought to zero out in order to fill, this time squarely within the stabilizing machine of music. Perhaps Jacques Attali was right after all in alleging that cyclical transformations in the sacrificial order of music anticipate the social world to come.⁵ Schaeffer’s particular preemption was to plagiarize Attali’s theory avant-la-lettre, flipping it from descriptive to prescriptive, formalizing a new, totalizing musicalized affordance model—from the bottom up—that would help induce the future through the transformation and regulation of natural sounds, channelling the impersonal, inhuman death drive (positive feedback) into homeostatic equilibrium (negative feedback). Schaeffer didn’t know that the cybercapitalist phonoegregore, already anticipating the decline of Fordism, was seeking such a set of schizophonic modulatory modalities to further its capture operations. It wouldn’t be surprising to discover that Dr. Ewen Cameron utilized some of this emerging theory in his brain-emptying experiments (which, according to Alfred McCoy, “laid the scientific foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method”) at the Allan Memorial

Marc Couroux

Institute in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s (after Schaeffer had accomplished his most important work). In fact, though confirmation has long been sought, no conclusions can yet be drafted. Predictably, Burroughs’s insistence on the functionalizing of art to unshackle its capacities to effectuate changes in reality was deliberately downplayed. Genesis P-Orridge recounts a story of the author casting a spell on an eatery whose proprietors had maligned him by walking back and forth in front of it playing a barely audible tape on which “trouble noises” were cut into characteristic field recordings captured in that location. Shortly after the action had begun, the joint closed without explanation. With the volatility and accessibility of schizophonic practices thus exposed—their capacities to fold time and space— it was deemed preferable to defuse Burroughs within the equivocating realm of postmodern stylistic experimentation, rather than let him further expedite the mass propagation of techno-actualization principles. Alexandre St. Onge’s l'indécidable crowbar cosmogonique (2010) opens xenocommunicative channels through a pragmatic intensification of the molecularities of vocal utterance, teasing out monstrous, phonoegregoric intelligence via informatic translation modalities. The conjuring of altervocalities is leveraged by various occult methodologies, grounded in theory-fiction (the Voynich Manuscript in particular): algorithmagical procedures, constellation-scores divined through ritual shatterings and détourned commercial technologies (a hacked Wiimote) all conspire to capture the phonoegregore in operation, the unfathomable heard through prismatically pressured systemic crosscontamination. The reboning of the machinaetheric sonic recalls efforts by primers to externalize algorithmically generated earworms (though this was precisely the mode by which the latter could achieve contagious effectiveness, unbeknownst to the afflicted parties).

CYBERAFFORDANCE: A concept (adapted from J.J. Gibson) describing the preemptively curtailed

possibilities for action contrived by cybercapitalist feedback mechanisms that actualize the future in the present, effectively (but stealthily) closing off any options the system cannot afford, pretending to openness (and convincing the subject of this) while operating within a set of clearly delimited boundaries.⁶ Norbert Wiener’s first-order cybernetics aimed to predict the movement and behaviour of enemy aircraft during WWII, by continuously gathering information about the opponent and feeding it back into the system, gradually improving the latter’s predictive ability. After the war, the Macy Conferences provided the impetus for an improved, second-order cybernetics to be applied to the social realm, in order to keep the death drive from exploding into actualization again. (Cybernetic, from kubernesis (Gr.) = steering, governing.) At the same time as communication technologies drastically accelerate and mass media acquires an ever-vaster purview, capitalism moves into its late, post-Fordist, just-in-time phase, which requires such a cybernetic system of instant feedback in order to minimize stockpiling. The constant extraction of information from every domain of an individual’s life (that occurs most often in the background of daily activities) operates to preempt future outside initiative by constantly predicting her next consumptive move, thereby embedding her ever deeper. Noise, especially of a critical variety, far from being a nuisance to the system, is in fact essential to periodically restart it. “There is no failure,

PREEMPTIVE GLOSSARY FOR A TECHNOSONIC CONTROL SOCIETY (with lines of flight)

61 A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). Robert C. H. Chia & Robin Holt, Strategy Without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Ghost in the Shell-Game: On the Mètic Mode of Existence, Inception and Innocence,” The Funambulist Papers 45, 2013, http://thefunambulist.net/ 2013/12/04/funambulistpapers-46-ghost-in-the-shellgame-on-the-metic-modeof-existence-inception-andinnocence-by-nandita-biswasmellamphy.

Images 37-38; Track 3, side B

4 Hyperstition = portmanteau term coined by Nick Land and the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) in the mid-1990s, combining hype (or hyper) and superstition.

Hyperstition operates via (at least) four vectors: 1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real; 2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-travelling device; 3. Coincidence intensifier; 4. Call to the Old Ones. See http://hyperstition. abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html.

5 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

6 James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. Robert Shaw and John Bransford (Hillsdale: Lawrence Eribaum Associates, 1977).

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7 Reza Negarestani, “Test1,” Hyperstition (Abstract Dynamics), June 13, 2004, http://hyperstition. abstractdynamics.org/ archives/003274.html.

8 Edward Hudgins, “Going Galt,” The Atlas Society, http://www.atlassociety.org/ atlas-shrugged/going-galt.

Images 94-95; Track 3, side A

9 Nick Land, “Quit,” Outside In, February 28, 2013, http://www.xenosystems.net/ quit/.

only feedback”—a fundamental maxim of neuro-linguistic programming. Capitalism’s insatiable appetite should never be underestimated, especially in view of its exceptional skill at capturing the opponent’s point of view and refiguring it as its own. Pervasive cyberaffordance eventually melts into system immanence (Hullot-Kentor), a pathological condition characterized by the inability to grasp the coordinates of the system one is in, through the isomorphic subjection of the infinitesimal quotidian to analysis, calculation, and prediction. Dip into a random selection of abstracts from any conference organized by the Society for Consumer Psychology to get a sense of micro-strategies of predation, esoteric feedback loop tunings seeking to incorporate any wayward noise that might induce a surge of positive feedback. “How would we rig the maze or problem-box so that the anthropomorphic rat shall obtain a repeated and reinforced impression of his own free will?,” dixit Gregory Bateson. Indeed, the Bateson Nudge is still employed today by the mavens of choice architecture, to preemptively and strictly limit possibility under-the-radar—the hyperphonochasm is a particularly astute version of it. Dixit Reza Negarestani: "Affirmation does not make you open to the world but closes you progressively through the grotesque domestications of economical openness, makes you more solid and economically open, more moralized and more ideal for the boundary whose uncontrollable machinery is based on transforming openness to affordance, and loyalty to survival economy."⁷ Dixit Nick Land: "The only way to get more tight-feedback under current conditions is by splitting, in every sense. That is the overwhelming practical imperative: Flee, break up, withdraw, and evade. Pursue every path of autonomization, fissional federalism, political disintegration, secession, exodus, and concealment. Route around the Cathedral’s educational, media, and financial apparatus in each and every way possible. Prep, go Galt,⁸ go cryptodigital, expatriate, retreat into the hills, go underground, seastead, build black markets, whatever works, but get the hell out."⁹ Alexis O’Hara’s SQUEEEQUE! The Improbable Igloo (2009-11) unstably deploys both negative and positive feedback models, as pharmacological poles (poison and cure). The warm and cuddly surround generated by the narcissistic return of sound (after occulted transformations—the contaminations of schizophonia normalized) scattered across a half-spherical bank of speakers actualizes the homeostatic model favoured by Wiener at the core of cybercapitalist circulation, a collectively sustained, ever-evolving loop increasingly closed off to any unaffordable outside. However, the stabilizing exchanges within the igloo are quickly thrown into disarray by the incautious proximity of input (microphone) to output (speaker), resulting in the production of howling, positive feedback; the audibilization of overload (the feedback that can be heard) throws into relief the inaudible negative feedback that stealthily entraps.

The HYPERPHONOCHASM surgically severs a subject from its acoustical milieu, delivering it into schizophonic chaos through a judicious control of reverberation. Glenn Gould undertook a series of phonochasmic and phonocollapsing experiments in the mid-1970s (by which time the reclusive pianist had completely withdrawn into the realm of reproduction) involving the alignment of an array of microphone pairs extending from the interior of the piano (close mic) to the back of the hall, allowing for

Marc Couroux

cinematic zooming away from and into the musical object of attention, enabling constant shuttling between an intimate closeness devoid of context to an overpowering of the putative signal by its resonant effects. Beyond its acoustical valence, reverberation indexes relative (critical) distance from an originary impulse via the attendant distortions the latter has shouldered along the way; the inevitable accretion of rumours (noise = rumore (It.)), latencies and other détournements makes plain the need for robust reverb management, and a more vigorous promotion of vectors deemed useful to persist (and to be reinjected into actuality) once the original emission has died off. The hyperphonochasm is a more recent development, its exacerbated, foreshortened character more suited to the rapid-response feedback of viral culture. Such a weapon was deployed by phonoegregoric corporate media in the aftermath of the Iowa caucuses of 2004, in which Democratic front-runner Howard Dean had finished third. Despite this poor showing, the politician’s response to his supporters’ enthusiasm was eminently hyperbolic, rattling off a wish list of states-to-win, culminating in a primal yelp. From a cellphone recording of the event taken in medias res, the context of what came to be known as the “Dean scream” can be easily discerned, one of infectious, multitudinous excitement, in which the ultimate utterance functioned simply as peremptory punctuation. Though its mediatic perpetrator remains unknown (Fox, perhaps?), the effects of the hyperphonochasmic version of the event that convulsively circulated were absolute: by amplifying the direct output of his microphone—therefore attenuating the surrounding elation—an unmistakable impression of madness was summarily conjured. Indeed, the ranting maniac produced by this on-the-fly mix appeared disconnected from reality, inappropriately content with a miserable electoral outcome, his vocalizations out of acoustic whack with the vitiated bleats of a deflated crowd (those remnants that hadn’t been successfully sucked out of broadcast range). Such an isolated, erratic individual would indeed be unsuitable for the highest office in the land. After some 633 iterations of the scream across the five major US television networks (pre-YouTube), Dean’s campaign was effectively deactivated (though only officially suspended a month later). The phone recording’s evidencing of the immersive nature of the event—its perspective lacking critical distance—is countermanded by the hyperphonochasmic version, a post-event reverberation (a re-perspectivized reinjection into the folds of the real) that ironically suppresses acoustical reverberation to insinuate its distorting imperatives.

The PHONOCOLLAPSE , the phonochasm’s underused antipode, dissolves the sonic predominance of an individual or an object into an undifferentiated whole, as antidote to teleological consolidation. Indeed, revisionist histories frequently employ such a mechanism to reinstate the non-linearities and chaotic bifurcations of social movements in contradistinction to clean encapsulations via the words and actions of their heroic leaders.

The MÖBIUS MODALITY governs imperceptible condition mutations through a creeping incrementation, each notch insufficiently distinct from the previous to significantly rupture a perception of status quo.

It is the regime under which the emergence of a new stratum of abduction cannot be apprehended by dint

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64 Image 83

10 Delphi Carstens, “Hyperstition,” Mer (Maggie Roberts), 2010, http://merliquify.com/blog/ articles/hyperstition.

of an individual’s submission to an endless succession of presents, steadily progressing through control and communication feedback processes. Dave Dyment’s untitled (headset) (2007) eloquently underscores the difficulty in grasping its machinations from an implicated position: the continuous feedback loop instantiated by an altered pair of headphones (one earpiece transformed into a microphone) is summarily broken when the listener’s head is interposed. Indeed, the operations of the möbius modality duck out of perceptible range when directly accosted. The möbius strip is a paradoxical entity with only one boundary, simultaneously one-sided and two-sided: the tracing of a continuous line on its surface— without ever breaking contact—involves the contouring of what appear to be two loops, which one might term introductory and normalization cycles. The first cycle is completed when the point on the opposite side of the inceptive point is paradoxically reached (without deliberately changing sides); the second, when the original point on the initial side is regained. In fact, there is only one global loop that encompasses the two cycles. This möbius operandi is the means by which an individual, a culture, a society become system immanent. Radical systemic shifts—phase changes—are only meant to be detected retrospectively (if at all), by which time reversal potential has been fully quashed into impotent acquiescence.

Consequently, intimate knowledge of the shifty, time-dependent operations of this modality can betray the boundaries of the (cyber)affordant model and its perpetual upgrading (qua normalizing) of fictional entities to the status of inviolable fact (the contingent provisional promoted to generalized permanence), prying open channels within which synthetic constructs may be insinuated (illapsus = flowing, gliding in), inf(l)ecting feedback loops accordingly. Such infra-integumentary infiltrations behave parasitically, forcing the distorting operations of time into consciousness. Moreover, the möbius modality affords the recovery of occulted valences from historical practices—by retrospectively surf(ac)ing un-adumbrated (un-normalized) pasts—in order to gain expedited access to the future. Nick Land describes the task of the “hyperstitional cyberneticist” as “closing the circuit of history by detecting the convergent waves [that] register the influence of the future on its past.”1⁰ PHONOGRAPHIC INCORPORATION: An internalization of auditory material of extended duration

(most typically of a musical nature) that can be recalled at will. Details regarding frequency, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and associated effects are all internally audible and accurately reproduced on cue.

Musicians, given the mnemonic imperatives of the profession, constitute the greatest percentage of individuals disposed to such incorporation. Auditory resolution increases dramatically among musicians endowed with perfect pitch abilities. A particular instantiation of the incorporation will often be triggered by an environmental factor—linguistic, musical, affective—that engenders internal playback (a phenomena known more commonly as phonomnesis). Baddeley suggests that recorded material might be incorporated via a “sub-vocal rehearsal process” that continuously refreshes the memory trace through the use of one’s inner voice. This process appears indispensable in extending the length of the incorporation beyond that afforded by the capacities of the phonological store, which can only maintain three to four seconds of material in active memory before decay sets in. Echoic memory is limited to

Marc Couroux

retention of the just-heard—fragments under one second—and thus perfectly amenable to the successful ingraining of timbral splinters that characterize the new rapacious modes of hyperforeshortened brand sigiling. Phonographic memory is essential to entrainment (see Squier Number). Some speculation suggests that the reboning of a phonographic-incorporation-in-progress short-circuits its continuance, though this is difficult to square with the continuing potency of embedded superearworms in primers, who persist in maintaining hi-fidelity reproductions despite repeatedly surfacing them through humming.

INCONGRUITY INDEX: The degree of deviation from normative melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic

conditions that requires excess cognition on the part of the listener, absorbed in the effort of identifying the anomalous nature of the mysterious event. This surplus effort to pull back perceived incongruity into an existing category induces an earworm—a more or less deeply lodged fragment, most often of music, that appears to have no purpose other than its obsessive reenactment in the mind of the afflicted individual—which is why sonic branders (inspired by the work of Dr. James Kellaris, among others) are interested in mathematizing a particular hook’s deviation in order to more effectively abduct. In addition, formulas exist that calculate the average amount of repetitions needed to naturalize a deviation, contingent on its incongruity index. This naturalization process is tantamount to the psychic half-life of the deviation—its gradual decay into the normative where it can do no more direct harm, though all the while it effectively conditions future potential by withdrawing into an expanding virtual. Types of deviation include: an awkward melodic leap of incipient unattractiveness, an unexpected harmonic modulation, rhythmic asymmetries and foreshortenings, metric aberrations, etc. These deviations are often sucked into controllable territory by the conscious mind without undue effort and without lasting parasitic effect, which is why the magickal art of deviation requires constant practice and perpetual amendment in alignment with prevailing sensible distributions of cultural matter. (Branding agencies have sizable research wings.)

The RECONTOURING MACHINE is populated by an inalienably local (therefore provisional) set of deviational functions feverishly tasked with the de-emphasis qua defusing of a resilient earworm, especially of algorithmic, superearworm variety (see primers). This machine discretizes the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic components of an earworm in order to calculate iterated deviations, peculiarly calibrated to donate a subliminal impression of change whilst preserving coherent contour-identity—a fractal positioning, in other words, erratically vacillating between familiarity and paramnesia (déjà entendu).

The recontouring machine operates in real-time via deaf recording procedures that segregate components within a given textual totality from one another, capturing them in strict indifference to adjacent context in order to curtail the temptation to produce deliberately memorable gestalts. Recontouring machines have been known to backfire, chiefly from insufficiently rigorous deviation design: an anomaly that too drastically exceeds parametric boundaries risks becoming a new object of obsession for the listener, unaware that an earworm is about to ingress. (See incongruity index).

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Images 61-62; Track 6, side B

REBONING: A procedure by which a mentally lodged acoustical signal is reembodied. Glenn Gould

attributed his increasing incapacity to accurately perform a given musical passage to the overwhelming influence of foreclosing mentations, preemptions of the future, the anticipation of difficulties ahead in a given timeline physically blowing back in the present. Gould’s solution to this debilitating condition consisted of obliterating any acoustical evidence of ongoing physical efforts, masking it by the massed effects of multiple vacuum cleaners, televisions, and radios operating at full blast. Once a properly embodied relationship with the passage in question was restored, so was its sonorous resultant. Some accounts report successful displacement of phonographic incorporations through humming, though the testimonies of many primers suggest that this form of repeated externalization has little long-term effect on the integrity of the inner recording. Similar invocations to sing out background Muzak (to concretely actualize what is only meant to be peripherally adumbrated) rely on a presumption that local, embodied instantiations enact (rhythm, pitch) deviations sufficiently potent to successfully derail the stealthy implantation of earworms or longer phonographic incorporations. However, due to the likelihood of the individuated deviation becoming an obsessive event in its own right, this technique works better in groups: consider the effect of flash mobs spontaneously breaking out into a plethora of discrepant, simultaneous individuations hummed out loud, effectively corrupting the sanctity of the original reproduction. Darsha Hewitt’s Electrostatic Bell Choir (2013) employs a similar form of transduction: imperceptible frequencies are surfaced through nonhuman resonators (pith balls responding to the static electricity emitted from CRT monitors). The potential applications of such surfacing techniques cannot be underestimated. Manifold worlds of stealthy transmissions, occulted directives, normalized pathologies await surfacing through whatever modality affords punctual legibilization.

Techniques for listening to infrastructural operations may involve both real-time ferreting and foregrounding (through amplification) and deferred, software-based disposition-analysis, culminating in the development of appropriately mètic responses.

OVERATTENUATION consists of an excessive application of smoothing modes arising from a

misevaluation of a culture's normalization of incompatibility. Consider its archetypal implementation in Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). Any fear of alienating viewers with an endless proliferation of contradictory adjacent stimuli betrays disconnection from the contemporary norm of unremitting psychedelic overload, in which the monumental and the trivial collapse into an undifferentiated flow, accelerated into equivocation. Unaware that rapid-fire editing and non-linear abutment have long ago attained normative status—the rate of disruption isorhythmically tuned to the viewer’s attentional capacities—the artist hired a sound designer to equalize qua normalize the gain of each audio track, ensuring uneventful acoustical flow from one scene to another, expelling in the process all incidental sound matter that might momentarily rouse the viewer from hypnosis, replacing the offending deletions with newly recorded foley effects. Such gauche overstepping ultimately foregrounds the nakedly corrupt, temporally-regulatory machinations at play, serving as a reminder that any successful indoctrination is

Marc Couroux

well advised to actively incorporate the techno-perceptual modalities of its era, lest its predatory manoeuvres be summarily outflanked.

The SQUIER NUMBER (named after Major General George Owen Squier, founder of the Muzak Corporation) describes the composite degree of discrepancy between a recording and the (phonographic) incorporation of it by a subject. Internal playbacks of incorporations are often induced via auditory latching, within the general purview of entrainment, a mode by which a subject attunes to environmental signals, often manifesting through the autonomic synching of bodily movements with adjacent rhythms.

Toe-tapping to a temporarily audible pop song pumped through a passing car. Slowing down walking tempo in the wake of a song fragment momentarily intercepted via an open door. (Entrainment is indispensable in the maintenance of collective egregoric synchronization.) Find a chain of stores that are all tuned to the same radio station. Once a song with which you are intimately familiar starts playing, latch onto it and sync it with your own inner recording. Leave the store but let the phonographic incorporation continue playing back. Wait a few seconds before entering the next store. On ingress, notice any untethering of the ongoing incorporation from the music playing in the actual space. Repeat. Alter exit and re-entry timings. The cut-out periods (in which the physical playback is temporarily occluded) constitute intervals of indetermination, during which the prolongation of the incorporation occurs entirely autonomously, hence incurring the risk of desynchronization. Latching will occur most often without one being aware of it—given a generalized passivity towards music’s schizophonic ubiquity— frequently coming to consciousness retrospectively, after the original signal has dissipated; the simple realization of the just-heard sound’s disappearance may internally reinstate it, automatically inducing the playback of an extant phonographic incorporation. A significant enough deviation between the subject’s incorporation and its analogue diffused through the air may foster, on becoming aware of the discrepancy (on reentry), a feeling Keats might have described as embarrassment, a surreptitious comingupon-oneself, a momentarily unsettling non-self-concordance. Raymond Scott’s 1964 Soothing Sounds For Baby series, consisting for the most part of extended repetitive rhythmic structures, was marketed as music to put your child to sleep. In fact, portions of his work may well have been used to investigate latching potential in very small infants temporarily caught in the gap between conscious and unconscious mind. Though cybercapitalist power has harnessed the autonomic valences of entrainment, binding them to individual consumption, any publically disseminated stimulus risks fomenting unlikely bonds between subjects mutually interpellated by it, who may choose to negotiate and overpower it together, through discrepant reappropriations, rebonings.

PREEMPTIVE SELF-DISTORTION: A timbrally leveraged property of sonic sigils marshalling anadumbrative ducking from resistant re-appropriation (wresting). Audio branders initially developed

PSD to defeat issues glaringly exposed by the 1989 release of John Oswald’s Plunderphonics album in which the genetic structures of iconic pop were subjected to disfiguring manoeuvres of urgent concern to

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11 Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in Tiqqun, “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” 2001. See the English translation at: https://cybernet.jottit.com/ chapter_5. The original French is located at: http://www.bloom0101.org/ tiqqun2.pdf.

12 “N comme Neurologie” (disc 3) in L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Éditions Montparnasse, 2004.

See also Charles Stivale’s summary and translation at: http://www.langlab.wayne. edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC3.html.

the corporate phonoegregore, fearing disastrous and potentially irreversible image-damage. (This explanation runs contrary to the general consensus that the records were destroyed purely for reasons of copyright violation.) Given the strategic move away from the jingle modality in the wake of sensory overload and the increasing unreliability of time (see chronophobia), branding researchers speculated that if they endowed their sigils with capacities to absorb distortion from all sides with no loss of integrity—chief ly through the timbral engineering of a unique soundprint—any future attempt at détournement by phonoinsurgents could be preemptively forestalled. Flexibility is the post-Fordist mot d’ordre. PSD recasts a common technique among institutions of control, involving the integration of plausibly comprehensive internal critique and dissent into a corporate image, multiple alibis conspiring to disguise a severely curtailed range of possibilities, such that resistance is promptly declawed. The perception of sufficiently legitimate options encourages the continued occlusion of the operating system (normalized, therefore inaccessible to direct engagement) within which each choice has already been predetermined (see cyberaffordance). Teilhard de Chardin: “All real integration is based on prior differentiation. […] Only union within diversity is creative. It increases complexity, and brings about higher levels of organization.”11 PSYCHEDELIC ADJACENCIES are generated via the strategic imbrication of overtly incongruent but

subliminally (genetically) congenial signals. Such formations are inevitably spawned within a colloidal dispersion in which perpetually recombinant surfaces enter into temporary electrical relationships with one another by virtue of haphazard temporal and spatial proximities. The colloidal model characterizes the contemporary distribution of auditory fragments within a given environment (most often an overlap of physical, online, actual, virtual dimensions) in which adjacencies are convulsively spawned. Deleuze’s baker’s dough analogy is fitting: two extreme points on a slab become adjacent after a mathematically-determinable number of folds.12 Immediately after 9/11, a minority of Americans were inclined to ascribe co-conspiratorial responsibility to Saddam Hussein; contrast with the 70 percent endorsement garnered in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq following copious media efforts at engineering adjacencies (Atta, Al Qaeda, Prague, Hussein, etc.), without explicitly declaring inviolable causal linkage. Terms need only hang together in the same general space-time for factual coalescence to occur. (Psyche + delos = made manifest to the mind). Phonoegregoric propaganda understandably deplores the waning of attention and concentration characteristic of colloidal capitalism (a lachrymose pining for an empty category considering William James’s reminder of how focus and distraction are perpetually complicating each other), fearful of an uncontrolled festering of the viral powers of psychedelic adjacency. Indeed, a state of permanent distraction—the primary perceptual modality of the twenty-first century—unlocks unprecedented capacities to induce synchronicities, making effective previously unsuspected correlations. A metastatic spread of such entities may indeed constitute an indigestible challenge to the stealthy incorporation of phonoegregoric earworms, given the unstable fracturing and resynthesizing typical of mutant rhythmanalyses.

Marc Couroux

In a FRACTAL LISTENING experience, an affective intuition of non-repetition is perpetually undercut by a cognitive ratification of identity. It can be thought as an overheated form of structural listening, a modality privileged by Adorno—increasingly difficult to materialize in the wake of pervasive schizophonia—that organizes listening according to a constant push and pull between parts of a given structure and the latter’s gradual, temporally irreversible consolidation. Such a framework, mobilized by constant dialectical interchange within linear evolution, reflected a more general conception of life as an ongoing narrative, in which one’s self-situation depends on the ability to form continuities, establish polarities. Such auto-fashioning requires for its continuing potency a foundational stability hard to come by within post-Fordist precarity, which dissolves permanent horizons into expedient, expendable presents, anxious instants insufficiently energetic to foment productive bonding. By contrast, the fractal experience shuttles the listener between local specifics (deviations with various capacities to be registered as deviations) and an accumulating shadowy shape-shifting totality, constantly updated by information from this transient matter, forever deferring its termination into a graspable gestalt. The incapacity to categorically identify ongoing recursion within the convulsions of febrile unresolution almost inevitably engenders temporal anomalies, folds, a general buckling of teleological integrity, and an acceleration of uncontrollable interpenetrations of past, present, and future; all the while, a virtual field of potential stealthily expands, unceasingly leveraging the perception of change. Any isolated iteration is thus summarily demoted to transient status, lacking the resilience to firmly establish itself. This modality takes into account the inevitable process by which repetition pressures incongruity to reverse into new forms of congruity (through a gradual ablation of idiosyncrasy); it therefore must remain constantly on the move.

(See chronoportation , anadumbration).

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ANADUMBRATION is the process that effects the perpetual postponement of any unifying perceptual

paradigm through the febrile shuffling of parameters. Adumbration is a term developed by philosopherphenomenologist Edmund Husserl denoting the continuous accumulation of various perspectives (shadings = abschattungen (Ger.)) of an object into a multi-dimensional mental consolidation.

Appropriating Husserl’s theory by détourning it (for highly practical purposes), English artist Norman Wilkinson originated at the tail end of World War I one of the most notorious applications of anadumbration via dazzle camouflage, a technique involving the painting of stripes of contradictory size and directionality on a vessel, such that the opponent’s ability to gather a coherent grasp of its coordinates (size, speed, heading, etc.) is accordingly impeded.1³ Any attempt to defeat a listener’s propensity to terminate perception when confident that an experience has been identified, categorized, captured is invariably enhanced by the use of anadumbrative tactics. Indeed, the un-gestalting deviations of anadumbration forestall any preemptive extraction from a system by preventing conscious seizure of its modalities; ungraspable from an extrinsic vantage point, their mysterious implications cannot be comfortably integrated qua dismissed. System immanence is guaranteed by a rapid containment of discrepant surfaces powered by the efficient operations of the Freudian secondary process, by which a

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13 Roy R. Behrens, “The art of dazzle camouf lage,” Defense & Security Analysis 3.3 (1987): 233-243. Roy Behrens suggests that the technique of dazzle camouf lage was already in existence by the time Wilkinson arrived on the scene to “invent” it (1917).

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subject backtracks into a rational second-order justification from an incoherent first impression, summarily deleted. Anadumbration is a chronocrypsic operation, tasked with time camouflage, asymmetrically imbricating incongruent temporalities while donating integumentary impressions of a wholly illusory kind. Dazzle camouflage breaks up surface continuities via differential blending— collapsing portions of the figure into the (back)ground—a technique that also works effectively in the time domain by abutting inconsistent, incomplete iterations of a given material that increasingly destabilize the constitution of an accumulated ground in memory.

TECHNOABLATION consists of the blunting of incipience through the möbiusoidal occulting

14 Marshall McLuhan, Book of Probes (Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 2003).

(backgrounding and consequent disappearing) of a technology’s operational identity, such that certain valences associated with contiguous materials are suppressed from conscious attention. Technoablative stratagems simulate and mutate the infrastructural shibboleths of a given device—exploiting the listener’s propensity to accept the latter as relatively immutable—thereby opening the floodgates to prodigiously productive bait-and-switch potentials. In a curious variation, the War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 was made vividly real to thousands of fleeing Americans by dint of technoablation. Because the technical glitch, the interruption, had been normalized as a harbinger of disconnect and danger, it was easy to simulate real horrors by simply manufacturing transmission dropouts when the narrative required it. (On the other hand, witness the loaded audio-visual communication breakdowns during the coverage of the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy that seemed to perfectly mirror (while amplifying) the traumatic nature of the event.) Consequently, it would have required considerably more resolve to resist this invocation of invasion than in current times, wherein the glitch has been domesticated into complicity, though it may still occasionally function—if used sparingly—to convey the impression of fallibility when needed; a useful, rapid-response decoy baiting the viewer away from a cynical cognizance of the preprogrammed, prepackaged nature of seamless mediation and the effective preemption of actuality induced by the highly compressed intensities proper to the horror vacui (see Tony Conrad’s Bryant Park Moratorium Rally). However, the same trust in digital technologies as 1930s Americans invested in radio (recalling the latter’s fireside intermediation) makes possible other types of suppressions, in which the presumption of the same actually conceals slowly creeping change, of a variety that subtly enters one’s consciousness and can open a channel for future indoctrination. Put differently, technoablation works in tandem with an affordance model calibrated to the putative operational boundaries of a given technology in order to exceed the latter (what the system affords) by the stealthy application of shellgame-type modalities that paradoxically (impossibly) simulate (audibilize) various functions. The excess engendered by such an exploit—that which is skimmed off what is apprehensible—is held in subconscious abeyance until it can be put to future use. However, a too-blatant enactment of this procedure may trigger a reflexive backfire, the excess effectively inducing in the perceiving subject a sense of paradox intermittently flashing into consciousness the coordinates of the occult system in question (its phase space).

McLuhan: “Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.”1⁴

Marc Couroux

Accordingly (like many of the modalities outlined here), technoablation is at once a method intrinsically suited to corporate egregoric control (subliminally spiriting a hidden message into the folds of the presumably identical, but infra-legibly different) and a catalyst accelerating the latter’s undoing, depending on which occluded grey areas of technological operation are to be momentarily foregrounded to gain tactical advantage. Juliana Pivato’s Yesterday Wants More (2013) engages in another form of technoablative maneuvering: by reboning (singing) an electronically reversed pop song minus the (ablated) telltale artifacts that punctually alert the listener to mechanical manipulation, Pivato alienates the original melodic succession substantially enough to occult identity, while secretly maintaining its anamnestic abductive capacities. In this case, technoablation triggers an unstable oscillation between novelty and identity, typical of fractal perceptual modalities. (See anadumbration; opposite: incipience ef fect.)

The opposite of technoablation (which occults the introduction of novelty), the INCIPIENCE EFFECT (TECHNOINTENSIFICATION) stems from technological procedures that foster a sense of newness amidst generalized stasis. The incipience effect requires temporary unlatching from a sonic territory (via cut-out) in order to lubricate stealthy reentry via an unsuspected portal. The effect of starting something again, making a new beginning (especially after the sudden rupture of a previous iteration), provides a temporary shock that occults repetition. The effect derives its potency from a concerted study of the phenomenon of cryptomnesia, in which something memorized is experienced as new on recollection.

CHRONOPHOBIA / MISOCHRONIA: Fear of time / Hatred of time. Just-in-time production, powered by instant feedback control and communication, replaces the just-in-case model that allows for the potential future consumption of a stockpiled commodity. The preemption of the future (see cyberaffordance) requires a never-ending series of present-weighted, provisional projects (shades of Kafka’s indefinite postponement and Cazdyn’s Already Dead chronic case, not to mention Muzak’s Quantum Modulation, that operates by subtending an endless variety of surfaces with rigidly unified affective prescription).1⁵ Greenberg’s Augenblick: the totality of the artwork is accessible in the blink of an eye, before cognition takes things up. Strategically deployed formalisms with the capacity to preempt conscious apprehension can effectively delimit the range of available experience. Tony Conrad’s Bryant Park Moratorium Rally (1969) goes one better: the mediated, televised coverage of the rally appears to precede the actual event taking place a few blocks away. L. Ron Hubbard defines a clear as one who thinks in instantaneous bursts, without the deleterious, deliberative ramblings of an inner voice, without time. Francis Bacon conjured paintings meant to explode directly onto the nervous system. Control requires time for its feedback operations, but needs to conceal this fact—by parcelizing it into manageable presents—lest the enslaved subject appropriate its modulatory effects to foster embodied continuities and self-eject from the communicative bind with capitalism. Minimalists wanted to let time back into art: as Christoph Cox has pointed out, Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood (1967) was more concerned with impugning Minimal art’s indistinction from a general experiential immersion in the world (and the wayward temporalities

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Images 45-46; Track 2, side B

15 Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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that inevitably wend through it) than objecting to its “theatricality.” Most importantly, the essay inadvertently galvanized the Minimalist project, which appropriated Fried’s language to carve itself a theoretical basis. Instability, process and change take on additional meaning in the late 1960s as minimalist artists militate against institutional structures. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), hailed as an “homage to time” is in fact the work of a profoundly misochronic sensibility: a replication of the chronometric, spatialized time of control, synching viewers up with the regimented logics of administration, casting the wayward potential of durée into a perpetual series of presents. Time indexed to function: a time and motion study for the twenty-first century.

MINIMAL ABDUCTIVE THRESHOLD: While the jingle-slogan could easily abduct the unsuspecting

transient individual within a relatively uncluttered mediascape—the popular 1950s/1970s TV show Name That Tune played its ideological part in testing a subject’s degree of embeddedness within popular culture—something more punctual was required to snatch the contemporary subject’s increasingly fragmented attention. Given the messy contingencies and vampire effects inevitably engendered by the passage of time, it’s no surprise that the chronically chronophobic phonoegregore would want to arrest its deleterious progress. Melody and rhythm require time to unfold, whereas a vertical, timbral structure can detonate instantly, according to the principles of sonic niching, by which highly effective intra-species communication operates in the animal world (see Bernie Krause’s work). Bare traces requiring no more than a few milliseconds to be actualized can intercalate themselves rhythmically between other signals without any undue effort—affectively tuned passwords promptly accessing worlds of association through chronoportation . In the absence of suitable crannies for tactical incursion, a judiciously constituted timbral cocktail riding unoccupied frequency bands can superimpose itself on a complex acoustic scene with no loss of communicational integrity. The quest for an ever-reduced abductive threshold is therefore a matter of intense speculation and experimentation. While cruder methods simply splinterize extant references into immediately legible, timbrally specific incarnations, autonomically activating prior phonographic incorporations (capitalism functions most effectively when the subject does its work), recent branding tendencies privilege the development of radically contained, psychoacoustically tweaked fragments without history, that more effectively resist the subject’s attempts to expunge them (see primers). The construction of these overcompressed units is highly inflected by research on human phylogenetic development and the somatic effects (breathing / heart rate) of specific acoustic wave patterns that activate deeply embedded survival mechanisms tied to hearing, though in this case it is the survival of the cybercapitalist system that motivates the abductive project.

CHRONOPORTATION: Time travel via anamnestic recall, triggered by a given stimulus. Sonic branding

operates by associating a bare sonic trace (see minimal abductive threshold) with a previously embedded positive memory. This brand sigil (a sonic transmutation of Austin Osman Spare’s method of compressing slogans expressing desired actualizations into graphemes—passwords—that can be launched during

Marc Couroux

a split-second glitch in consciousness) acts as a transitional fulcrum between the anchored memory or sigil anchor (the deeper the better) and the range of synaesthetic, semiotic associations populating a particular brand constellation, that together collaborate in a form of operant conditioning. Successful chronoportation hinges on the specificity of the bare trace, which has the capacity to immediately abduct you to a pleasant moment in your past (e.g., the first chord of Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” or the first milliseconds of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” for an earlier generation). The moment you become unstuck in time (typically arriving unannounced, in the rhythms of Skinner’s variable ratio schedule, their irregular instantiations tethering you more intimately to a given system—the unpredictable, overlapping arrivals of tweets, RSS feeds, news alerts, emails conspire to permanently bind us to our devices, wherever and whenever we are) a corporate predator can slip in. Oswald Store’s works were explicitly tasked with recalling complex, interlocking affective systems through the radically integral re-presentation of specific historical conjunctures. His 1971 installation-performance—November 22 1963 12:30 5:30 PM CST ABC WFAA CBS NBC—aimed to literally reengineer the traumatic effects of the JFK assassination via a synchronized replay of the coverage (from three major networks) immediately following the event, taking the oft-heard shibboleth to heart: “you will always remember where you were when you heard the news.” JFK (short title) functions chronoportatively, compounding inertias, inaccuracies, communication glitches, and newscaster shock into cascading temporal breakdowns, where waves of retrospective disorientation and anticipatory dread make mincemeat out of the spatialized, chronometric time that characterizes contemporary life (see Marclay’s cynical submissions to the latter in The Clock).

Accordingly, two conceptions of time are at permanent loggerheads. Inflexible and impermeable clock time repeatedly cedes to its radically embodied, somatically-charged other, subjected to intense affective inflection that parcels time into qualitatively distinct tactilities: quicksilver alternations of sludge, liquid, and vapour correlated to the vagaries of information trickle in the first hour; glacial solidity once the news of the President’s death hits; lapses and paralyses that bore holes into continuous time as the effects of the event sink in and repetitive information becomes too much to bear. While today’s media world “keeps the energy up” by providing constant stimuli (the eternal present decried by Debord), the affective sinkholes co-produced by trauma and technical insufficiency are given time to expand and take hold on a cellular level.

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Lost in Two Different Ways: John Cage at Emma Lake

Timothy Long

2005

In August 1965, noted American composer John Cage travelled from Stony Point, New York, to the secluded shores of Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, to co-lead a joint composers’ and artists’ workshop.

Cage’s interactions at the workshop are legendary, remaining vivid, even today, in the memories of participants and in written form through Cage’s diary published in Canadian Art.1 However, the event has received relatively little attention in recent histories of the workshop or in assessments of Cage’s work.2 These omissions have not assisted in the task of writing a history of the interdisciplinary arts events that sprang up in Canada during the 1950s and 1960s, as epitomized by Cage, one of the leading figures of this emerging form.³ Also missed is an opportunity to consider, from a different perspective, the often-fraught relationship of Canadian arts to the “centre,” New York. Cage’s 1965 journey to Emma Lake, then, offers a dual set of rear-view mirrors from which to consider his position at the crossroads of music and the visual arts, and the alternative road he travelled from New York to Saskatchewan.

Cage’s involvement in the 1965 Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it marked only the second time that a composer had co-led an event, which had been devoted primarily to the visual arts since its inception in 1955. The dual format had sprung spontaneously from a conversation in 1963 between two professors at the Regina Campus of the University of Saskatchewan (now the University of Regina): Regina Five painter Kenneth Lochhead, Head of the School of Art and initiator of the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, and composer Jack Behrens, a young American recently hired as the Head of Theory in the Music Department. At the outset, the joint workshops aimed to overcome the isolation that contemporary artists and composers in Saskatchewan felt by bringing to the province the leading (i.e., American) figures in their respective fields and by promoting the ideal of mutual exchange between the disciplines. Prior to the first workshop in 1964, an example of such an exchange had already occurred when Lochhead had presented two paintings to Behrens who, inspired by the canvases, composed two works for wind ensemble, Hot Yellow and Green Centre, titled after the paintings. The idea for the compositions came to Behrens after Lochhead told him to “look at it [the painting] for a minute then look at something light,” thereby causing him to see the painting’s vibrant afterimage.⁴ Behrens’s compositions are structured on analogies suggested by this experience; according to the composer, the “contrast between the very bright colours” of the painting Hot Yellow finds an equivalent in an “oscillating figure” in the corresponding composition. During the 1960s, analogies between art and music often offered starting points for new work. These analogies were in accord with the prevailing modernist paradigm, which admitted interaction between mediums on the level of metaphor and structure. Such comparisons were particularly useful for abstract painters, who, when pressed to justify their choice to leave behind representation, could always point to music as another essentially abstract medium.

The leader chosen for the artists’ side of the 1964 workshop was, as in previous years, an American painter with a reputation in New York—in this case, Jules Olitski. Olitski had recently shown work in Regina in the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery exhibition Three New American Painters: Louis, Noland, Olitski, which was organized by the pre-eminent New York art critic Clement Greenberg, one

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1 I would like to thank Jack and Sonja Behrens, Ted and Phyllis Godwin, Ricardo Gómez, Marilyn Levine, Kenneth Lochhead, Boyd McDonald, Wayne Morgan, and Jack Sures for sharing with me their memories of the workshop. Thanks also go to Janell Ranae Rempel for her research assistance.

Transcripts of interviews with a number of the artists (but none of the composers) may also be found in John D. H. King, “The Emma Lake Workshops, 1955-1970: A Documented Study of the Artist’s Workshop at Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, of the School of Art, University of Saskatchewan, Regina from 1955 to 1970” (bachelor’s thesis, University of Manitoba, 1972). Cage’s diary was first published as “Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965,” Canadian Art 23 (January 1966): 70-71; and reprinted in A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 21-25.

Images 10 and 13

2 John O’Brian’s excellent history of the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops does not focus specifically on the 1965 workshop, although it does give the basic details and contains a transcript of a letter from Cage to Behrens in which Cage advises that Jasper Johns and Lois Long will accompany him to the workshop (Johns and Long did not attend); see John O’Brian, ed., The Flat Side of the Landscape: The Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1990). Recent critical assessments of Cage’s work make no mention of Emma Lake or the Canadian Art article.

76 The one exception is Jack Behrens’s article with Austin Clarkson which includes his account of the Emma Lake Workshops with Wolpe and Cage: “The Sense of Nonsense: Wolpe, Satie, Cage,” in Clarkson, ed., On the Music of Stefan Wolpe: Essays and Recollections (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2003), 139-52. The comparative strength of popular as opposed to critical memory of Cage’s activities in Canada was recently underlined when organizers of a 2003 recreation of Reunion, Cage’s legendary March 5, 1968, chess matches with Marcel and Teeny Duchamp at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, failed to invite the original instigators—gallery dealer Av Isaacs and composer Udo Kasemets—who had programmed Reunion as the opening presentation of the festival “Sightsoundsystems.”

3 David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 200; and Leta E. Miller, “Cage’s collaborations,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162.

Toronto in the mid-1960s was a receptive site for Cage’s interdisciplinary approach as witnessed by a number of Cage-inspired events collaboratively staged by Kasemets, Isaacs, and the artists connected with the Artists’ Jazz Band (Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, Nobuo Kubota, Robert Markle, Michael Snow et al.). Other notable Cage performances in Canada during the 1960s include the performance of Atlas Eclipticalis, commissioned by the Montreal Festivals Society for the “International Week of Today’s Music” (August 3, 1961) and a performance of Variations V in British Columbia sometime in 1965-66.

of modernism’s chief proponents and the leader of the 1962 workshop. To lead the composer’s workshop, Behrens chose another New Yorker, John Cage, whom he had met in 1960 at the Festival of American Dance in New London, Connecticut, where the composers were in residence with the dance companies of Ruth Currier and Merce Cunningham.⁵ Although at that point Behrens knew little about Cage’s work, he nevertheless felt the composer would be a stimulating leader. When Cage declined, Behrens followed Olitski’s suggestion and instead invited Stefan Wolpe, a distinguished German-American composer and colleague of Olitski at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. Wolpe brought not only his practice of non-tonal composition, but also an intimate familiarity with the New York abstract expressionist painters, particularly his friend Willem de Kooning. While the generational gap between Olitski and Wolpe made the fit somewhat less than perfect, a modernist affinity was clear.

The workshop featured separate working sessions for artists and composers, but it also offered opportunities for the two streams of participants to meet and hear both co-leaders. Boyd McDonald, a young composer from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon at the time, recalls that in the evening sessions, it was the artists who grasped Wolpe’s discussion of musical concepts more readily than the composers, for whom he was “quite far out”; by contrast, when Olitski found himself at a loss for words to describe a painting he had done at the workshop, it was the composer Wolpe who jumped in to describe the relationship of colours, objects, and shapes.⁶ Despite the small number of composers in attendance—three compared to more than twenty visual artists—the organizers reported that the workshop had successfully fulfilled the goal of improving “communication among the arts” and was sure to result in “the creation of higher values in the arts in our Canadian Society.”⁷

While the 1964 workshop maintained a modernist stance, alternative points of view came to the fore in 1965, demonstrating an attempt by the artists’ workshop coordinator Arthur McKay (who replaced Lochhead as head of the Art Department after his departure to Winnipeg in 1964) to broaden the perspectives of the workshop. The New York art critic and curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lawrence Alloway, invited as a counter-voice to Clement Greenberg at Barnett Newman’s suggestion, spoke of pop and op art during his formal lectures at Emma Lake.⁸ Cage, re-invited

by Behrens, brought a practice that challenged a range of modernist assumptions by transgressing boundaries between artistic disciplines and ultimately between art and life.⁹ Although respectful of each other, the two leaders did not interact closely. Alloway’s lectures mentioned Cage’s friends, artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. And Alloway also made a quip regarding Cage’s music to one of the artists: “We’re not going to come out of here whistling his tunes.”1⁰ Yet, in a reverse of the situation at the previous workshop during which the painter Olitski proved a more forceful presence than the chronically ill and retiring composer Wolpe, it was the composer Cage who made the more profound impression on both artists and composers.

Cage set the tone for his daily sessions with the composers in a discussion of his most recent multimedia project, Variations V, which had been performed for the first time just three weeks earlier at Lincoln Center in New York. The presentation of this complex collaboration, featuring choreographer

Timothy Long

Merce Cunningham, engineer Billy Klüver, video artist Nam June Paik, composer and pianist David Tudor, and filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek among others, introduced participants to the history of electronic music and Cage’s current concern for “music without measurements, sound passing through circumstances.”11 A few days later, his lecture Where are We Going? and What are We Doing?, a piece involving three tape-recorded voice parts playing simultaneously while Cage read the fourth part, provided both artists and composers a first-hand example of Cage’s technologically assisted assault on everyday habits of listening and his attempt to create through indeterminate forms a new experience of sound and sense. Although many in attendance did not fully understand his performance, reactions to Cage were sympathetic, with nearly everyone remarking on his infectious personality.

This favourable response by participants would also seem to be a product of Cage’s teaching philosophy, which he articulates at the beginning of his diary: Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but’s a conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place, whether with those concerned or those unaware of what is being said. We talk, moving from one idea to another as though we were hunters.12

Cage’s awareness of his ethical responsibilities as a teacher reflect his concern, often expressed at this point in his career, with anarchic forms of social organization and the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.1³ This ethical orientation was picked up by at least one participant, curator and painter Terry Fenton, who remarked disparagingly about Cage’s “semi-political philosophy,” which he viewed as an attempt to “destroy high art.”1⁴

Fenton’s comments highlight the close connection between aesthetics and ethics in Cage’s thinking and cause one to wonder at the opportunity Cage’s ethical position presented for reconsidering the relationship of leaders to the workshop in what had become a very contentious area. The possibilities for a different kind of ethic become clear if one compares commentaries on the workshop by Cage and by Greenberg, which are available thanks to Canadian Art editor Paul Arthur who commissioned both to provide a New Yorker’s take on the workshops. The first of these articles, “Clement Greenberg’s View of Art on the Prairies” (1963) stirred up a vehement debate about the value of critical advice, or interference, as some would call it, from the “centre.”1⁵ Greenberg’s rhetoric is liberally sprinkled with references to the need for “large and obvious ambition,” “an aggressive and up-to-date style,” “seriousness,” “originality,” and the all-important “breakthrough.” A rejection of this set of individualistic and competitive attitudes is very much on Cage’s mind at the time of the 1965 workshop and is succinctly expressed in the score for Variations V, written immediately after the workshop, in which he calls for “‘Breakthrough’, by means of collaboration, into the ‘unorganized areas in the rear’ of the unknown.”1⁶ Greenberg’s comments about the “double obscurity” of prairie art, as far removed from Montreal and Toronto as from New York, point to the underlying hegemonic view of American culture. By contrast,

Lost in Two Different Ways: John Cage at Emma Lake

77 4 Jack Behrens and Sonja Behrens, interview with author, London, Ontario, December 8, 2002.

5 Jack Behrens, liner notes for Jack Behrens: Water Music, CD, independently produced, no date. Cage declined the invitation due to his commitments as the Music Director for the Cunningham Dance Group, which toured Europe that year. Behrens and Behrens, interview.

6 Boyd McDonald, telephone conversation with author, September 17, 2004.

7 Jack Behrens and Kenneth Lochhead, report to Dr. T.H. McLeod, September 1, 1964, in King, 142. The musicians and composers participating at the 1964 workshop were Jack Behrens (workshop coordinator), Boyd McDonald, and Terence Bailey. Participating in the 1965 workshop were Jack Behrens (workshop coordinator), Martin Bartlett, Boyd McDonald, Ted Bourré, Keith Cockburn, and an unidentified Calgary composergeologist mentioned by Cage in his “Diary.”

8 Barnett Newman to Arthur McKay, October 23, 1964, University of Regina Archives.

It is interesting to note that Greenberg himself had suggested Alloway as a possible leader in 1962-63 (see the “Sheet of Names: ‘Possibles’” reproduced in O’Brian, 39, 85). Although Greenberg did not always agree with Alloway, he nonetheless deemed him one of “the strongest avant-garde critics.”

See Clement Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name” (1962), in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 142.

78 9 According to Sonja Behrens, Cage’s reasons for agreeing to lead the workshop ranged from the opportunity to hunt mushrooms (in support of a study at the University of Michigan), to a need to help pay his mother’s nursing home expenses, to a natural curiosity. Behrens and Behrens, interview.

10 Reported by both Ted Godwin and Ricardo Gómez.

Ted and Phyllis Godwin, interview with author, Regina, Saskatchewan, October 5, 2002; Ricardo Gómez, interview with author, Sydenham, Ontario, March 12, 2003.

11 Cage, “Diary,” 70. For a description of Variations V, see Miller, 162-63.

12 Ibid., 70.

13 John Cage, “Foreword,” A Year from Monday, ix.

“The reason I am less and less interested in music is not only that I find environmental sounds and noises more useful aesthetically than the sounds produced by the world’s musical cultures, but that, when you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I’d like our activities to be more social and anarchically so.”

14 Terry Fenton in King, 162.

15 Clement Greenberg, “Clement Greenberg’s View of Art on the Prairies,” Canadian Art 20 (MarchApril, 1963): 90-107.

Responses to this article appear in “Letters to the Editor,” Canadian Art 20 (May-June 1963): 196.

Cage’s non-competitive ethic extends to anarchistic views on social organization, including a critique of American nationalism: “U.S.A. thinks the Free World is U.S.A.’s world, is determined to keep it free, U.S.A.-determined.”1⁷ For those visual artists concerned about the undue influence of New York on Saskatchewan, Cage was the ideal choice. Cage was not out to make converts or give advice to the faithful; nor was he up for a vacation (as some accused Alloway). He was there “for conversation” and he responded to individuals, as McDonald puts it, “where you were at and showed where you could go from there.”1⁸

Cage’s effect on the composers is perhaps seen most directly in the career of Martin Bartlett, who went on to study with a frequent Cage collaborator, David Tudor, at Mills College (1967-68) and to concentrate on experimental electronic music.1⁹ But artists as much as composers were affected by Cage. This included painters Ted Godwin and Don Reichert who, already interested in chance, were stimulated to further explore chance procedures and indeterminate compositions in their painting practice, though they never fully embraced Cage’s level of ego detachment.2⁰ At least one participant, Regina sculptor Ricardo Gómez, understood the broader possibilities suggested by Cage’s interdisciplinary practice. For Gómez, the discussion of Variations V brought to mind what he had heard about “Black Mountain College, Jasper Johns, and the era of the happening.”21 The link to Black Mountain College was certainly apropos. As Behrens notes: For Cage, the experience of Emma Lake was reminiscent of Black Mountain College, but the summers of 1964 and 1965 at Emma Lake were a quiet echo by comparison to Black Mountain twelve years earlier, where the lectures and performances Cage and Wolpe gave were part of an intense engagement with a large and diverse community of poets, musicians, painters, and dancers.22

Gómez’s assessment was similar. Unlike Vancouver, where Gómez had worked prior to coming to Regina in 1964, there was no venue in Saskatchewan equivalent to the Western Front or the New Era Social Club for such interdisciplinary collaborations to continue after the workshops. Furthermore, after the departure of Behrens, who very promisingly had begun to organize music programs in concert with events at the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery and the Dunlop Art Gallery, there was no coordinating force akin to Glenn Lewis, Michael Morris, or Vincent Trasov.

As for the future of a composers-artists workshop, a series of unfortunate events—Cage’s getting lost in the forest while searching for mushrooms [Image 9], a fire in a nearby town, McKay’s sudden departure due to illness, a theft in the camp, and general overcrowding—left a negative impression on participants, most of whom did not return the next year. Following Behrens’s departure from Regina in 1966, a composers’ workshop was never again held, despite Behrens’s attempts to find another organizer before leaving. According to Behrens, “visual art was a decade ahead in the prairies over avant-garde music” and with a history of only two workshops and a small base of students, there was no institutional

Timothy Long

force in the Music Department to sustain an annual workshop.2³

On a larger scale, the winds of change were blowing through Emma Lake’s modernist encampment. By the end of the 1965 workshop the political and artistic landscape in Saskatchewan had changed dramatically. With the election of Liberal Premier Ross Thatcher in 1964, Saskatchewan’s socialist experiment had come to a halt. The cohesiveness of the Regina Five, whose history is inseparable from the workshops, was dissolving. New York school modernism, which the workshop had done so much to introduce and foster, was itself under attack.2⁴ Greenberg’s 1964 exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction, which had included Lochhead and McKay, had been savaged by American critics. In Canada, federal support was shifting from the modernists to the regionalist pop art coming out of London, Ontario.

Against this backdrop, the dream of a fresh connection between modernist art and music, at least in Saskatchewan, seemed predestined to failure or irrelevance—a lost enterprise. In the face of mainstream popular culture, the modernist enterprise in both art and music was losing the high ground, the claim to “higher values,” for which it had fought. Cage’s visit offered a tantalizing vision of a hybrid practice that promised an alternative to the Greenbergian modernist values connected with the purity of the medium, the sanctity of the studio, and the separation of art and society. But Cage’s ideas did not take hold and the strength of Greenberg’s vision would be felt in Saskatchewan for years to come and when resisted, it would be on different terms than those suggested by Cage. As Cage crouched on a squirrel midden in the boreal muskeg waiting for rescue, he may well have contemplated his displacement geographically, aesthetically, and politically during his time at Emma Lake. As he later wrote: “Up by our bootstraps! Lost in two different ways. There was also a fire to put out. Alone (no one to disagree with).”2⁵

79 16 John Cage, Variations V: Thirty-seven Remarks Re an Audio-Visual Performance, musical score (New York: Editions Peters, 1965), 3.

17 John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1967,” in A Year From Monday, 159.

18 McDonald, telephone conversation.

19 See Musicworks 69 (December 1997). The issue is devoted to Martin Bartlett and David Tudor.

20 See Don Reichert in King, 168-69; and Ann Davis, Ted Godwin: The Tartan Years 1967-1976, exhibition catalogue (Calgary: The Nickle Arts Museum, 1999), 51-55.

21 Gómez, interview.

22 Behrens with Clarkson, “The Sense of Nonsense,” 146.

23 Behrens, interview.

24 David Howard, Arthur F. McKay: A Critical Retrospective (Regina: MacKenzie Art Gallery, 1997); and O’Brian, ed., The Flat Side of the Landscape.

25 John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1966,” in A Year from Monday, 53. In one final irony, Cage was incorrectly identified as “John Page” in a newspaper report about the search and rescue misleadingly titled “Art Student Wanders Off,” Prince Albert Daily Herald, August 24, 1965.

Lost in Two Different Ways: John Cage at Emma Lake

Not Musicians (the Early Years)

Ben Portis

2005

The Artists’ Jazz Band (AJB) was founded in Toronto circa 1961–62 and the Nihilist Spasm Band (NSB), in London, Ontario, in 1965. Because the AJB and the NSB emerged so near to one another geographically at around the same time, because both were made up of visual artists and were active within arts milieus, because of incidental connections between the two through the Isaacs Gallery1 and the Music Gallery,2 and because of the persistence and longevity of both groups (the AJB held together until the mid-1990s, the NSB continues to this day), it is tempting to propose essential relationships between the practices and activities of the two groups. However, what is of more interest here is to appreciate how profoundly each group resolutely followed its own course. As the title of this essay suggests, a common feature with definite relevance was their status as outsiders: they were amateurs in the best sense, a limitation they turned into an advantage, giving rise to both groups making unlikely, yet real contributions to a world of creative music-making they variously cherished as listeners.

The Artists’ Jazz Band emerged out of a circle of young Toronto artists bonded by a great enthusiasm for and knowledge of jazz. Painters Gordon Rayner, Robert Markle, Graham Coughtry, Richard Gorman,³ and architect/sculptor Nobuo Kubota formed the original nucleus. Each worked to a constant accompaniment of jazz recordings in his studio and each had his own preferences. Willfully disregarding their rudimentary musical abilities, they began playing together at impromptu (and not infrequent) loft parties—Rayner on drums, Markle and Kubota on saxophones, Coughtry on trombone, and Gorman on bass—usually a few notes in front of the few formal lessons they had, but always in front! Their good friend Michael Snow, who spent most of the 1960s in New York, joined them whenever he was back in Toronto. (His then wife, Joyce Wieland, gave the Artists’ Jazz Band its name.) Snow was an accomplished jazz pianist who could earn his living as such, but with the AJB he often played trumpet, on which he was less skilled. Perhaps he felt the amateur quality of his trumpet playing would be more at home with his fellow players’ abilities, but in their company he discovered an unusual freedom that did not demand virtuosity, only verve. The band lacked refinement, but as often happens when artists wade into a new discipline, they managed to avoid the predictable outcomes engendered by conventional training and taste.

The AJB arrived at a moment when the identity of jazz was in flux. Just as the debate over jazz’s status as a seminal twentieth-century American art form was being settled, along with the acceptance of artists such as Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday as major figures, a dissonant underground burst forth—“free jazz”—embodied by such figures as New York tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler.⁴ Although the AJB chose less radical role models, its heroes, post-bebop giants like Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane, also took up the urgency of free playing. This new sound presented the AJB with an opportunity that, while far from being popularly accepted, was identifiable not just as artistically expansive and liberating, but also as responsive to an era of social and political uncertainty. They also aligned their music with other cultural currencies—the compelling fluidity of Beat poetry, the openness of Abstract Expressionism, the use of chance by composer John Cage. The Jazz Band members embodied these qualities, as personalities and through the dynamics of the group, which erased the

Not Musicians (the Early Years)

81

1 In the 1960s, Gordon Rayner, Robert Markle, Graham Coughtry, Richard Gorman, Nobuo Kubota, and Michael Snow, of the Artists’ Jazz Band, all began showing with the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, as did Greg Curnoe of the Nihilist Spasm Band.

Of the other artist members of the NSB, Murray Favro showed with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and John Boyle showed with Nancy Poole’s Studio.

2 The Music Gallery was (and is) a pioneering Toronto-based, artist-run organization for musicians and sound artists.

At various times in its existence it provided performance, rehearsal, and studio facilities and operated a record label, Music Gallery Editions, on which The Artists’ Jazz Band Live at the Edge (1977) and The Nihilist Spasm Band Vol. 2 (1979) LPs were released.

3 Gorman left the AJB in 1965 when he moved to Britain.

4 Ayler, Sunny Murray, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock, and John Tchicai appeared in and provided a blistering improvised soundtrack for Michael Snow’s 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control.

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5 For the AJP, the 1960s live on as oral history only, as any recordings of the band’s early performances have vanished.

Image 16

usual distinctions between leaders and accompanists. A gambit played by one demanded response by the others. They became quick listeners.

Drink- and drug-propelled loft sessions gained a reputation for hilarity, adventure, and brilliance.⁵ Bona fide players and local pros, such as bassist Terry Forster and drummer Larry Dubin, began dropping in for music workouts they could not get elsewhere. Before there was any audience to speak of, it was apparent that the AJB was a working band. The Isaacs Gallery, where many of the AJB artists showed their work, soon became their home base. Word about the band spread. They were invited to play at gallery openings, colleges and universities, and other functions that sought the Bohemian aura the band manifested, not only around Toronto but also in Ottawa, Montreal, New York, and Paris. When Michael Snow returned permanently to Toronto in 1971, he became a regular member of the band.

Largely due to his presence, the AJB (which had expanded to nine, adding Snow and four other musicians—Forster, Harvey Cowan on electric violin, Jim Jones on electric bass, and Gerald McAdam on electric guitar) made a self-produced double LP in 1973. Their dealer, Av Isaacs, backed the project with the band producing a limited-edition portfolio of prints to help finance the recording.

Affinities between the AJB’s artwork and its music were obvious, if somewhat disclaimed by the participants. Inspired flourishes, improvisational strategies, celebrations of gesture, movement, and colour were hallmarks of both. The band’s performances interjected idiomatic figures and motifs, involving a highly idiosyncratic use of collage. And they displayed an allegiance to voice, song, and anecdotal reference, also not characteristic of serious jazz at that time. The wild, unbridled joy and sly wit the AJB brought to playing out of their feeling for the jazz idiom, celebrating their limited command of technique, ensured the band was underappreciated in a Toronto scene that was too often captivated by sophistication and control. At a time when a premium was placed on tight performance, the AJB were loose. One could make various arguments for the legitimacy of the music the band made, but significantly, they would be beside the point.

London’s Nihilist Spasm Band sprang from one of the most vibrant regional art scenes of the 1960s and lives on as its most enduring manifestation. Their name spills references: spasm bands originated on the streets of New Orleans, often made up of children, playing pots and pans and homemade instruments; the term nihilism can open itself up to all manner of existential philosophy, but its suggestion of the Russian nihilist movement of the late nineteenth century, and their rejection of all established political/bureaucratic institutions, is perhaps most relevant here. The close-knit group of painters Greg Curnoe, John Boyle, and Murray Favro and friends Art Pratten, Bill Exley, and Hugh McIntyre first tried their hands at music in 1965 in an all-kazoo ensemble that recorded the soundtrack for Curnoe’s No Movie. The kazoo is a skill-free instrument that buzzes when hummed into. When many are played simultaneously by a number of people, a more-or-less continuous buzzing cloud of sound will be produced given the differences in each player’s breath. Hanging on to the marvel of that sound, they formed a band, though they were untrained musicians, and began building instruments that embodied their individual predilections. A penchant for loudness led them from acoustic to electric

Ben Portis

amplification—a megaphone was replaced by a microphone, a gutbucket bass⁶ was traded in for an electric version, as were the kazoos, guitars, and violin. In 1966, with two new members, John Clement and Archie Leitch, the band took up a weekly residence at the York Hotel in downtown London, turning the usually quiet Monday nights into raucous events.

In 1967, the NSB made its first recording, one side of a flexi disc insert for artscanada magazine, and in 1968, the group released an LP, No Record, for the Montreal label Allied Records. The back of the album jacket listed wickedly funny profiles of each member—notable for an off-the-wall sincerity and the wildly different personalities each one described—along with a detailed journal of the band’s brief history. The profiles of Curnoe and McIntyre indicated an avid familiarity with many types of music, particularly the new and the radical, but also, selectively, the old, native, and sentimental.

Favro’s statement made it clear that favourite forms of music only defined what was off limits: “The Nihilist Spasm Band is made up of about eight people who try to play as well as they can and avoid using any knowledge of music that they might have outside the band. Other times we play as well as we can and use our knowledge of music. It sounds about the same.” Despite its professions of naiveté, the band knowingly and diligently eliminated in advance any conventions that might entrap or constrain them.

The Nihilists so drastically limited their options that they were left with little besides freedom, invention, and self-reference.

The NSB’s creative and charismatic narcissism led to the copious production of artworks and ephemera celebrating its unique status of being the best in a category within which they had literally no competition. For example, Curnoe’s painted plywood construction Kamikaze (1967–68) proposed the band as figurative suicide bombers against American cultural imperialism.⁷ Their instruments were gaudy works of art, designed to make a particular range of sound that might be abandoned as new instruments with different properties were made a few weeks or months later. Their mania to depict themselves gained credibility, and it was echoed in the popular press and by local photographers, such as Don Vincent and Ian MacEachern, who documented the flowering of the London art community.

In 1969, the NSB was selected to be part of Canada’s delegation to the Paris Biennale des Jeunesses, an overseas tour that included a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England.

The band members sewed crests on their jackets, calling themselves “Canada’s Official Music Team” and appeared in a concert series in Paris along with American free-music expatriates, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The degree to which the NSB had become paramount in its members’ lives was indicated when Curnoe, as Canada’s official representative at the São Paolo Biennale, elected not to attend the event so that he could travel with the band instead.

After the 1960s, the NSB lost some of its notoriety; however it continued to play regularly on Monday nights from 1973 to 2003 at the Forest City Gallery, an artist-run centre that the band members helped found. The NSB recorded two more LPs and a cassette but seemed fated for obscurity. Then in the 1990s, the band suddenly found a context in noise music, which had sprung up independently in various underground milieus around the world. Subsequent generations of sonic iconoclasts hailed the

Not Musicians (the Early Years)

83 6 A gutbucket is the classic American primitive musical contraption: a broom handle attached by cord to an overturned washbasin.

Image 24

7 Kamikaze took the form of a pyramidal hut modeled after the “orgone” collector boxes of the maverick American psychologist Wilhelm Reich.

Inside its bright yellow chamber one could read the text of John Boyle’s speech, delivered at the 3rd Annual Nihilist Party Picnic, a rant against Lyndon B. Johnson.

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5 For the AJP, the 1960s live on as oral history only, as any recordings of the band’s early performances have vanished.

NSB as forefathers, pointing to its singular release, the now apparently groundbreaking No Record of 1968. All of its long out-of-print recordings were reissued, and the band made four new CDs. In 1998, the NSB began hosting its own annual No Music Festival, a raucous international gathering of noise musicians that showcased the originality and creative potential of anti-music. Remarkably, all these developments occurred after the 1992 death of Curnoe, who was regarded, to some degree inside the band and to a great degree outside, as the formulator and leader of the group’s leaderless formation.

The NSB made good on the belief, most vehemently professed by Curnoe, that the band was not just something that artists did, but an artistic entity in itself.

The Nihilist Spasm Band and the Artists’ Jazz Band approached music-making not as musicians but as artists, treating “music” more as material, form, and process and not as technique, a numinous communication of emotion, or something defined by its audience in any way. While their taking of vanguard positions might encourage drawing affinities between these artists and musical counterparts who took similar positions, the similarities are nearly accidental. Each band was its own most critical audience—and more than that, for extended periods, each band was its only audience.⁸ The long periods of obscurity were as satisfying as the rare opportunities for connection with an audience. The AJB and the NSB developed remarkable capacities of internal listening and as a result were always prepared to engage with new ideas, new instruments, new situations, new collaborators, or new audiences as they might happen to come along. Their ability to set their own criteria for accomplishment allowed them to succeed on their own terms, while remaining relatively oblivious to the concerns of any parallel musical realm.

Dedicated to Hugh McIntyre (1936-2004) and Gordon Rayner (1935-2010).

Ben Portis

Talkin' Yoko Ono, Mother and Language, Art and Music Blues

Michael Turner

2005

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3. What's that noise? my mother said It's loud enough to wake the dead!

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4. That night I rented Let It Be And we watched the Beatles disagree Afterwards we had a chat About art and music, what's come to pass It was interesting I learned something I learned that if I keep my mouth shut long enough, my mother will speak on topics other than the home—what’s for dinner, what the neighbours are up to—how she grew up playing piano, until her father died and her mother could no longer afford the lessons, not that that stopped her, for her love of music was so strong that every day after school my mother would stand by the door of the Avenue Grill

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and wait for a song—any song—to come on the juke box, after which she would run home humming it (whether she liked the song or not), tapping it out on the piano like a telegraph operator during wartime, bombs going off, the blood in her head pounding, until one day she came home and the piano was gone, sold, and in its place, a bed, and in that bed, her grandmother, staring at the ceiling, mouth open, tears running down her cheeks, and oh how my mother cried, not for her grandmother so much as the piano! and how all she could do to not cry was to hum Carroll and Graham's “Oo-Shoo-Be-Doo-Be” over and over again until her mother gave her money for dinner and a show, and off she went, to catch the Arbutus bus, but instead of dinner at Woolworth's and the seven o'clock screening of The Rose Tattoo, she met a couple on their way to a poetry reading, and wouldn't she rather do that, see poetry, than see Anna Magnani fall for Burt Lancaster? to which she surprised herself and said yes, she would, and just like that they were off, the three of them, to the north end of Gore Street, to a place that looked like a fish cannery, a place where bearded men dressed in variations of the same black turtleneck and women in tams and leotards danced to music that sounded like plates of spaghetti teetering on the edge of a waiter's tray, dancing without touching, without any sense of what's coming next, and out of nowhere a woman approaches and asks if she would like a drink, and my mother says sure, and the woman returns with twelve shot glasses arranged in two rows of six, like eggs in a carton, atop a hard cover book, which, soon enough, is opened to reveal what my mother thought were photos of the universe but were instead reproductions of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, and the woman who did the opening, the page-turning, she tells my mother these are not reproductions of Pollock's paintings so much as documentation of the artist's actions, expressions of his inner self, parts of which were excited y jazz and bebop, music my mother wasn't fond of on account of its reckless nature, its disregard for what was soft and round and perfect in the world, which was what my mother sought for herself, my mother who was tall and hard and angular, like the man who suddenly grabbed her and pulled her onto the dance floor, spinning her until all she saw were Pollocks, and then, on her hands and knees, Pollocks on the floor before her, spinning like the turntable upon which the music played, and then what seemed like two turntables, then four, each a little slower than the other, the music loping like a horse up a hill, then crashing wildly, as if someone threw a clothes peg into the spokes of a passing bike, and how that night has haunted my mother ever since, how she told my father about it after doing the things one does to get to the place where it's safe to talk about such things, which was how we got our piano, and how I ended up with lessons, music becoming important to me, important to the way I make my sentences, to the way I make sense of the world, a road that takes me to places other than music, invisible places where ideas are sometimes made into things, like writing and, before that, drawing, and when I told this to my mother, about how my travels in music and sentence structure made me the ox cart I am today, she pulled out a box I'd made filled with drawings of album covers and the art inside them, and we talked about this for some time, stuff like Peter Blake's cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's album, how significant that was, to see Pop art and popular music converge, how the ad hoc compositional strategies that went into making Beatles songs out of drug-inspired sketches were similar

Michael Turner

to the collage method Blake might have employed for his covers, and I said all this while trying to shove the drawings—more tracings than drawings—back in the box while my mother, very gently, took them from me and returned them to their folds, saying, Of course we're embarrassed by the stuff we do as kids, but let's not forget the time we put into it, the devotion, what was going on in our heads while tracing Freddy Mercury's jaw line or David Bowie's ass, how much rye can be stolen from the liquor cabinet, how much of it can be watered down without anyone noticing, or something more amorous, at which point I shivered with embarrassment and my mother, thankfully, changed the subject, returning to what happened after the poetry reading, her conversation at the Peter Pan Restaurant with the man who grabbed her and spun her onto the dance floor, who helped her walk off the last of the alcohol, this same man who, it seemed, was genuinely interested in who she was and how she ended up at the foot of Gore, nodding his head at the sad bits, teasing her about her almost religious devotion to popular song, asking her questions that were actually song lyrics, whether they meant anything to her, to which my mother replied, Yes, in the context of the song, they did, but divorced from their source, No, all I see are blanks, to which he replied, What colour is your concept of blanks? to which my mother replied, I don't know that one, and he laughed, though my mother did not know what he was laughing at, and it was then that she realized for the first time that what was important to her now might not be tomorrow, like the songs this man was laughing at, songs he was singing in a pitch and timbre that said he knew what he was talking about, that he'd had the proper training, and why if he could sing these songs so well was he so contemptuous of them, ridiculing them, because isn't having a mastery over something synonymous with liking it? which was another lesson my mother learned that night: that just because you can do something well doesn't mean it's worth doing, not when your idea of music goes beyond Mitch Miller, so maybe not songs so much as music, or even more than that, sound, the echoes of pebbles falling down a well, fingernails over a blackboard, or the texture of Yoko Ono's voice, full throttle, aimed at a microphone that costs more than most cars, how you can hear more if you know what sound is, how it's made, that's what this guy was talking about, like it was a joke to him, even though he was serious, goading my mother, giving her clues as to what he was thinking, then asking her in how many notes could she name that tune, and he carried on like this, one after another, a small clue, a few notes, then, after awhile, he would demonstrate with his magnificent tenor how some songs are almost identical, and that's what contributed to his boredom, this sameness, how his musical journey took him not to music school, to become an opera singer (like his priest and parents wanted) but to art school, where he learned to pull colour from his throat and paint with it, and this impressed my mother to no end, because here was a man who was doing what he wanted, putting it into words, and later, after walking her to her door and kissing her quite purposefully on the lips, these feelings only got more intense, and she couldn't stop thinking about him, sulking for days because he didn't phone, crying into her pillow, but she got over it, as we all do after we fall for someone so quickly, how we wait for them by filling their absence with stuff they might be doing (like reading Clement Greenberg and listening to John Cage) before our lives get in the way and we lose interest, forget, then return to what we know,

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which, in my mother's case, was going out with her girlfriends and eventually meeting my father, through a friend of a friend, and how good they were together (or so they were told), the parties they threw, my father on piano and my mother singing the hits of the day, which, near the end of their marriage, were new songs written to sound like old ones, songs that pined for times my parents never knew, like the one my father liked so much, the one Paul McCartney adapted from a Russian folk song and gave to Mary Hopkin, called “Those Were The Days,” a real show-stopper at our house, my father finishing the last verse on the ukulele, my mother on the ottoman, arms out like Carol Burnett, and all their friends crying, even my grandmother, who attended these sessions right up to her death, and so I asked my mother about this, about this nostalgia for a time she never knew, and she says not everybody experienced the same Nineteen-Sixties as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, that for some it was 'free-love' (always the guys) but for others (the girls) it was getting knocked up, getting into trouble, and that was the least of it, because there were tons of intangibles back in those days and nobody felt secure, not like the days when you got a job at twenty-one and forty-four years later you retired from it, so “Those Were the Days” was sad, as was the break up of the Beatles, which coincided with the breakup of my parents, as well as speculation that there was someone else in my father's life, because suddenly there he was, on weekends, wearing bell-bottoms, sporting a moustache and hanging out with a woman who was noticeably older, a filmmaker who was attempting a new kind of film, not film that adhered to rules about coverage and cutting, but a new way to record, say, a musical performance, indeed, a visual composition analogous to ensemble playing, not restricted to the templates of popular music, where soloists step forward, or, if a solo does not exist, one is written for them by this pen and sword implement that inscribes everything it 'sees'—the camera—no, not at all, this filmmaker had a particular way of presenting things, where sound and image act independent of each other, the two never lining up because there is no such thing as 'lining up', because we can do the same thing over and over again but it is never quite the same, not when the bird that chirps one day suddenly doesn't the next, and this was how she spoke to my father, except louder and faster, with a strong accent, and how my father fit into her life is a mystery to me, a complete shock, because my father has some very old ideas about things, one of which has women in the background, except when singing, not quite what Yoko Ono's talking about in Feeling the Space, but close (like the bird not chirping), indeed, Ono made Feeling the Space when things were not well between her and her husband, when the latter was on the West Coast, getting drunk every night with Harry Nilsson, but that's neither here nor there, because it is Feeling The Space we are talking about, which is about music, yes, and anger, yes, and protest, yes, but also a poll, which Ono is taking by gathering around her some very fine musicians and asking that they support her music as a political statement, and although, as I said, my copy is without its jacket, I will never forget what is written on it, its dedication to "the sisters who died in pain and sorrow for being unable to survive in male society," and I told this to my mother as I was rewinding Let It Be and putting it back in its case, and she told me how rare it was, even in nineteen-seventy-three, to come across those words, how there were print shops back then who refused to handle such sentiments, who would send them back to the

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record company or the book publisher with a note saying, This is seditious, or It's inciting hatred, and we should never ever forget that, we should never forget that what is now more often than not in our face was once a whisper, that it does not come without a price, that nothing comes without a price, just as nothing comes out of nowhere.

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Interviews with Raymond Gervais

Nicole Gingras

Excerpts from Puisqu' à toute fin correspond - Entretiens (Montréal: Éditions Nicole Gingras, 2007).

Used by permission. Translated in 2013 by Timothy Barnard.

Imaginary Records

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Nicole Gingras: Absence is crucial in your work. For example, your imaginary records

are about artists who are deceased. You’re interested in photography and phonography as the capturing of a moment which can only be brought back into the present because it is past.

Raymond Gervais: That’s because there’s a relation between phonography and death. First of all,

records themselves are dead. And, of course, what is living is the listening situation: a human being— thus, a living being—listens to a record, a dead object. The dead disc traversing the living person makes a life experience. There would be a lot to say about phonography and death. But, just the same, death is the most radical experience an individual can have. We age. People we know die. Gradually, we are faced with this question. And for me, that becomes an artistic practice. It becomes extremely concrete, meaning that I concoct a kind of time travel machine in the sense that I want to go to the side where death is. I want to go into death itself by making a work in which I speak directly to the beyond.

Take for example, Jean Papineau. Jean is dead now. I don’t know where he is. With the work Écrire au loin à distance (2000), which is dedicated to him, I am writing to Jean from a long way away.

To write from a long way away, from a distance, beyond life, in death: “Do you hear me?” It’s a little like with my saxophonist friend Bryan Highbloom, who I called . . . on the stage of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1976: “Bryan Highbloom, do you hear me? Answer me! Answer me!”1 And, at a certain point in the performance, he appeared. But Jean doesn’t answer me. It’s a charged situation; it’s a situation of waiting. I’m waiting for him to reply, like I’m waiting for the record Beckett would send me and that I would slide into its sleeve. I create situations of waiting, which are magnetic situations, meaning that a tension has taken hold because the work has been created, because the gesture has been made. Someone could say: “Come on, that’s stupid, why are you making an imaginary record cover around Beckett? Beckett is dead. He can’t play the piano any longer. Stop wasting your time!” But in fact what I create is magnetism. I create a situation in which I call on the beyond to manifest itself. And it’s like a magnet in the end. It attracts. I presume that the beyond can be attracted by the work on display, which charges the site with this tension of calling and waiting, in which we find ourselves in the role of viewer.2 NG: It’s true, you create encounters! And these encounters are . . .

RG: . . . impossible . . .

NG: But they’re possible if our imagination permits them. And then one can follow your project.

One wants to get closer to this—impossible—vision that you offer us.

Interviews with Raymond Gervais

1 In English in the original— Trans.

2 Raymond Gervais, Samuel Beckett, piano solo (Les disques Oboro, 1989).

LP record sleeve with a text by Gervais, “Samuel Beckett et la musique,” part of the boxed set Trio pour Samuel Beckett, which includes a work of sound art by Rober Racine on magnetic tape and a photograph by Irene F. Whittome. Published in an edition of 49. (In 1995, this record sleeve became part of the work Waiting for Beckett for music stand and turntable.)

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3 The Final Houdini Seance (Mark 56 Records, 1976).

Produced by George Garabedian, narrated by George L. Boston with the voices of Mrs. Harry Houdini and Dr. Edward Saint.

Recorded on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood (more than three hundred guests formed the outer circle, while the inner circle was made up of thirteen participants: a scientist, an occultist, a journalist, a magician, friends, and Mrs. Houdini).

4 Rosemary Brown: Piano Album (A Musical Seance) (Philips, 1970). One side of this record is devoted to the virtuoso pianist Peter Katin and the other to Rosemary Brown. Brown performs unpublished works transmitted by Liszt, Grieg, Schumann, and Chopin.

Record sleeve with a booklet and illustrations. Rosemary Brown (1916-2001) also published three books, including Unfinished Symphonies in 1971.

Image 55

RG: You know, there is a concrete and objective basis to this kind of vision. Once again, it already exists

in the history of phonography.

I told you the story of the Houdini record, Houdini the magician! Houdini died. Then they made a record of the final session in which his friends, seated around a table, called on him to manifest himself. In the end, obviously, nothing happened. This final session became a record. This recording of the final session around Houdini thus exists on vinyl. You can put it on a record player and hear a voice say: “Houdini, if you can hear us, if you are alive, give us a sign. Give proof, in any manner whatsoever, of your presence in this other dimension to which we do not have access.” This object exists in our real world. And I, in my own manner, I write to Jean in the beyond. In reality, however, this question of making contact with the invisible or the beyond already exists on this record, just like my imaginary encounters with classical musicians, for example.³

There’s also the case of Rosemary Brown: she claimed to receive visits at her home from deceased musicians such as Liszt, Debussy, and Chopin. They gave her unpublished music to notate; they helped her to notate and play this music. She herself was not a virtuoso pianist. A recording of this music exists.⁴ In a sense, we could say that all the imaginary encounters I forge were already anticipated by Brown.

And this means that this fictional and imaginary dimension that I concoct in my work already exists in that state in events and everyday life somewhere in the world! We’re awash in the imaginary. We’re run through by the imaginary. We are in the presence of the imaginary and, from this perspective, the imaginary may be a form of reality. In the end, I’m not the inventor of that practice! I’m simply in stride with what life brings me, if I’m listening. And, of course, my interest in the aural imaginary doesn’t come from Houdini, because when I began this work I didn’t have this record on Houdini and was unaware of its existence.

NG: At what point did the idea of working on these records, of putting together the series or

collection of imaginary records, come to you?

RG: The first concrete piece dates from 1986. That was Concerts imaginaires, presented at the Saidye

Bronfman Centre for the Arts. Normand Thériault was preparing the exhibition Les Musées imaginaires, and he asked me if I was interested in presenting my piece for thirteen turntables. He had seen 12 + 1 = in 1976 at the Média Gallery and liked it. The image of the piece had stayed in his mind. But what this piece conveyed on an acoustic level was a mass of sound: thirteen turntables. It was pretty physical on an acoustic level! Because I no longer had those turntables, I couldn’t redo the piece. But Normand insisted. So I thought I could maybe redo it differently. And I redid it, this time silently.

I had a photo of the work on exhibit at Média, a photo of the thirteen turntables. I made a disc, a photograph in the form of a disc, which I placed on the turntable. That was sort of the idea: the photo was a disc, the disc was a photo. And afterwards I thought that those thirteen turntables playing could be thirteen people. I could redo the piece differently, in the form of a poster announcing an imaginary

Nicole Gingras

concert! So I made that poster. Because the poster is enough on its own, I don’t need the turntable with the photograph of the old artwork. But when the work was exhibited in 1986, there was the turntable with the photo of the thirteen turntables on it and on the wall the poster + 1 =, about Claude Debussy.

You see Debussy at the piano with four jazz musicians, meaning improvisers. A phonetic choir that makes reference to the seven voices of Debussy’s Nocturnes and the presence of Isadora Duncan, who I imagined dancing to this music, improvising a dance (she knew Debussy and lived in Europe at the same time).⁵

Then I thought that getting thirteen people to participate was too complex. I simplified the approach for the exhibition Elementa Musicæ the following year at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal at the Cité du Havre. I returned to the concept, but it became duos. I had found the formula: a duo is more accessible, it’s easier to imagine. So there was a duo featuring a classical musician and a jazz musician. There were three composers: Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, and Manuel de Falla (all three made records) and three jazz musicians: Lester Young, Paul Desmond, and Charles Mingus.

I thus created imaginary, complex duos.⁶ You might say that my work around the aural imaginary began there. But in fact, it began much earlier. It goes as far back, for example, as when you read that a musician, whom you would have liked to have seen in concert, has died. Then you’re already in a state of wanting to hear something that can’t be heard, to which you can’t have access, but which you know exists. You look at a photograph and you see such-and-such a musician with such-and-such another musician and you say to yourself that you would have really liked to have heard them.

There is a photo like that which is legendary. It was taken by Bob Parent, the jazz photographer I interviewed for Parachute in the 1970s. He’s deceased now. He was Franco-American, crazy about jazz, and in the 1940s and ’50s he documented many, many jazz musicians, big names like Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker.⁷ One of his photos is reproduced often: it shows Thelonious Monk at the piano and Charlie Parker on the saxophone (it must be said that Monk and Parker recorded very little together).

They were two key figures in modern jazz, but in reality they made only the equivalent of one record and a few bits and pieces together—practically nothing. So in this picture, they’re together in a nightclub, with Charles Mingus on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. You look at this photo and you tell yourself that it must have been extraordinary! It’s a legendary photograph. You want to hear this group. That too is the aural imaginary. It’s a part of the desire to hear what is missing, and this desire is generated by something real. This music, if it had been recorded, would not be a fiction. But because it was not recorded, it can exist in our heads only as fiction. That is something strange, because naturally I know the style of all these musicians. I’m familiar with many of their records. When I look at the photo, I don’t really hear a piece of music, but I’m aware of the potential for exchange, I’m familiar with the sound and phrasing of each of these musicians. I know it could work, and in the end, I never make the definitive record in my head. From that point of view, it’s fertile. It’s never made. It’s always in the process of being made. It’s always in a state of being . . .

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5 Raymond Gervais, Les Concerts de l’imaginaire (Ensemble Claude Debussy + 1 =). Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal, 1986, part of the exhibition Les Musées imaginaires, curated by Normand Thériault. The group in question was made up of Claude Debussy on the piano, Bix Beiderbecke on cornet, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums, along with a seven-voice phonetic choir and Isadora Duncan.

6 Raymond Gervais, Elementa Musicæ. Posters of imaginary duos presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1987 as part of the exhibition Elementa Naturæ, curated by Michiko Yajima.

7 See Raymond Gervais’s interview with Bob Parent, “Bechet to Coltrane,” Parachute 15 (1979). Parent (1923-1987) was also a filmmaker. The jazz club where the photo described was taken was the Open Door in Greenwich Village in New York.

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NG: . . . possible!

RG: Yes. And what is mysterious about the aural imaginary is that it doesn’t become aural; it never

becomes acoustic or audible to anyone.

8 Raymond Gervais, 12 + 1 =, Montreal, Média Gallery, 1976, on the occasion of the Olympic Games. Photographs

by Roland Poulin. Four versions.

Image 54

9 Raymond Gervais, 3 + 1 =, Montreal, Gilles Gheerbrant Gallery, 1977, as part of the exhibition Art génératif.

Photographs by Pierre Boogaerts. Four versions.

This work was recreated in 2003-2004 for the Re-play section of the exhibition Soundtracks at the Edmonton Art Gallery (later also exhibited in Toronto, Regina, and Ottawa), curated

by Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer.

Image 42

NG: What were the sound sources for 12 + 1 = in 1976?⁸ RG: Oh, that’s complicated! I made four versions, but initially I wanted to make thirteen. Thirteen

versions for thirteen turntables. There was a version using various pieces of traditional world music.

There was a version with Tibetan monks, Gregorian chants, a cantor, and different religious music; all this vocal music played together created an enormous choir. Another version used thirteen instruments from thirteen different musical traditions: thirteen solo instrumental records creating a very bizarre chamber orchestra playing inconceivable music which was impossible to compose, obviously. It was machine music: only machines—in this case turntables—can enable music like that to exist in that way.

And for the fourth version, I wanted the same instrument thirteen times. I chose the piano, so there were thirteen piano solos. That made a mass of piano sounds.

Each of the four versions could play all day. I redid this piece a year later, in 1977, at the Gilles Gheerbrant Gallery. That time I called it 3 + 1 =. Thirteen is the figure of change. And it was necessarily a music that changed all the time. Thirteen is also four: 3 + 1 =. So I re-did the piece in a reduced version for four turntables. And here again these versions were different because in the end, with turntables, any number of versions, mixes and themes are possible. With different recordings you can truly create aural fictions.⁹

I was asked in 2003 to redo the piece for the Re-play section of the travelling exhibition Soundtracks, which first showed in Edmonton. In 1977, one of the versions for four turntables had been a jazz version. It was based on the following anecdote: in New Orleans, at the turn of the twentieth century, jazz musicians met at street corners and engaged in musical duels to win the public’s favour. The best band was the one that drew the most number of people to dance in the evening. Thinking about this anecdote, I had had the idea of bringing together four New Orleans bands on disc by having them play at the same time on the turntables to create a kind of battle with four bands facing off in a sort of public arena in which the best would win. As the turntables were all automatic, they could play non-stop; when the record was over, it started over again. It was like an endless battle! The result was a music that is impossible to imagine, a music that can only be obtained through the intermediary of machines.

For Soundtracks, I redid the piece with four CD players in which four records by New Orleans bands played non-stop using the repeat mode. These four recordings merged. You heard all four at once.

I redid the piece on two levels, meaning that I took the photograph of this piece as it was presented at the Gilles Gheerbrant Gallery in 1977 and turned it into a poster. In terms of the aural imaginary, you

Nicole Gingras

thus saw the work again as a photo. You saw a poster on the wall advertising 3 + 1 =. You had to imagine the sound of the photo! In fact, you saw quite clearly that there were four turntables. It’s as if I suggested that you hear the photo. . . . I added four CD players so that people would truly hear the music.

I noticed that very few people stop long enough to really listen! I attended the opening of the first two exhibitions. And I could see the public’s reaction. It was the same thing for 12 + 1 = at the time, for the thirteen turntables at the Média Gallery, where I had spent a lot of time sitting on a chair in the corner to listen. That’s when I truly experienced the work and this machine music—a very complex music given that all these different pieces of music were playing at the same time. The work requires a listening effort that, in reality, very few people make. You really have to sit down, take time and give time to the work!

This time I realized that, even when presented in its sound version, 3 + 1 = is, after all, silent for me. People don’t hear that. I’m not making a judgement when I say that. I’m only remarking: even with sound, the piece is silent for me, meaning that in the end I could have not played the CDs and it would have been the same! The sound coming out of the four CD players is a ball of sound. But the experience becomes truly magical if you listen to the aural result of this encounter between the four CDs in an attentive and concentrated manner. At times you hear the bands playing together; the bands and musicians come together or get farther apart; one disc comes to an end and another begins. There is a great deal of rhythmic complexity. A mysterious respiration inhabits this piece, which you can really grasp if you take the time to listen to it. So a sound work can also be the same as a silent work: people see it, but they don’t hear it.

NG: It’s hard to break certain habits. For example, there’s the idea that a work can be experienced

in the moment but not over time.

RG: That’s it! I don’t judge the audience, but what I find paradoxical about my recent experience with

3 + 1 = is that since 1990, as you know, my work has become silent. It is very silent, and above all silent!

Even an earlier piece that had sound at the time and which I absolutely did not imagine as capable of being silent, which was the case with 3 + 1 =, today I realize that in the end its sound version is silent.

It fits in with my work today, despite myself. Certainly, it has the potential for being aural. It is aural in the sense that when someone listens to it they can take from it what I think can truly be taken from the experience. But it’s like anything else: if you take the time, if you pay the price, if you do the work, you get what it is you’re looking for. It always comes back to paying a price by giving your time, time being the precious matter of our lives.

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Listening NG: You have said that it is possible to understand and hear on different levels. In your case,

how do you listen to music?

RG: In fact, I listen in all sorts of ways. Today I listen differently than I used to, in the sense that I don’t

have as great a need for music, or the need to listen compulsively from beginning to end, or to listen to a record more than once. I listen in all sorts of ways. I seek out what might interest me. In the case of record albums, I’m often, very often these days, interested not only in the record for the record’s sake but in the album cover. This is where the difference lies, meaning that over time the visual aspect of the record has become very important to me, more than ever. It’s not that I no longer need sounds today or that I no longer have a desire to listen to music, but it’s different. It’s also less important for me to compulsively expand my repertoire, because I feel instead a need to listen to things over again.

NG: To hear different versions of the same work?

RG: Yes, among other things. Sometimes I let the same music play all day, filling up the space I am in.

NG: Does listening to a CD or a vinyl record provide you with more than a performance or concert?

RG: It’s different. A CD, for example, lets you play a record non-stop, something that a concert or a vinyl 10 Erik Satie, Vexations, LP, Reinbert de Leeuw, piano (Philips, 1983). (Other versions exist on CD.)

record doesn’t really let you do. So it’s possible to take Vexations by Satie on a CD, select that theme, and let it play all day.1⁰ Once again, I’m not necessarily interested in filling up the space I’m in, either. I’m just fine without sound, without music, with nothing. So what I find interesting is that today we have every possibility. You can do what you want. Before your relation with a record was such that, when you played it, you really listened to it. Today we live in a world in which there are so many different sources of sound that our relation to sound is truly different (having the radio, the television, and a record playing at the same time sometimes). There are so many sources of sound that can be present in our surroundings that in the end the way we listen depends more on how we manage the situation.

We have spoken in the past about listening before there was television. We could also say there was listening before music recording and phonography and there is listening after the arrival of the record. After television, listening was not the same, and listening on your computer is no longer the same at all. So there are several kinds of ways to listen that were unthinkable before and that we now have to manage according to one’s interests and temperament, but also according to one’s artistic practice.

In the end, the way I listen is tied to my artistic practice. There’s no doubt that what I listen to is always connected to what I’m working on and to what I have worked on. And what interests me is not necessarily an entire work. It’s hard for me to speak about this in general terms because each situation is unique.

Nicole Gingras

Yes, I can listen to a work intensely from beginning to end, just like I can listen to just an excerpt or not listen to it at all. I can also listen to the album cover, listen to what the visuals are telling me.

And so, with respect to your question, the record you included with your book on sound published by Artexte, for example, I listened to that. I listened to excerpts at home; I listened to it in the car a few times. CDs make that possible. You listen at the beach, you listen in the country, you listen in a car. …

There are many different ways to listen, each giving a different experience, in my view.

But it’s certain that before I had an artistic practice I couldn’t locate, I couldn’t determine what could have a particular interest for me in what I had just listened to. And I could identify it and pin it down even less. It was an accumulation over time of things that interested me more or less as a result of what my culture, in a broad sense, was made up of. But once you have an artistic practice, you listen more keenly through the eyes of that practice, with the ears of your artistic project and of the things you have done.

And, finally, I listen with the memory of my work. That’s what determines what interests me or doesn’t interest me today. I don’t listen to have a broader musical culture.

99

NG: But there are moments when you are certainly taken by surprise, when the work exerts a

kind of magnetism.

RG: Yes, you’re right, but that’s impossible to predict. I have to be in a situation in which someone plays

something for me that suddenly grabs me. An example is the record you produced for the book S:ON, with Michael Snow’s Tap. I have worked on Michael Snow’s sound works and records frequently, and Tap was not available on record before. So I saw this piece in a gallery. But seeing it, hearing it in context with the photograph and the text, all those elements in a gallery, is not the same thing at all. So I listened to Tap on the CD and suddenly this work had a lot to say to me. You’ll say to me: “It speaks to you because you have already worked on Michael Snow, so right away your curiosity is heightened.” Yes, that’s true. But it’s more than that. What I heard on that CD set something off in me with respect to my understanding of Michael Snow’s sound world, something that I didn’t have before. And my reaction was also related to a letter I was in the process of writing to him, following a conversation we had in the summer of 2003.11

Let me explain the context to you very quickly and you’ll see how it’s an example. In the summer of 2003, Michael Snow and I were a part of the Soundtracks exhibition in Edmonton. He has tremendous experience as a jazz musician, from Dixieland to free jazz, and he told me that his son had asked him to tell him the history of jazz, and that maybe in the summer, on their holidays, he would tell him that history. We spoke about various things, and in the end we spoke a lot about this history of jazz.

For Soundtracks, I exhibited, as we discussed earlier, a piece on jazz in New Orleans in the early days, which Michael is quite familiar with. You may know that one of the earliest pieces he played was “Mamie’s Blues,” by Jelly Roll Morton. So he knows the jazz classics and the New Orleans musicians very well. Michael asked me if I knew a Chicago pianist called Tut Soper. I had never heard of this pianist.

Interviews with Raymond Gervais

11 Michael Snow, Tap, 1969.

Including a photograph, text, loudspeaker, and sound.

Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Excerpt of 3 min., 4 sec. taken from the work of the same title reproduced on a CD accompanying the anthology S:ON—Le son dans l’art contemporain canadien/ Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art, Nicole Gingras, ed. (Montreal: Artexte, 2003), 240.

100 12 Tut Soper, Jazz and Blues Piano, vol. 2, 1924-1947 (Document Records, 2001).

Includes five duos from 1944 with Baby Dodds. Tut Soper’s Riverside album with Marty Grosz, Hurray for Bix, was republished in 2000 by Good Time Jazz.

A key figure on the Chicago jazz scene, Tut Soper (1910-1987) was an insurance salesman at the end of his life.

13 Michael Snow, The Last LP (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1987).

14 See Réginald Hamel, Gottschalk et son temps (Montreal: Guérin, 1996).

Includes notes on his Canadian tour. Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) left Paris just as Ernest Guiraud (1837-1892), also from New Orleans, was settling there permanently.

He said: “He’s really very good. If you like, I’ll send you a few recordings by this pianist from the 1930s and ’40s. Some of the recordings are duos with Baby Dodds, one of the great New Orleans jazz drummers.”12

Back home, I did some research on this little-known pianist, one of whose records was with Marty Grosz, the son of the painter George Grosz. It’s strange, all these connections. So I wrote a letter to Michael saying: “You know, I did a little research into Tut Soper and I thought it would be interesting to tell the history of jazz through the piano, which runs through its entire history. I have leads that you never find in the jazz histories. It’s a kind of whimsical history of jazz. . . . ”

So I wrote to Michael Snow about the history of jazz and the connections between the piano and drums. In my letter, I referred to the fact that people speak a lot about this place in New Orleans called Congo Square, where slaves got together in the nineteenth century to dance on Sundays and play the drums—before it was forbidden. This place became legendary in New Orleans, and it came several decades before jazz, but was something like one of jazz’s sources.

Then when I heard Tap, for me it was Congo Square. It’s truly a somewhat primitive beat that could be a kind of transposed African percussion, but made with technology: a finger tapping on a microphone. Here was the world created by jazz pianists. Suddenly, I could listen to this sound document, taken out of the installation context in which it was understood in relation to the photograph and text.

I could listen to it in relation to Michael Snow’s jazz practice—that alone. And this idea of telling his son the history of jazz came back to me. It’s as if Michael, to tell the story of the beginnings of jazz, had invented a fictitious music and the beginnings of jazz history: a microphone steals into Congo Square and records African slaves in the United States getting together to dance and play their music. It’s like an unpublished track from The Last LP, which is a fiction, but based on something true.1³ And the rhythm, the beat I heard in Tap, corresponds from a distance to the image I had of Congo Square, as it is described in accounts of the day.

So I wrote to him. In the end it’s a long story. To sum it up for you very, very quickly, there was a pianist who went to these sessions in Congo Square when he was very young: Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a New Orleans Creole and a young piano virtuoso. He heard this music and was inspired by it. Then, around 1842, he went to study in Paris. He was from a well-off family in New Orleans. In Paris, he met Chopin, Berlioz. … These composers heard this extraordinary young American and were amazed by both his virtuosity and the strange music he played, which was inspired by the bamboula, the dances he had heard and tried to transcribe to piano in the Romantic style. When he returned from Europe, Gottschalk went on tour, passing through Montreal, Toronto, London, and Hamilton. In fact, he travelled all over and died in Latin America, in Brazil. It’s a long story.1⁴

And then a younger compatriot of Gottschalk’s in New Orleans, the French-speaking American Ernest Guiraud, who knew this music very well, went to study composition in France. Among his students were Erik Satie and Claude Debussy, who were thus able to discover Gottschalk’s music— a music that preceded ragtime and includes rhythms tied to the origins, to the roots of African-American music. So there is a whole circle around the piano and this hidden French connection, beginning with

Nicole Gingras

Louis Moreau Gottschalk. It’s a long story that branches off in all sorts of directions. For example, when Michael Snow was a boy, his mother played Debussy for him. And Debussy heard Gottschalk’s music through Guiraud. This is how a fiction, a story, can emerge and develop by following all sorts of historical paths which, all of a sudden, you bring together. . . . It spills into fiction, but at the same time there is an aspect of reality to it. . . .

Michael Snow could never have imagined that Tap could be interpreted as the beat of a traditional African dance. But I heard it that way immediately on the disc you produced!

101

NG: It must be said that this piece is based on a rhythm that goes right to the most vital.

It’s economical also: there’s a microphone, an instrument (fingers tapping on the microphone), a tape recorder, and a speaker. The instrument is the hand; plus, you need recording technology.

You have everything you need to make music and broadcast it.

RG: But, you see, this beat is also a nervous impulse. We’re full of beats, of rhythms. We’re saturated

with them: jazz has raised us on rhythms. And, in the end, what we hear is a true beat. I hear it as African percussion; another listener will hear it differently.

This discussion is completely in keeping with the spirit of Bop, a piece I did inspired by Anna Akhmatova’s poem The Verdict. I couldn’t decipher its Cyrillic title, but I was able to read the last three letters: B-O-P. At the bottom of the page, the date of the poem was written: 1939. And it was in 1939 that Charlie Parker invented be-bop. According to legend, for a long time he had been hearing a music that he couldn’t manage to convey. He couldn’t find a way to phrase it, to play it. He was on the verge of something, but he couldn’t do it! Then, finally, by playing with the chords of the tune “Cherokee,” a popular song at the time—it’s interesting, Cherokee is an Indian name—Charlie Parker suddenly said: “My fingers are in place, I’ve begun playing this music. I’ve begun to be able to express it.”1⁵

And so the work Bop brings together in 1939 two artists who are otherwise very distant, one Russian and the other African-American—each marginalized in their respective society and radical in their artistic practice. Here, they enter into dialogue with one another.1⁶

15 Charlie Parker, The Complete Birth of Be Bop (Stash Records, 1991). Recordings dating from 1940 to 1945, including solo variations recorded in Kansas City around 1940 and a version of “Cherokee” from 1942.

16 Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer and ed. with an introduction by Roberta Reeder (Somerville: Zephyr, 1990). Several other English-language anthologies of Akhmatova’s work that include The Verdict exist.

Interviews with Raymond Gervais

Heard and Misheard Notes

Christof Migone

2014

How do we hear ourselves at first? As an endless singing-to-oneself, and in the dance. Both are still nameless. They have no life in themselves, and no one personally gave them form.

Where one encounters them, they possess the appeal of every originary beginning. But one had to go through something else in order that expression be amply and securely equipped.1

Ernst Bloch Entries a home speaker, a barely there murmuring

This page has a volume, albeit an infrathin one.2 Barely audible, though immanently playable and amplifiable, therein the infrathinness of the page lies a heard volume. It is in the past now. The notes were played, they are presently elsewhere. Attempts to revisit Volume: Hear Here have to contend with this reduction. But to reduce also suggests to concentrate, and from it one can tentatively reconstitute.

I shall not assume you were there then, but I shall also refrain from dwelling on the merely descriptive, favouring instead an elusive poetics that will let you heuristically meander through the exhibition’s various registers (spatial, temporal, aural, conceptual)—an interpretation of what Geertz terms thick description.³ From thin to thick. From page to igloo, geodesic dome, curved space with speakers as walls—a home for waves. A space inactive along with you, unless you decide to enter, and opt to play.

A regressive or generative act? The basic cue given by a microphone in an exhibition space is speak into me.

Or is the invite only heard or heeded by the exhibitionists? Perhaps the quandary solicited by this incitation, even if it is unanswered, is enough. In Alexis O'Hara’s SQUEEEQUE! The Improbable Igloo a choir lies, at home, waiting to congregate, conjugate. Cacophony and melody acquaint—improvisation at the ready.

Whispers suggest appearance, they don't impose it; they are insidious insertions of in-betweens.

In Whisperfield, Oswald recorded individuals describing their appearances in their native tongues, the resulting collective murmuring played back at background levels might be mistaken for the vocalizations produced by visitors inside Alexis O’Hara's speaker igloo. For instance, they could be thought to be the playback of past participants. The potential confusion is welcome. Whispers float in that blurry band of the aural periphery—words not quite discernable, not quite graspable, but there nonetheless. Due to their recorded form the whispers shift the liveness and all the attendant improbabilities of O’Hara's installation to a more defined and controlled mode of diffusion. The present passes even though the sotto voce might fool the ear. Not quite aloud, though the layers of whispers do aggregate to a semblance of a din, at least some kind of insistence is instilled.

Heard and Misheard Notes

103 1 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford University Press, 2000 [1918]), 34-5.

2 Duchamp’s neologism originally appeared as two words, infra mince (infra thin).

I opted to make it slimmer.

More importantly, the two emblematic examples of the term Duchamp provides are: “the sound or music which corduroy trousers make when one moves” and “the hollow of the paper between the front and back of a thin sheet of paper.” In The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 194.

In “Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp,” Alain Badiou theorizes: “The infra thin is the exercise of the critical point as a point of minimal discontinuity; the point of discontinuity from the same to the other same. The new productive and reproductive thought must pass by this point.”

Alain Badiou, “Some remarks concerning Marcel Duchamp,” The Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan.com, accessed June 17, 2014, http://www.lacan.com/ symptom9_articles/ badiou29.html.

Images 94-95; Track 3, side A Track 4, side A

3 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000 [1973]), 20: “So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the ‘said’ of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms.”

104

Heads a pair of feedback headphones, a cluster of deracinate devices, a tale for head and mind

Image 83

4 Dave Dyment in this volume, 174.

5 Ibid.

Image 15

6 Laurie Anderson, Music for Dogs, premiered outside the Sydney Opera House, June 5, 2010.

7 Sarah Maharaj, “XenoEpistemics: Makeshift Kit for Sounding Visual Art as Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regimes,” Documenta 11 Catalogue (Hatje Cantz, 2002), 73 and 76.

Image 70; Track 4, side B

8 Douglas Kahn’s recent book, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013) hinges on aesthetic approaches that are tuned to electromagnetic phenomena expanded from the merely audiovisual.

Amidst this dialogue between sets of voices, one hears another insistence, this time it is not verbal but tonal. Minute but piercing; something’s awry. The source is a pair of headphones on the back wall, Dave Dyment’s Untitled (Headset). Put on the headphones to stop the feedback. The piece works when the headphones do not. “Your head gets in the way,” as the artist says; it unsounds it.⁴ One ear no longer hears but speaks, this rewiring thus creates feedback when it nears the other ear. But is your head the way to the piece? The way to internalize the inputs and outputs, an exteriorized and amplified synaptic? Dyment claims that the silence resulting in putting on the headphones is a “blunt metaphor for the inability to understand infinity.”⁵ Or, by adding the (de)activating head of the listener to the equation: we interrupt eternity with our mortality. Or, it's a (failed) attempt at the comprehension of the eternal return by way of a sonic and ouroboric contraption.

Dyment’s Nothing (for Robert Barry) accompanies the above with another type of thwarting.

A range of ultrasonic pest control devices populate a power bar seemingly there for a utilitarian purpose.

But this is not intended for us, or at least the emissions bypass us, we have immunity. Whether they succeed in their function as reverse Pied Piper machines is debatable (they are notoriously ineffectual), but their import to our ears is that they delimit our hearing range. Inaudibility is species-specific, this address targets non-human listeners. A perceptual challenge; an art form not intended for us. Unlike Laurie Anderson’s Music for Dogs,⁶ here the instruments are more insidious, nevertheless they emit and they point to a xenophilic drive via a xenosonics.⁷ The art of the electromagnetic spectrum goes beyond the thin sliver that corresponds to the audible frequencies.⁸ The linguist C.K. Ogden asserted that in the same way that “we cannot be more dead than dead, [...] there is no anti-volume, opposed to volume and beyond one-volume, no anti-mobility beyond rest, no anti-light beyond darkness, no anti-sonority beyond silence.”⁹ A list of terms that denote limits and include their own antithesis. A surfeit of beyond, yet all negated. Consider if the oppositions were removed—beyond the audible, to a wider spectrum.

Nauman’s Room/Mind duel aggressively staged in his 1968 sound installation Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room shifts to a Head/Mind binary in Charles Stankievech’s Get Out of My Head, Get Out of My Mind (2008). Has the room been swallowed by the head in this revision? “Where is my mind?,” Charles channels the Pixies, and perhaps ELO’s or Kylie Minogue’s “I can't get you out of my head.”

The wireless headphones sit on a shelf, they can be donned or just eavesdropped. The volume here is layered by the solipsistic loops of the content and its vehicle. The artist states that it “denies architecture and explores the unique relation between virtual space and psychotopology.”1⁰ Indeed, the room has been excised (twice, Nauman’s and the Blackwood Gallery’s), but the construction is now between the ears, immersed in a solitary exercise of soliloquized listening (another doubling). Headphones, unless they are integral to the work (which is the case in the aforementioned works), should be a curatorial or artistic

Christof Migone

choice of last resort. Headphones may be practical but they reinforce the pretense that a work has a non-porous integrity that must be maintained when it is presented. Exhibition conditions are vexed circumstances, the public inadvertently bumps into things, or they intentionally steal (which happened during this exhibition), or they miss the point, or they quite generously offer a reading not foretold by either the artist or the curator—in other words, an exhibition is always partial because a) a space is heterotopic and b) reception is beyond our control. These two conditions resound with intensity via the anaphoric Get Out. Theories an act of sounding, a performative volumen, a somatized volumizer From the utterance stems the establishment of the category of the present, and from the

105 9 C. K. Ogden, Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 46-7. Emphasis added. He precedes the quote with: “Abstract and generic terms, which have an infinity of dynamic oppositions, are opposed by their negations but have no negative qualities which are their own image reversed.” And he follows the main quote with: “Volume or extension is a general quality of figures which are symmetrically opposable.”

10 Charles Stankievech in this volume, 176.

category of the present is born the category of time. The present is precisely the source of time.

It is that presence in the world that only the speech act makes possible, since (if we reflect on this) man has no other way of living “now” at his disposition besides the possibility to realize it through the insertion of discourse in the world.11

Volume: Hear Here is conceived around the vexed question of presence in its entwine with absence— the da of dasein. An ontological discussion considered through the tenuous objecthood, but resolute materiality of sonic phenomena. Benveniste’s epigraph gives primacy to the speech act, what if we supplanted it with the sound act? If the speech act is the condition of possibility for presence, how does the sound act function in relation to the original’s privileging of discourse as an ontological determinant?

The event of language taking place in time replaced by sound as infiltrator, enveloper, occupier of both time and space. Perhaps this is a moment akin to Tony Smith’s famed conclusion following his experience of driving on an unfinished and unmarked portion of the New Jersey Turnpike: “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.”12 The incompleteness, which is a corollary of the decision to dwell on unframed experience, is what Michael Fried in “Art of Objecthood” so vehemently resisted and is the condition of possibility of this exhibition project; its curatorial DNA if you will. Returning to Benveniste, the other bias his statement foregrounds is the role discourse performs as a framing function.

There is a desire in the works assembled in this curatorial project, however temporary and fraught the exercise of this desire might be (and certainly ascribing desire to an artwork is), to go beyond meaning, beyond interpretation. Why this need to seemingly bypass the straight path to knowledge?

Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke that while a poem is able to convey a “meaning intention,” simultaneously a “truth lies in its performance.”1³ Serendipitously, he dubbed this dimension volumen. Following Gadamer’s notion, the volumes at play here are not measurable or quantifiable, they are sung by the artists

Heard and Misheard Notes

11 Émile Benveniste in Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 36.

12 Tony Smith in Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 131.

13 Hans-Georg Gadamer in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 64.

106 14 Gumbrecht, 107. “[I]n addition to the dimension that can and must be redeemed through interpretation, poems have a ‘volume’—a dimension, that is, that demands our voice, that needs to be ‘sung.’”

15 Daniel Buren, “Function of the Museum” in Museums

by Artists, ed. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 59.

16 Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (New York: October Books, 1995), 197.

17 Sarat Maharaj, 76. I want to thank Christine Shaw for pointing me to this revelatory essay in early 2014, not only is it pertinent to this project but in it Maharaj deploys the term sonic somatic, and my prior ignorance of his usage in light of my 2012 book (and 2007 PhD dissertation) titled Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body, ensured that I was thereby not burdened (or paralyzed) by this knowledge.

That being said, the quandary that prior knowledge would have caused would have surely been offset by the abundant usefulness of his essay to that previous writing project.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

Image 107

20 Jean-François Lyotard, “The Inaudible. Music and Postmodernity” in Miscellaneous Texts I. Aesthetics and Theory of Art, ed. Herman Parret, (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 209.

and mixed by the curator.1⁴ The desire I attribute to the works to go beyond meaning and interpretation is an unabashed curatorial imposition. They each have their own volume, and as curator, I just temporarily have my hands on the dials. Or more precisely there are more than one set of dials by which to listen to each of the works.

In a gallery context, which Daniel Buren said “flattens”1⁵ the artwork and which Robert Morris describes as “antispatial or nonspatial,”1⁶ the fixity and rigidity of the gallery (non)space is interrupted by a playful sound(song)track. This is not to assert that all the works presented here sing by producing actual sound, but certainly in an expanded sense, they can all be heard. And certainly hearing is the interpellated sense in this visual art context. But it is by no means a hearing conduced only cochlearly; as Sarat Maharaj asserts, “sound is a volumizer. It stacks up spatial blocks around the image, amplifying the feel of architectural-somatic expanse.”1⁷ Evidently, a relationship to the visual is articulated here, one of interdependency, or even one which comes to the aid of the retinal in order to impede that input from being the sole arbiter. However, the move would be trite if its endgame was merely to invert the sensorial hierarchy. Maharaj appears to lean in this direction when he thereafter writes: “sound is a corrective blast against retinal surfeit, it’s a deretinalizing force.”1⁸ But the strident tone is temporary.

What he ultimately advances is a notion of xeno-sonics, or a “noise as an overall, feral, unknown possibility.”1⁹ This kind of unbound unsound is akin to Lyotard’s prescript that “the task of the artist is to let the sound perform an act that seems to exceed the audible, and to record the trace of it in the space-time-sound that determines the field of the audible.”2⁰ The beyond returns and is reintroduced within the realm of discernable materiality once it is instrumentalized with a test function. But again, such a reduction can operate generatively: a play of dynamic tensions between the conceptual (inaudible) and the tangible (audible) staged through a body not only with opened ears but also one committed to mishearings and unhearings.

Lyotard’s hyphenated entity of the thought-body suits the task at hand: “the defining paradox of art consists in giving to this thought-body a perceptibility as a sensible and moving arrangement, certainly, but one that also suggests the ‘presence’ in it of an act that exceeds the capacity of this thought-body.”21 Dances a joyous choireography, a cycle of subtle static rings

The quintessential love song of a generation torn apart. The registers are torn asunder, gesture of love, memory triggers, a song moving in space. Ian Skedd’s laborious title, Sign Singing: Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division, 1979, Deaf Choir, 2009 indexes simultaneously the source, the method, the performer, and the three-decade gap. The video stages Ian Curtis’s sombre vocal delivery transmuted into a collective celebration imbued with deference, muted save for the minimal robes swaying along with the hand and arm gestures and the reverberant church room tone—a prime instantiation of Fred Moten’s notion of phonochoreography.22 The camera pans to the organ during the instrumental section of the

Christof Migone

song that we cannot hear. The pipes play nonetheless, they are activated by the camera pan. The camera listens. Beside the choir is another choir (but one even less literal than the last) and another dance, a dance of electrons. They share the Blackwood’s smaller gallery space, the e|gallery (name intended to allude to all things electronic). Darsha Hewitt’s installation posits that static is not static, but a subtle kinetic trigger in the form of an electrostatic charge harnessed to activate an array of bells. The components and the reaction chain are decidedly pre-digital: an inventive bricolage of obsolete technologies. Contextualized by an often clamorous atrium adjacent to the exhibition space, the sporadic freneticism of the ringing bells mirror or mimic the neighbouring activity. The periodic discharge of accumulated energy causing the bells to sound is hopefully echoed in the multitudinous synaptic firings occurring throughout this learning institution. If not, the bells will have to sound the alarm.

Breaths a paper bag breath, a cryptic monster music video, a tale of acoustic architecture, a song unsung

A breath is donated into a bag, and not by just anyone, by Pauline Oliveros’s lungs; the composer reverses the airflow of her instrument of predilection, the accordion. Once the paper bag is filled, it is breathed mechanically by Lozano-Hemmer’s apparatus. The automaton lung hangs in the gallery space, somewhat alien and clinical though retaining an anthropomorphic semblance. A breath manifests the I at its most present and bodily, but desubjectivized. Returning to Morris, he establishes a distinction to his model of presentness between a “real-time ‘I’ and a reconstituting ‘me.’”2³ The latter is predicated on a re-, a second-order, a trace of the precedent. The recurrent cleavage between the moment and its passing, the present and its absence, the immediate and its mediation, the I and its other, animates a profusion of theoretical debates from a plethora of philosophical traditions. How does sound inform or deform this discussion? Can an exhibition, focused on sound and foregrounding its play at display, propel the question to a position heretofore unheard? To synchronously stage here and un-here, to place and dis-place, to orient and dis-orient, constitute the modus operandi of a practice (curatorial, artistic, and beyond) constantly negotiating paradigms, polemics, and paradoxes. The confluences and contradictions amongst those three axes produce the rhythmic agents that animate discourse as well as the beyond-discourse, the remainder.2⁴ The Last Breath may be expertly constructed and statistically averaged to render the breaths of a typical adult over the span of a day, but it also produces a poetics of fragility, a pump dutifully moving its parts while life-breath hangs by a filigree of conduits.

A white crowbar plugged into aleatory digital processes accompanies a voice in a ritualistic performance. The whole produces sounds both alien and animal. It is hermetic; it is teratological. Then the video shifts to Alexandre St-Onge licking a toilet bowl captured in grainy footage—desublimation in action. The video displayed almost at floor level is lined with the paper bag breath across the corridor— orificial alignment. North and south winds meet at the equator. Confronted by the somatic, even when

Heard and Misheard Notes

107

Images 61-62; Track 6, side B

20 Jean-François Lyotard, “The Inaudible. Music and Postmodernity” in Miscellaneous Texts I. Aesthetics and Theory of Art, ed. Herman Parret, (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 209.

21 Lyotard, 213.

22 Fred Moten, B Jenkins, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 102.

Images 27-29; Track 1, side B

23 Morris, 77-78. Morris borrows this concept from George Herbert Mead.

24 The remainder is discussed under various names and through a variety of configurations. One salient reference in literary theory, though perhaps not well known, is Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (New York: Routledge, 1990). One can liken the remainder in language to noise in sound.

Images 37-38; Track 3, side B

108

25 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 18.

flattened by the screen, can cause a recoil. Understandably, understanding may be hindered by what may resemble a puerile shock tactic. However, the work can be accessed and appreciated if one changes the tuning to the visceral instead of the rational. In Bataille’s speculation, in the animal world “nothing is posited beyond the present.”2⁵ The linearity of the rational cannot function on a point, it thirsts for a line, whereas the visceral thrives as the undertow of the circular, spherical, lenticular domains. These are the realms working in consort with the unknowable and they provide complexity to the present:

The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the

26 Ibid. 22. Ellipsis in the original.

27 Georges Perec, L'infraordinaire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989), 12. Emphasis added. Translation mine.

“Perhaps we should start our own anthropology: one which will speak about us, which will seek in us what we’ve sought so long in others.

No longer the exotic, but the endotic.”

28 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, 107 and passim.

Images 45-46; Track 2, side B

Images 50-51

name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. But this too is poetry . . . 2⁶

The scenes in St-Onge’s video seem to emerge out of such a poetic present; it is as if we were witnesses to mere glimpses of still ongoing hermetic rituals; they depict perplexing actions perhaps but ultimately ones steadfastly endotic as opposed to exotic—the animal is our bruit de fond.2⁷

According to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht there is “a tension or oscillation between a meaning culture and a presence culture” where the former overwhelms or silences the latter.2⁸ Hear Here (a sonic progeny of différance2⁹) attempts to stay stuck in its presence mode, and sound may be the apt sensorial mode for such wanton disregard for an interpretable product. Or a stuck mode not so dismissive of paths yet to come, just content to temporarily stall, a kind of neutral disengagement which is “attentive and not arrogant.”³⁰ Press pause, stop right in the middle of that “indivisible point of the present.”³1 Sound in this mode does not construct a time, it foregoes memory, it forestalls recording. Even if it did record, it is as if the play button acquired an amnesiac function where it simultaneously erases. However tempting this line of argument, which appears to privilege presentness, may be, it is chimerical. But this trap is instructive for it is where the recurrent paradoxical twinned desire for and dismissal of presence (material, body) paired with distrust of and dependence on meaning (logos, reason) find their stage. One such instance, albeit a contorted one is Pivato’s Yesterday Wants More. Once a day, every day of the exhibit, the Carpenters’ song is sung by the artist. Those old melodies / Still sound so good to me / As they melt the years away. The contortion is that the song is unsung, it’s sung backwards, yawa sraey eht tlem yeht sa / em ot doog os dnuos llits / seidolem dlo esoht. An attempt to get to yesterday by going backwards; temporality in space. A Sisyphean gesture repeated every day of the exhibition. Attempt to enact an ontological asynchrony.

Another daily occurrence was David Lieberman’s “performance performity performativity performance”. The title’s repetitive variations on perform and the deliberate formatting jumble speaks to the work’s anomalous presence in this already heterogeneous curatorial mix. For the piece is inherently self-reflexive, indeed it is a poetic and theoretical essay presented in the hybrid mode of a pedagogue raconteur. While the neologism performity might perplex the attentive reader, the performed text discusses the term as used to describe “space as an active participant in both the production and engagement of its

Christof Migone

use.”³2 He later adds “performity is intended to address architectural space beyond its material physicality and to embrace its emotive character.”³³ I read that as yet another entry point for a poesis. An analogue of this can be found in Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of Mallarmé contra Wagner where the archi-theatrical and the archi-musical are advanced to describe “Volume as a rhythmic organon.”³⁴ Space rhymed; time punctuated by the appearance of the musician architect and his talismanic array, including a “sketchbook filled only with sounds.”³⁵ Expanses a turning bass floor, a box of hearing aids of the ocean, a patient sweeping

For Mallarmé, the titled word Volume appears in the following to function as a utopic merging place: “I believe that literature, taken up at its source, which is Art and Science, will furnish us a Theater, whose performance will be true modern worship; a Volume, explanation of man, sufficient to our most beautiful dreams.”³⁶ Basement Bass is a repurposed theatre stage fitted in such a way that the visitor must walk on it in order to go from one end of the gallery to the other. The visitor is thereby momentarily on Marla Hlady’s stage, unwittingly performing. The single upstep and bare stage might at first imply some sort of non-performance, but as the title suggests, there is a downward thrust at work here—lower frequencies, lower architecture. This is non-theatrical Theatre, bass and base.³⁷ First, the floor functions as a speaker thanks to a surface transducer that uses the material of the floor to disseminate the recorded sounds. This favours the bass, resulting in a floor woofer that induces a somatized listening, especially if one surrenders to the downward pull and opts to sit or lie down on the butt-kicking floor³⁸— the bones hear, the viscera vibrates. Second, the recording is of the sub-basement of the building (Hart House) where the gallery is located. The architecture, archi-music, archi-sound, of the site is sampled and encapsulated and rendered as a bass track. Further, it is figuratively grooved for the stage floor slowly rotates (this type of floor is called a revolve in theatre parlance). It resembles an oversized turntable, enabling those on it to move about the space while staying still; they are languidly spun by the work.

Nearby, at the other end of the frequency spectrum lies the small mirrored box with the piercing high end of John Wynne’s hearing aids. The feedback is necessarily produced live, it is of the present— a befitting property for a piece which is in memoriam of the artist’s father (the original user of the hearing aids). Accompanying the sound and object elements of this small installation is a video projection of waves far from shore, in the expanse of the ocean. The smallness of the box and its aids (tiny) and the smallness of the high frequency waves (tinny) contrast with that captivating immensity. Continuing to add to the full-frequency sonic mix of the works that occupy that side of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is sweeper by crys cole. Another video, another expanse: a large empty warehouse space methodically crisscrossed by the artist as she sweeps the room. The sweeping is framed in such a way that it plays with the distance of the figure within the enormous room in contradistinction with the proximate sounds

Heard and Misheard Notes

109 29 The homophonic play shared between the exhibition subtitle and Derrida’s différance manifests a connection at the surface-level; a more extensive study would delve further into the theoretical links as they pertain to the issues at play here between presence and meaning and the related metaphysical and logocentric processes addressed by Derrida.

Interestingly, from a curatorial perspective, David B. Allison, the translator of La Voix et le phénomène (where différance first appeared), points to the dual spatial (différence, differentiate) and temporal (différer, deferral) aspects of Derrida’s term. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: and other essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 82 fn. 8.

Images 18-19; Track 5, side A

30 Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 83.

31 Vico in Barthes, 83.

32 David Lieberman, script for the spoken word performance titled “performance performity performativity performance,” unpublished.

Images 78-79; Track 5, side B

33 Lieberman. Emphasis added.

34 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford University Press, 1994), 77.

Images 92-93; Track 8, side A

35 See list in this volume, 175.

110 36 Mallarmé in Lacoue-Labarthe, 71.

37 Lacoue-Labarthe, 71: “The Theater is literature itself, Volume or Poem . . .

If you prefer, the Theater, in its truth, is not theatrical”; and 76: “Volume is not, in essence, theatrical. It is rather archi-theater, and origin of representation.”

produced thanks to a wireless contact mic ensconced in the bristles of the broom. The discrepant soundtrack vis-à-vis the static wide shot enables the repeated minimal gesture to go beyond its acknowledged banality: “the repetitive part, in the mechanical sense of the term, and the creative part of the everyday become embroiled in a permanently reactivated circuit.”³⁹ For Henri Lefebvre, this informs a critical stance, and certainly issues of labour and gender are not swept away here, but can implicitly be read through the lowercase titled work by the artist with the lowercase name. A variant formulation, from a collaborative text by Lefebvre with Catherine Régulier, foregrounds another important aspect of this piece, its soma-space-rhythm: In and around the body, the distinction between two sorts of rhythm is found as far as in movements

38 The brand name for the low frequency audio transducer used by Hlady is ButtKicker.

[gestes] [...]: from the everyday (the way one eats and sleeps) to the extra-everyday (the way one dances, sings, makes music, etc.). The extra-everyday rhythms the everyday and vice versa.⁴⁰

39 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2008 [1961]), 45.

The empty space is swept with an accent on the extra, it is an additive sweep. In other words, the space is swept dirty—sonically at least.

40 Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier, “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities” in Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), 95.

Marks

Images 21-22

41 H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing In Books (Yale University Press, 2001), 264. The recent but instant classic case of artistic project with marginalia is Nick Thurston’s Reading the Remove of Literature (York, England: Information as Material, 2006) where the author kept only the marginal notes and underlines he had written in Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature and removed the commented text but kept the layout and pagination.

Images 34-36

42 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” in Silence, 109.

a graphitic silence, a tarred instrument and a wall in the middle of nowhere, drawings of the here and now, moiré pattern compositions, a bookwork tracking sonic movement

The marginalia of a book constitute a reader’s engagement in dialogue with a text and its author, it is a supplemental authorship, a gesture of philia that is both “responsive” and technically “unauthorized.”⁴1 With Ryan Park’s graphitic obliteration of John Cage’s book Silence we witness marginalia run rampant, an absolute noisification of silence attesting to the overabundance of commentary that this iconic book has generated since its first printing in 1961 (culling texts written from 1939 onwards). Park’s bookwork can also be read as a silencing of silence, a uniform undoing of language such that the now illegible words on silence are silent to the reader. Cage relished in contradictory propositions that mimic such apparent dichotomous readings, for example: “What we require is silence, but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”⁴2 In an extensive study, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” Douglas Kahn mounts a virulent critique of Cage, the gist of which is in the following: “he did not incorporate the social, or the ecological for that matter, into the immediate materiality of sounds, but only simulated their compass and complexity through undifferentiated totalization.”⁴³ In other words, the composer functions as the architect of all sound, enfolding it within the rubric of music despite an ethos of radical openness which proves to be merely rhetorical. Neil Klassen’s tandem Requiem and Ruin #1 and Requiem and Ruin #2 touches on one of the underlying arguments in Kahn, that of “human centeredness” in relation to ecological concerns.⁴⁴ Tar silences a trumpet and a cinder block wall sits in a forest. The Ruin could refer to the biblical story of the blowing of the trumpets enabling the crumbling of the walls of Jericho,

Christof Migone

but more generally (and contemporarily) the sculpture and the photograph stage statements of negation, they instill an arrest—etymologically requiem is related to rest. The idle mode is pertinent to the issue of presence we have been tracking throughout, and it implies a definition of time like Heidegger’s: “time itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in stillness.”⁴⁵

Drawing is a practice of arrested gestures, stilled movements, spent time occupying flat space.

With the added parameter of sound, music, and composition, drawing acquires extra-dimensionalities.

David Merritt approaches this conjoining in the two large-scale drawings by using key words germane to this curatorial project, here and now. These operate as ciphers, which guide the viewer through an audiovisual parkour throughout the page—an obstacle course of interweaving lines tracing the formation of syntax particular to song lyrics. These drawings sound because “as soon as these words are read as song titles, they cease to be silent.”⁴⁶ The memory jukebox automatically responds once a lyrical thread is recognized. The convoluted array is organic, like memory, remembering provenances but not always conclusively, a kind of practice that “echolocates rather than actuates possibility.”⁴⁷ Hence, there is a haze in these dissections; they seem to emerge out of the infrathinness of the paper that is the depth of language. A depth denoted by language’s infinite iterability, and manifested here not only in the work itself but in its titling. The untitling leaves the door open, defined only by the endlessly recombinant workings of words. The bracketed appendages, (here) and (now), momentarily specify the key by which we will be able to enter the door that has no lock. In other words, there is a contingent selection made.

With In Every Direction, the selection effuses both randomness and discernment—idiosyncrasy inserted in the encyclopedic impulse. The poetics of tables, lists, and schematics structured as inconclusive evidence—evident strictly of research, process, investigation, not of teleological aspirations. A bookwork that has a left to right, a beginning to end, but no end to begin with, and no right to end up with.

Sylvia Matas would probably concord with Daniella Cascella’s provisional proposition: “I think of writing as the other side of sound. Instead of looking for answers it echoes questions with questions, riddles with riddles, it adds complexity to complexity. Writing sound traces the shifting in the tuning of my words, of my questions, of sounds drifting.”⁴⁸ A bookwork splayed end to end on a single wall, contained and conventionally readable but also going past both of its delimiting corners, as if the line of pages continued every which way, like the multitude of arrows contained therein. Similarly, Chiyoko Szlavniks’ drawings drift. They wander in such a way that perception is destabilized and challenged.

These works are “perpetual essays” and are “always at work.”⁴⁹ The moiré patterns oscillate vision while transfixing the viewer—the back and forth it engenders works at a micro-level, minimal movement or even just a tilt of the head best reveals the pulsation. The three-dimensionality thereby induced parallels Szlavniks’ sentiment regarding her durational compositions: “A stillness enters the music, allowing listeners to notice things, to think, and to reflect. That’s part of what space in music means for me—that space of listening.”⁵⁰ Arranged on the wall in such a way to evoke a waveform, a sound wave on the wall, further forwards the peculiar spatiality of listening instilled by the three drawings—a quieting replete with infra interferences, a noisy quietude.

Heard and Misheard Notes

111 43 Douglas Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4, Winter 1997, 556-598, 589.

Images 88-89

44 Kahn, 587.

45 Martin Heidegger in Daniel Charles, “De-Linearizing Musical Continuity: John Cage’s Aesthetics of ‘Interpenetration Without Obstruction,’” Musicworks, No. 52, Spring 1992, 19-23, 23.

46 David Poolman, “Silence / Debris / Duration,” David Merritt: shim/sham/shimmy (London, Ontario: Museum London, 2010), 23.

47 Carl Wilson, “The Music of Not Listening,” David Merritt: shim/sham/shimmy, 52.

Image 6

48 Daniella Cascella, En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012), 73.

Images 40-41

49 Georges Didi-Huberman, Sur le pli (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013), 12. Translation mine. In the context of this book, the phrases are more about heuristic strategy and open interpretation as opposed to perceptual play, but I do not think that the latter precludes the former.

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Tracks

50 Chiyoko Szlavnics in Julian Cowley, “Chiyoko Szlavnics: Draws the Ear Towards Infinity,” Musicworks, No. 119, Summer 2014, 38-45, 44.

a skull turntable, a voluminous conclusion

Image 69; Track 1, side A

51 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Towards A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 100.

52 Steven Connor, “Photophonics,” text of lecture given at the Audiovisuality conference, University of Aarhus, May 27, 2011, 15, accessed June 17, 2014, http://www.stevenconnor.com/ photophonics/ photophonics.pdf.

53 Jacques Derrida in Rosalind Krauss, "The Blink of an Eye," The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 177.

54 Mladen Dolar, “The Burrow of Sound,” Differences, Vol. 22 (2011): 112-139, 122.

55 Gaston Bachelard, “Instants poétique et métaphysique,” in L’Intuition de l’instant (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1992 [1939]), 103-105. Translation mine.

Interestingly, Bachelard characterizes this poetic instant as being androgynous.

To intersect this moment with the recent book by Tara Rodgers might lead to generative results (Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)).

56 Bachelard, 104.

The actualization of Rilke’s fantasy by Mitchell Akiyama, according to Seth Kim-Cohen, is a fruitless exercise: “to drop a phonographic needle into the suture's groove is meaningless. As sound it no longer maintains any connections to the conditions that produced it. As sound, it is contextless data, pure noise.”⁵1 Steven Connor further amplifies the critique: “sonification prolongs a mystical soundobscurantism that gives sound studies much of its impetus while yet also enfeebling it intellectually.”⁵2 The work however, especially how it is titled (Ur-sound, or, the noise no writing can store) and how it was installed, is clearly a referential work. It has no pretense to actualize Rilke’s romantic notion of a skull-score unearthing the ur-sound, it merely performs the technique Rilke proposed. Transpositions of this sort, especially from a literary source, are by no means an unusual artistic practice. The piece presents the sonic results, and indeed they are noise, but not pure, far from it. The prominent literary reference provided ensures the contrary. Plus, I would argue against the necessity of the didactic apparatus; in other words, even without it, the sound work would nevertheless retain (however opaquely) its citationality. One could even argue that the audio work deflates the mystic aspirations in Rilke’s quest, for after all, what we hear is materiality at its degree zero, needle against skull, nothing more. No point of origin, just a reference, and that is in the material—what we also hear is the page and its words, as now record and sound. Nothing more, just a closed groove on a record, on continuous play mode, a playback mode that brings it forward: “for the ideality of the form of presence itself implies that it be infinitely re-peatable, that its re-turn, as a return of the same, is necessary ad infinitum and is inscribed in presence itself.”⁵³ So there is a kind of doubling at work here, or “an excessive presence, a presence too much,” a complex equation composed of perpetually accumulating derivatives.⁵⁴ The whole enterprise, from concept to form, behaves like an obstinate obstreperous machine.

Gaston Bachelard says that the poetic instant occurs on a “vertical” axis of time, correspondingly we might say that the sound art object performs a peculiar song whose duration does not flow, rather it is sudden and discontinuous.⁵⁵ In other words, the collective song played by the disparate chorus of assembled artworks, is resolutely abrupt, staccato, improvised. As part of the manifestation of this instant, Bachelard includes the “harmonious relation of two opposites,” which creates a “dynamic, excited, and active ambivalence.”⁵⁶ So, the instant is by no means simple or singular, it is vexed. Similarly vexed, the reluctance of the artist, the curator, the writer to be pegged to sound (as an art form, as a discipline, as a sense) in an exclusionary mode, as per Jean-Luc Nancy’s caveat that “nothing can be said about sound that is not also valid for the other registers and against them, [. . . they are] in an inextricable complementarity and incompatibility one from the other.”⁵⁷

Each work in Volume functioned as a stage, in some cases literally, in others metaphorically or conceptually. The concomitant reception (hear) and presence (here) required volume to act, to activate

Christof Migone

and be activated—the feedback of poetics. Each stage (t)here was present(ed) as the ground zero for a sound event. But as alluded earlier, the sound event may not produce actual sound, it may only reference it. In either mode, the possibility of resonance arises. Martin Seel characterizes resonance as “an occurrence without something occurring” and as such it enables a “forming beyond the formation of forms.”⁵⁸ For resonance to occur and provisionally materialize, an a priori condition must be met.

A constant, a base state is required. The formless forms, including silence (sound’s rhythmic foil), emerge out of a plural or hyphenated space, a space beyond space, a performative space. A voiced space, a sung space, in other words, a volumen—a Volume heard, a volume misheard.

Heard and Misheard Notes

113 57 Jean-Luc Nancy in Christof Migone, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body (Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2012), 176. Translation mine. English original in Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 71.

58 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143 and 152.

Seel makes a distinction between mere resonating and artistic resonating that I am glossing over here.

Exhibitions & Brochures

The list of exhibitions overleaf is followed by the curatorial texts which appeared in the original brochures that accompanied the exhibitions.

Soundtracks

Come a Singing!

Re-play

Video Heroes

Soundtracks was

The Edmonton Art

The Edmonton Art

SBC Gallery of

Gallery

Gallery

Contemporary Art

Edmonton, Alberta June 14-August 24, 2003

Edmonton, Alberta June 28September 14, 2003

(formerly Liane and

a three-part exhibition project (comprising Come a Singing!, See Hear!, and Re-play) exploring the diverse influence and crossfertilization of music and the visual arts in Canada. The project was initiated by Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer.

McMichael Canadian Art Collection

Blackwood Gallery

Kleinburg, Ontario September 20November 16, 2003

(University of Toronto

Montreal, Quebec November 20, 2003January 11, 2004

Mississauga)

Cambridge Galleries

Cambridge, Ontario January 24-March 7, 2004

MacKenzie Art Gallery

Mississauga, Ontario October 22December 14, 2003

Regina, Saskatchewan February 14-May 17, 2004

Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto

See Hear!

The Edmonton Art Gallery

Edmonton, Alberta June 14-August 24, 2003 University of Toronto Art Centre

Toronto, Ontario September 25, 2003January 11, 2004 MacKenzie Art Gallery

Regina, Saskatchewan February 14-May 17, 2004

Exhibitions & Brochures

Danny Taran Gallery)

Scarborough)

Scarborough, Ontario October 22December 14, 2003 Re-play: Rodney Graham The Power Plant

Toronto, Ontario September 19November 16, 2003 Mackenzie Art Gallery

Regina, Saskatchewan February 14-May 17, 2004

Volume: Hear Here Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga)

Mississauga, Ontario January 16-March 10, 2013 Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto)

Toronto, Ontario January 16-March 10, 2013

115

116

Come a Singing!

Curator: Andrew Hunter The Edmonton Art Gallery

June 14-August 24, 2003 McMichael Canadian Art Collection

September 20-November 16, 2003 MacKenzie Art Gallery

February 14-May 17, 2004

The musical symbols of an imagined community are many: an identif iable corpus of folk song, usually printed for wide distribution; national songs and national anthems; folk songs that spell out the history of the 1 Philip V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 54.

nation in overt and subtle forms; and, in general, the equation of folk music with national music.¹

Philip V. Bohlman The inspiration for Come a Singing! was a rather modest yellow booklet published by the National Museum of Canada in 1947. Compiled by the influential anthropologist Dr. Marius Barbeau with the assistance of musicologist Arthur Bourinot, Come ‘A Singing! was meant for “practical use” meaning that it was to be used in schools, by scouting and church groups, at summer camps and in the home. But it was more than this. Illustrated by Arthur Lismer, Come ‘A Singing! represents the convergence of powerful streams of intellectual activity that were well-established in Canadian popular culture: the Group of Seven’s model of Canadian art, the collecting and documenting of folklore and the defining of Canada as a northern nation of European heritage.

In the first half of the 20th century, numerous government bodies, academics, and cultural organizations were composing a picture of Canada out of select “authentic” pieces in order to create it, in the words of John Murray Gibbon, a “Canadian Mosaic.” Folk songs and popular Canadian visual art, with their related themes of rugged wilderness and rustic authenticity, were critical components. The songs that follow Lismer’s highly symbolic Come ‘A Singing! cover image of a halo encircled lone pine tree were meant to be received as more than just light entertainment. They were significant tools in a cultural program that included clear definitions of who the Canadian people were and where they came from (first France and Great Britain followed by a more diverse spectrum of Europeans) and what the essence of the country was (a hybrid rural/wilderness of virgin nature and vast resource potential). Aggressively pursued for decades, the core ideas of this program continue to inform popular definitions of Canada, a highly problematic phenomenon for First Peoples and immigrants from countries not part of this “traditional” founding narrative.

There are two dominant threads that run through the modern folk-based obsession to define Canada. One is the demographic breakdown of the country into definable racial groups with specific cultural traditions, as seen in the work of John Murray Gibbon. The other is the anti-modern fascination with rural or simple “folk.” This perspective is reflected in the paintings of artists like A.Y. Jackson and the song collections of individuals who “hunted” in the hinterland for genuine nuggets of pre-modern life and who then translated these collections into evidence of a region’s true nature. The work of Dr. Marius Barbeau in Quebec and Roy MacKenzie and Helen Creighton in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are prime examples of this. What needs to be remembered is that it was primarily outsiders, academics of the middle and upper classes, who defined the “folk.”

Andrew Hunter

When the twentieth-century intellectuals described rural backwardness, they did so with the ef fusive fondness of

117

grown-ups describing a childlike world they had already left behind. When they looked upon a f ishing family’s humble abode, they saw not rural poverty but the simple life. They rarely distinguished between a voluntarily chosen simplicity and that which the rural poor were compelled to adopt because they lacked the money to live in any other way.²

Ian McKay The strongest parallel between the focus of folklorists and many of the artists represented here is this romantic engagement with rural and wilderness settings. These parallels are not surprising as the paths of both disciplines consistently crossed.

Publications such as Come ‘A Singing!, Canadian Mosaic (with images by a number of well-established artists including W.J. Phillips) and George Bouchard’s Other Days Other Ways (with Edwin Holgate’s woodcut Decorations) are just a few examples.

The exhibition Come a Singing! follows the lead of the original booklet by pairing folk songs with works of visual art. The installation extends the links out into samples of other forms of cultural production that were equally influenced by the obsession with folklore and that promoted elements of the nationalist vision. Following an introduction to the work of John Murray Gibbon and concepts of the “folk,” the exhibition is organized into thematic groupings based on popular collecting areas of folklorists: The Maritimes, Quebec, The West, Lumbermen, and Northern Rural and The Great Outdoors.

At the end of the exhibition, a selection of films that either document or were influenced by folk music can be viewed. The National Film Board, an organization that played an active role in promoting an idea of Canada through art and folk material, produced all of these films. What the exhibition proposes is fairly simple: that many of the ideas that informed the collecting and promoting of folk songs were echoed in the subject matter and ideologies of the visual arts. Both reflect a select and narrow vision of the country.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.³

Ernest Gellner

Come a Singing! features the work of the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, NFB productions, and rare songbooks,

to emphasize the shared terrain of subject matter that inspired visual artists and the collecting and distribution of Canadian folk songs in the early part of the century.

Artists: Franklin Carmichael, A.J. Casson, Harold Copping, Lawren S. Harris, Robert Harris, Prudence Heward, R.S. Hewton, Edwin Holgate, Yvonne McKague Housser, A.Y. Jackson, Illingworth Kerr, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, Henri Masson, Doris McCarthy, Ruth Pawson, George Pepper, Robert Pilot , Inglis Sheldon-Williams, Philip Surrey, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté, Homer Watson, Mary E. Wrinch, Florence Wyle.

Come a Singing!

2 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 226.

3 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 169.

[Note that the spelling of Nicolson is incorrect in the brochure text as it is right now].

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See Hear!

Curators: Timothy Long and Ben Portis The Edmonton Art Gallery

June 14-August 24, 2003 University of Toronto Art Centre

September 25, 2003-January 11, 2004 MacKenzie Art Gallery

February 14-May 17, 2004

The sixties were a time of intense image-sound experimentation that changed the way we see and hear. From avant-garde composition to jazz improvisation to multi-media experimentation, Canadian artists engaged a range of musical forms, creating new sight/sound hybrids in painting, sculpture, film and performance.

From a spectrum and decade of diverse investigations, See Hear! focuses on three models of image/sound interaction that emerged in the richly creative period from 1961 to 1965. During these years, some artists explored art/music relationships with traditional boundaries. Others responded to such category-blurring practices as those of artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage or new interdisciplinary directions in theatre, dance, and film. In some instances they actively participated in new, non-traditional performance groups and musical bands.

See Hear! is divided into three sections–each featuring two artists or groups–which illustrate these various models.

The first focuses on two examples of how analogies between art and music offered starting points for new work. With his groundbreaking En Hommage à Webern print series of 1963, Montreal artist Yves Gaucher began a sustained meditation on the phenomenology of rhythm and duration in painting and prints. Throughout the next decade, Gaucher was inspired by the structural analogies suggested by a range of musical forms, including serialism, jazz, and Indian ragas. Jack Behren’s compositions based on paintings by Kenneth Lochhead make analogies in the opposite direction, creating musical equivalents for optical effects. Exchanges between the two Regina professors also led up to the 1964 Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop in northern Saskatchewan, which for the first time brought both artists and composers to this annual event. These analogies were in accord with the prevailing modernist paradigm, which admitted interaction between media only on the level of metaphor and structure. Such comparisons were particularly useful for abstract painters, who, when pressed to justify their choice to leave behind representation, could always point to music as an essentially abstract medium.

The second section of See Hear! looks at two multidisciplinary approaches to art making that combine both visual and aural elements. While co-leading the 1965 Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop, New York composer John Cage discussed Variations V, which combined dance, electronic music, video, and film following predetermined “chance” arrangements.

This hybrid was the result of his close collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham, engineer Billy Kluver, video artist Nam June Paik, composer David Tudor and filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. While Variations V was not performed in Canada, other Cage-related events were staged in Toronto by Av Isaacs or composer Udo Kasamets, including the legendary chess-game performance Reunion with Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in 1968. Michael Snow extended his Walking Woman series of paintings, sculptures and photographs into cinema with New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), made by the Toronto artist while living in New York. It demonstrated the structural nature of film, wherein a jazz soundtrack and a pictorial sequence became equal but independent elements, serving the conventional cinematic linkages between sound and

Timothy Long and Ben Portis

image. Through their forward-looking work, both Cage and Snow expand the possibilities of perception and point to a postmodern mixing of media.

The third section looks at two groups comprised of young visual artists engaged in individual studio practices while participating in collective music-making at the same time. Beginning in 1961, the dual freedoms of abstract expressionist painting and the bebop jam session provided mutual models for artistic and musical experimentation by Toronto’s Artist’ Jazz Band (Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, Richard Gorman, Robert Markle, Nobuo Kubota, Michael Snow et al.) Much of their artwork pertained to jazz either through representations of the figure in motion or improvisational strategies in its making. With their copious output of maverick music, hand-built instruments, and self-documentation, John Boyle, John Clement, Greg Curnoe, Bill Exley, Murray Favro, Hugh McIntyre, and Art Pratten of London, Ontario’s Nihilist Spasm Band gave vent to a regionally-based parody of party politics. Formed in 1965, the band has earned an international following for its experimental “noise” music performed on a variety of invented instruments including amplified kazoos and electric guitars.

Both the Artists’ Jazz Band and the Nihilist Spasm Band flourished in their own rights and attained considerable musical repute beyond the successful artistic careers of their individual members.

Together the models indicate a momentous shift, as modernist values connected with the purity of the medium, the sanctity of the studio, and the separation of art and society began to give way to a variety of robust hybrids. The early sixties were years of radical border crossing, both literally, as artists travelled to-and-from the “centre” of New York, and figuratively, as they dissolved the boundaries between media. Although hostility and resistance to these transgressions was frequently met, by the end of the decade the eyes and ears of the public had been opened to a host of new possibilities.

See Hear! investigates the dramatic surge of image-sound exploration that emerged in Canada between 1961 and 1965.

Engaging the most avant-garde composition, jazz improvisation and multimedia experimentation of the day, visual artists created a host of new art-music linkages in painting, film, and performance.

Artists: Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops 1964-1965: Lawrence Alloway, Jack Behrens, John Cage, Ted Godwin, Ricardo Gómez , Kenneth Lochhead, Art McKay, Jules Olitski, Stefan Wolpe Yves Gaucher, Michael Snow (Films)

Artists’ Jazz Band: Graham Coughtry, Harvey Cowan, Terry Forster, Richard Gorman, Jim Jones, Nobuo Kubota , Robert Markle, Gerald McAdam, Gordon Rayner, Michael Snow

Nihilist Spasm Band: John Boyle, John Clement, Greg Curnoe, Bill Exley, Murray Favro, Hugh McIntyre, Art Pratten

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Re-play Curators: Barbara Fischer and Catherine Crowston The Edmonton Art Gallery

June 28-September 14, 2003 Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga)

October 22-December 14, 2003 Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto Scarborough)

October 22-December 14, 2003 Re-play: Rodney Graham The Power Plant

September 19-November 16, 2003 Mackenzie Art Gallery

February 14-May 17, 2004

Over the past few years there has been an explosion of interest among visual artists in the popular culture of music—its diverse, yet ubiquitous manifestations. Re-play explores the ways in which 18 established and emerging Canadian artists have taken up popular music, its forms of musical and visual expression, in such mediums as drawing, sculpture, video, performance and installation.

The artists in Re-play are concerned with the culture of pop music—mainstream and underground. They are attracted by its themes and sentiments, its versatile styles of communication and its powerful, generative effects. Some of the artists seek a more immediate contact with popular music, immersing themselves within the circles of actual practitioners, collectors, and fans. While none of them participate directly in the industrialized end of music production—big sound studios, major label contracts, live television concerts—they flirt with the idea. Yet, in the end, all of the artists share a more reflective approach to the images and sounds of popular music.

The works in the exhibition offer observant replays, emotional inhabitations, ironic appropriations and a skewed perspective on glamour, hero-worship, and stardom. The replay of popular tunes and the mimicry of its styles are made into a means for these artists to act and reflect on forms of identity, community, alienation, and dissent. Popular music has become a particularly seductive means of experimenting with the limits and potential openness of cultural participation—of playing out the complexity of its passive and/or active manifestations.

In the work of some of the more established artists, links to the experimental ethos of the earlier generation may be recognized—although with an altogether different emphasis. The works of Raymond Gervais, Ian Murray, and Stan Douglas, for instance, focus on issues of dissemination, technical reproduction and the industrialization of music. Stan Douglas’s video installation Hors-champs is concerned with the free jazz movement in Paris in the 1960’s, and the television practices that were used to document it, while Raymond Gervais’s simultaneous replay of early recordings of well-known Jazz bands makes

Barbara Fischer and Catherine Crowston

reference to the “sing-offs” of the Jazz-craze. In Ian Murray’s Top Songs, the artist has recorded the first ten seconds of each of the top 100 pop songs from the 1960’s to create a 17-minute medley, while in contrast, Holly Ward’s soundtracks, compiled from found strips of cassette tape, at first evoke musical experimentation, but in fact represent the more-or-less familiar debris and massive dissemination of contemporary music.

Vancouver artist Rodney Graham has gained fame for his incursions into the field of pop music. A founding member of the now defunct band UJ3RK5, Graham uses music as conceptual overlay for film, video, and slide projection installations, but also has become a solo recording artist—performing live and issuing albums. This influence and interest in enacting music is apparent in the work of many of the younger, Vancouver-based artists in the exhibition. The desire to perform or join a band is often initiated by the mimicry of existing sound tracks. It is also a strategy in a number of artists’ work to mark the diverse relations that exist within cultural productions. Vancouver artist Tim Lee performs and thereby deconstructs existing pop tunes; Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Toronto/Berlin) enacts a song-and-dance solo which is edited and multiplied onto one track to make a series of solo performances into a band. Kevin Schmidt and Althea Thauberger, however, elicit a peculiar simultaneity of longing empathy and ironic distance.

This ironic resistance to the templates of popular culture is a central part of this exhibition. Joanne Bristol, for instance, reenacts the androgynous rock performances of David Bowie from the 1970’s and, in the solo-performances of David Armstrong Six (Toronto) and Pascal Grandmaison (Montreal) identification becomes a more open-ended creation.

The artists in Re-play demonstrate an equal interest in fan culture—its sometimes volatile mix of fantasy, projection and identification. Steven Shearer (Vancouver) has been collecting and editing photographs of men with their guitars, along with a diverse array of images from rock-paraphernalia: album covers, portraits of rock stars, song lyrics, and other items associated with fan culture. A reflection of his own addictions as a music collector, Dave Dyment’s Pop Quiz simply presents us with a litany of questions that are culled from and query our literacy of pop music, while Vancouver-based Shannon Oksanen obsessively collects and draws the album covers of the pop star Nana Mouskouri.

Obsession may also have subtler, culturally productive meanings. Zin Taylor records live performances of his favourite underground bands in Toronto, which he passes on as bootleg CDs as a means of “trying to make friends”—a fluid indeterminate sharing of aesthetic, musical convictions. Music becomes the lightening rod of socializing—a fact that is more overtly celebrated in the Toronto-based collaborative team of Instant Coffee’s mobile Urban Disco Trailer (UDT), a lounge for get-togethers where participants gather, select, and play various records from a large collections of singles.

More than a simple thematic exhibition, Re-play highlights a new, emphatic concern with the social aspects of cultural expression, its passages and transformations between creators and performers, and the blurring of the hierarchical organization of cultural experience. The gallery space is often displaced—literally as in Vancouver artist Ron Terada’s earlier, portable soundtrack compilations for exhibitions—and in this exhibition in his inhabitation of the spaces of marketing and promotion. His poster and advertisements for the exhibition draw attention to the contemporary ways of disseminating culture. More often, however, the displacement is conceptual, in that the gallery space is transformed into a provisional host for informal gatherings and exchanges through the means of music. The artists in Re-play engage with popular music from jazz to rock, from metal to pop. Some mime and enact it, while others document and record it. All are interested in the culture of music and the way in which it makes and breaks our sense of individual and collective identity.

Artists: David Armstrong Six, Joanne Bristol, Stan Douglas, Dave Dyment , Raymond Gervais, Rodney Graham , Pascal Grandmaison, Instant Cof fee, Tim Lee, Ian Murray, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Shannon Oksanen, Kevin Schmidt, Steven Shearer, Zin Taylor, Ron Terada , Althea Thauberger, Holly Ward.

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Video Heroes Curators: Sylvie Gilbert and Gordon Hatt Text: Sylvie Gilbert SBC Gallery (formerly Liane and Danny Taran Gallery)

November 20, 2003-January 11, 2004 Cambridge Galleries

January 24-March 7, 2004

Earsplitting, enticing and utterly predictable, the music video not only revolutionized television in the late 1980s, it inspired the hearts and minds of an entire generation that let itself be seduced by pop music and the extravagant imagery of what was to become one of the industry’s most lucrative promotional tools.

The aural and visual environments of our homes were forever changed by the music video’s relentless on-air onslaught. Saccharine melodies, rock anthems and beat-box beats alike were synchronized to a rapid succession of slick images of bands on the road, or onstage, but always surrounded by fans and nymphets for hire. The music video from the start sided with the spectacular and entertainment aspects of music, much like Hollywood cinema or the rock show had before it.

Following the example television had set just a few decades before, the music video became the main vehicle for superstardom, and like advertising, it promoted a look and sold a style. Well entrenched in the entertainment industry, more than anything else the music video generated extraordinary profits.

At once enchanted by the phenomenon of the music video, wise to its commercial concerns and perplexed by the industry’s incredible production values, visual artists appropriated the genre. They mimicked its effects rather than its means; the works included in this exhibition were made by artists who grew up with music videos, but also in the digital age of the sampler, the personal computer and downloadable software. They grew up with the tools of the DIY artist, the crafty creator operating outside commercial networks of production.

The video works presented in this exhibition take the form of short visual and musical essays that recreate, mimicking music video hallmarks like celebrity, performance and the symbolism of success, situations and settings of heartwarming simplicity. These artists have opted for spontaneity, with a heavy dose of tragicomedy; the irony and humour that unite their works reflect music video conventions, but counter the genre’s narrative traditions. For many, the figure of the star, or the hero, is the site through which they have chosen to infiltrate the televised world. Their forays lead into the complex experiential and emotional constellation that surrounds the hero, that sacred monster, source of identification, inspiration and permissiveness. Their attempted emulation of the best the hero has to offer, the transcendence of reality, is quashed by an omnipresent pathos. The video works selected here also attest to the emotional attachment their creators have to the pop music they illustrate. The element these artists most protectively preserve from television’s vocabulary is the emotive power intrinsic to the music and images onscreen, a testament to the music video’s impact on our daily lives.

In a work devoid of music soundtrack, My Heart the Rock Star (2002), Nikki Forrest shares autobiographical details that astutely express the position rock heroes enjoy in our lives. The two-minute homage to singer Patti Smith explains what Forrest sees as a hero’s promise: a character who endorses her sexuality and who allows identification with her. In her hero’s presence, anything is possible.

In Rob Ring’s Ultra Hustle Dance Party (2002), an immediate reference to the endurance performances of those

Sylvie Gilbert and Gordon Hatt

American art heroes of the 1970s jumps to mind. Ring performs for 60 minutes before the camera, dancing a disco choreography. It becomes clear within the first few minutes of the work that its action will remain unchanged and its conclusion will therefore be prosaic (the artist comes toward the camera and simply turns it off). The piece’s unusual length, in contrast with the music video tradition, makes us tune out; our minds wander to speculations on the video’s meaning, to the technique of previous steps, to the location in which it’s filmed (his father’s basement), to sartorial details (the artist’s white socks), or to the ridiculousness of the light effects, which go from red to green. Through it all, though, the artist’s perky determination remains heroically hypnotic.

More of an urban hero, David Armstrong Six stays true to the language of video art. His face, positioned inches from the lens, recalls American artist Bruce Nauman, who did many performances on camera. The tradition is however updated from the 1970s thanks to the mirrored sunglasses worn by Armstrong as he rides behind the wheel. This accessory acts as a sort of split screen, on which we watch the highway leading from downtown Toronto to the suburbs zoom by. I’ve Been Thinkin’ (2002) communicates its intent through the artist’s words, in a narcissistic loop – his face fills the screen, and the whole world is reflected in it. His caustic rhymes shed a critical light on the attitudes associated with success; his brand of hip-hop is urban, raw and streetwise. From his position in the driver’s seat he throws out a smooth rhythmic diatribe as he weaves through the tangle of thoroughfares.

Sunglasses are iconic in the imagery of stardom; they protect from unwanted curiosity, the California sun and ever-present spotlights. Tricia Middleton wears them as she lounges in front of the stationary camera, emulating the abused and disabused superstar. Theme Song II (2001), created in collaboration with Joel Taylor, puts us in the midst of a dilemma between oral and written narrations that pit hope against despair. The singer appropriates lyric segments by the band Spiritualized that pertain to the hard life of heroin-poisoned stardom, while words of discouragement for the starlet run in subtitles, warning her against the illusory nature of success. The fiction is also accentuated by the blurring of genders, the pretty, soft-focus starlet lip-synching the words of a man. The illusion is impossible, and as further proof there is no reflection in her shades, no hope for her to reflect.

Kevin Ei-ichi deForest and Tim Lee, also working with fictitious identity, merge more physically with the heromusician. During one of his regular second-hand record hunts, deForest came across a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady in Japanese, alongside video footage of a folk concert crowd in Japan in the early 1970s. That was all the motivation he needed to take a place beside his hero onstage. The sound-image synchronization of his work Foxy (2003) is as fake as the editing; the sound, like the quality of the image, wavers, accentuating the appropriation and highlighting the short circuits of the period, the ethnic mix and the talent that deForest is gleefully playing with.

Tim Lee’s fiction has a smoother flow, though it is more believable; consisting of a tricky superimposition of Lee himself and a pro guitarist, Funny Face, George & Ira Gershwin, 1933 (2002) hilariously discombobulates the fiction of dubbing.

Rather than make any effort to mask the mixing of two images from two different sources, Lee emphasizes their disjointed quality to highlight the two subjects’ different skin colour. The absurdity of the union contrasts effectively with the seamless imagery typical of the music video industry.

Using an accordion inherited from her family as a prop, Monique Moumblow, with the help of Yudi Sewraj, also enacts a scene of absurdity in their work Accordion (2000). Like Lee and deForest, the two artists double the number of musicians necessary for the performance, but in this case the multiplication is literal rather than the result of technological manipulation. Their cooperation, artificial yet evocative, forces Moumblow and Sewraj into synchronized action to play Little Annie Rooney, a tune from the 19th century, in unison on a single instrument.

Doubling takes a more extreme form in the work of Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, where his likeness is multiplied in modified versions until it fills the screen and forms a virtual choir. Thanks to editing techniques regularly used in the manipulation of digital images and television, Nemerofsky Ramsay places his different singing and dancing incarnations— the raver, the hipster and the androgen—against a studio background. I am a Boyband (2002) is a horizontally composed illusion, from left to right, that recalls the chorus line and plays on the seductive appeal of pop and boy bands.

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Though pop music is ubiquitous in today’s art videos, this was not always the case. The first wave of video artists were more interested in sound than music in their attempts to counter televisual strategies. Soundtracks of the period were composed of direct sound, voice-offs and dialogue. Music was there, but manipulated, transformed, sampled; used in an experimental capacity. The omnipresence of the music video seems to slowly through the decades have transformed the relationship of opposition between video art and popular music into one of proximity and emotional impact. Pop music today, and its associations with fantasy, pleasure, humour, and even sweet nostalgia, has carved out an important place for itself in contemporary art.

The musical piece composed by Tyler Brett (Propane, 2003) accompanies another car ride, but one more carefree in spirit than that of David Armstrong Six. We are invited by Brett to take our place next to him as he drives to his hometown, Chilliwack. It’s a journey at once nostalgic and abstract; the significance of the buildings under construction, the malls and the rows of houses along the highway is potent for the artist, but remains abstract for us. Brett’s camera records the movement, the receding highway and the passage of time, while the music becomes the soundtrack to his different journeys.

Daniel Olson’s dreamscape, on the other hand, is still. With his back to the camera, Olson sits and smokes in front of a picture of his mother pinned to the wall. The smoke from his cigar progressively fills the room in which he sits, to the point that it creates a translucent screen in front of our eyes, a moveable cloud, a protective yet dangerous haze. Olson is completely absorbed by the Bob Dylan song he’s listening to—or is it the task of creating all that smoke in the futile goal of filling the room that captivates his attention? In this work, titled Sad Eyed Lady (2003), Olson creates an ode, with the help of Dylan, to the evanescence of sound, smoke and memory.

In Morning Has Broken (2001), March21 (Jeremy Shaw) breathes new life into a 1970s folk song by juxtaposing it with the techno craze of the 1990s. The daybreak that signified for Cat Stevens a new mystic dawn, bursting with promise, reflects here the harsh awakening of exhausted ravers pouring out of an industrial building in Vancouver at the party’s end.

Sunrise has signified the end of a night’s reveling since the birth of rave culture in the 1990s, when raves were the ultimate performance scene, the place where music (rhythm) and dance (trance) intertwined. The mystical quality associated with dawn in the 1970s has become redundant, no longer representing social or political change. Dawn is the end of the party, the final destination of the night’s chemical voyage; the hope-filled musical message gives way to the bumpy return to reality.

March21’s poignant cultural condensing illustrates the acceleration of our musical awareness in the last 30 years.

For Meesoo Lee, it is also in its capacity for translating emotions that music is powerful. In Deer Dreams (2003), Lee’s talent lies in the pairing of found footage and songs in perfect narrative and musical unison. His manipulations and reediting of his sources are simple, thorough, and free of irony; they express with moving sincerity the respect Lee has for the material he uses. Deer Dreams invests Bambi and the music of Donovan with new meaning, and happily celebrates colour, music, and the animated frolicking of deer.

If the charm of 1960s pop music resides in its political and social naiveté, it is the formulaic quality of 1950s pop, straight out of the music-hall tradition, that fascinates. Mic in hand, the crooner would riff on the details of his own life – sometimes pathetic, often lovelorn, always smoky – in front of a shimmering club curtain. In I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong (1997), Anne McGuire reminds us of a time when audiences went out to clubs or hotels or bars to see their idols, a time before the arena rock concerts were tailored to the desires of crowds hungry for evermore dramatic special effects. Club shows were intimate, and relied on the particular charisma or sex appeal of the singer. McGuire reproduces in her performance the mannerisms of the genre; she parodies the failing starlet, the one who gets a little too drunk to carry us away into her imaginary world, to take us over the rainbow. The poor creature’s downfall is even more affecting because of the contrast it creates with today’s female stars, all-powerful and self-confident.

When it is completed, the work 80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music, started in 2000, will comprise 80 different minutelong music videos. Skawennati’s compilation highlights 80 songs from the 1980s, and will take the form of a jukebox on the Web. Hits by the Clash, Neneh Cherry, New Order, and the Cars are reinterpreted by Skawennati’s friends and colleagues, all members of the generation that grew up believing, thanks to the music video, that becoming a millionaire, a movie star, or rock royalty was within anyone’s reach. The compilation so far includes 15 clips, and gives each of the protagonists the

Sylvie Gilbert and Gordon Hatt

chance to finally shine under the footlights. The era’s songs are here freely modified, appropriated, and updated. When Christina Friedrich, a biological systems modeler by day, steps out of a telephone booth to the sound of REM’s Superman (1987), the scientist takes a step into science fiction.

Some remain immune, however, to the issues of celebrity, the inaccessible dream, and the power of the star, or to the emotional dynamics between the musical, graphic, and performance genres explored within this exhibition. Kelly Mark’s cat, for example, couldn’t care less about the squeals of Black Sabbath’s 1970 hit War Pigs intruding into its quiet naptime on the sofa. Mark’s clip doesn’t offer any crescendos, performance, or even any irony. The cat’s complete disinterest paradoxically helps to reveal the nature of our investment in pop music in all its forms and the space it offers us for illusions and projections; acting as a sort of epilogue, the clip War Pigs (2002) mocks the industry as disarmingly as all the other works in this exhibition.

Artists: David Armstrong Six, Tyler Brett, Kevin Ei-ichi deForest, Nikki Forrest, Skawennati, Meesoo Lee, Tim Lee, Anne McGuire, March21 (Jeremy Shaw), Kelly Mark, Tricia Middleton & Joel Taylor, Monique Moumblow & Yudi Sewraj, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Daniel Olson, Rob Ring.

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126 1 Émile Benveniste in Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 36.

2 Tony Smith in Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 131.

3 Hans-Georg Gadamer in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 64.

Volume: Hear Here Curator: Christof Migone Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga)

January 16-March 10, 2013 Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto)

January 16-March 10, 2013

Hearing Notes 1.

From the utterance stems the establishment of the category of the present, and from the category of the present

4 Gumbrecht, 107.

is born the category of time. The present is precisely the source of time. It is that presence in the world that only the

5 Daniel Buren, “Function of the Museum,” in Museums

by Artists, ed. AA Bronson & Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 59.

6 Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (New York: October Books, 1995), 197.

7 Morris, 77-78. Morris borrows this concept from George Herbert Mead.

8 These notes are a preliminary condensation of ongoing readings. The concurrent exhibitions at the Blackwood Gallery and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery instantiate another facet of the conversation. Rather than expound a thesis, these curatorial notes adopt an essay form and all the provisionality this genre affords. An example of a substantive consideration of these theoretical matters as they pertain to sound art is Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a NonCochlear Sonic Art (London: Continuum, 2009), especially chapter 3, “The Perception of Primacy,” where the title itself already hints at its critical stance by reversing the title of a lecture by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“The Primacy of Perception”).

speech act makes possible, since (if we reflect on this) man has no other way of living “now” at his disposition besides the possibility to realize it through the insertion of discourse in the world.¹

Émile Benveniste Volume: Hear Here is conceived around the vexed question of presence, the da of dasein. An ontological discussion considered through the tenuous objecthood, but resolute materiality of sonic phenomena. Benveniste's epigraph gives primacy to the speech act, here the intent is to supplant it with the sound act. The event of language taking place in time is replaced by sound as infiltrator, enveloper, occupier of both time and space. This is a moment akin to Tony Smith's famed conclusion following his experience of driving on an unfinished and unmarked portion of the New Jersey Turnpike: "There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it."2 The incompleteness which is a corollary of the decision to dwell on unframed experience is what Michael Fried in "Art of Objecthood" so vehemently resisted and is the condition of possibility of this exhibition project. Returning to the epigraph, the other bias it foregrounds is the role of discourse which also performs a framing function.

There is a desire in the twenty-four works by nineteen artists assembled here, however temporary and fraught the exercise of this desire might be, to go beyond meaning, beyond interpretation. Why this desire to seemingly bypass the straight path to knowledge? Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of a poem speaking not only through a "meaning intention" but that simultaneously a "truth lies in its performance."³ Serendipitously, he dubbed this dimension volumen.

2.

Following Gadamer's notion, the volumes at play here are not measurable or quantifiable, they are "sung" by the artists and mixed by the curator.⁴ In a gallery context which Daniel Buren said "flattens"⁵ the artwork and which Robert Morris describes as "antispatial or nonspatial,"⁶ the fixity and rigidity of the gallery (non)space is interrupted by a playful sound(song)track.

This is not to assert that all the works presented here sing by producing actual sound, but certainly in an expanded sense, they can all be heard. The following synoptic list gives an idea of the range: a skull turntable, a turning bass floor, a paper bag breath, a graphitic silence, a speaker igloo, drawings of the here and now, moiré pattern compositions, an amplified sweeping, a

Christof Migone

murmuring, a pair of feedback headphones, a wall in the middle of nowhere, a tarred instrument, a song unsung, a cryptic monster music video, a box of hearing aids of the ocean, a set of bells triggered by television static, a sign language choir, a tale of acoustic architecture, a bookwork tracking sonic movement, a cluster of ultra-sonic pest control devices, and a wireless headphone for head and mind.

3.

In the same text mentioned above, Morris establishes a distinction to his model of presentness between a "real-time 'I' and a reconstituting 'me'."⁷ The recurrent cleavage between the moment and its passing, the present and its absence, the immediate and its mediation, the I and its other, animates a profusion of theoretical debates from varied philosophical traditions. How does sound inform or deform (informe) the discussion? Can an exhibition, focused on sound and foregrounding its play at display, propel the question to a position heretofore unheard? To synchronously stage here and un-here, to place and dis-place, to orient and dis-orient, albeit momentarily, may be the most we can expect.⁸ 4.

Corresponding to the poetic instant that Gaston Bachelard says occurs on a "vertical" axis of time, the sound art object performs a peculiar song whose duration does not flow, rather it is sudden and discontinuous.⁹ In other words, the collective song played by the disparate chorus of artworks, is resolutely abrupt, staccato, improvised. As part of the manifestation of this instant, Bachelard includes the "harmonious relation of two opposites" that creates a "dynamic, excited, and active ambivalence."1⁰ So, the instant is by no means simple or singular, it is vexed. Is the instant here? Is it here as you read this, or there as you visit the galleries? The instant is not synonymous with the present, but occurs within it.

5.

According to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht there is "a tension or oscillation between a meaning culture and a presence culture" where the former overwhelms or silences the latter.11 Hear Here (a sonic progeny of différance12) attempts to stay stuck in its presence mode, and sound may be the apt sensorial mode for such wanton disregard for an interpretable product, for as Morton Feldman declared "sound does not know its history."1³ Thus, the repeat button contains an amnesiac function, the play simultaneously erases. Sound in this mode does not construct a time, it foregoes memory. However tempting this line of argument which appears to privilege presentness may be, it is chimerical. But this trap is instructive for it is where the recurrent paradoxical twinned desire for and dismissal of presence (material, body) paired with distrust of and dependence on meaning (logos, reason) find their stage.

6.

Each work in Volume functions as a stage, in some cases literally, in others metaphorically or conceptually. The concomitant reception (hear) and presence (here) require volume to act, to activate and be activated—the feedback of poetics. The stage here is present(ed) as the ground zero for a sound event. But as alluded earlier, the sound event may not produce actual sound, it may only reference it. In the latter mode, the possibility of resonance arises. Martin Seel characterizes resonance as "an occurrence without something occurring" and as such it enables a "forming beyond the formation of forms."1⁴ For resonance to occur and provisionally materialize, an a priori condition must be met, a constant, a base state is required. The formless forms, including silence (sound's rhythmic foil), emerge out of a plural or hyphenated space, a space beyond space, a performative space. A voiced space, a sung space, in other words, a volumen, a volume.

Artists: At the Blackwood Gallery: Dave Dyment, Alexis O'Hara, Darsha Hewitt, John Oswald, Ian Skedd, Charles Stankievech.

At the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery: Mitchell Akiyama, crys cole, Marla Hlady, Neil Klassen, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sylvia Matas, David Merritt, Ryan Park, Alexandre St-Onge, Chiyoko Szlavnics, John Wynne. Daily performances: David Lieberman, Juliana Pivato. One-time only performances: Vikas Kohli & Subhadra Vijaykumar, Erin Sexton.

Volume: Hear Here

9 Gaston Bachelard, 127 “Instants poétique et métaphysique,” in L'Intuition de l'instant (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1992 [1939]), 103-105.

Translation mine. Interestingly, Bachelard characterizes this poetic instant as being androgynous. To intersect this moment with the recent book by Tara Rodgers might lead to generative results (Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

10 Bachelard, 104.

11 Gumbrecht, 107 and passim.

12 The homophonic play shared between the exhibition subtitle and Derrida's différance manifests a connection at the surfacelevel, a more extensive study would delve further into the theoretical links as they pertain to the issues at play here between presence and meaning and the related metaphysical and logocentric processes addressed by Derrida. Interestingly, from a curatorial perspective, David B. Allison, the translator of La Voix et le phénomène (where différance first appeared), points to the dual spatial (différence, differentiate) and temporal (différer, deferral) aspects of Derrida's term. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 82 fn. 8.

13 Morton Feldman in Christof Migone, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body (Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2012), 7. Whether this statement made in "The Anxiety of Art" from 1965 remains factually true given the plethora of texts staking the history of sound art published since is debatable, nevertheless it remains a useful notion in order to consider the degree of self-awareness of an art form, especially one with historical tensions between its live and recorded manifestations.

14 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143 and 152. Seel makes a distinction between mere resonating and artistic resonating that I am glossing over here for the sake of space.

Biographies

Mitchell Akiyama is a Toronto-based composer, artist, and scholar. He has performed and exhibited his sound works and

installations throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Akiyama has received commissions from Akousma, Le Nouvel Orchestre d’Aujourd’hui, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among many others. He holds an MFA from Concordia University and recently completed a PhD in Communications at McGill University.

David Armstrong Six is an artist based in Montreal.

Martin Arnold is a musician based in Toronto. His notated compositions have been played nationally and internationally.

Martin is also an active member of Toronto’s improvisation and experimental jazz/roots/rock communities performing on live electronics, banjo, melodica, and guitar. In particular, for the last 15 years, he has been electric guitarist in the Ryan Driver Quintet/Sextet. Martin’s music/performances are a part of a number of internationally distributed recordings released by labels including Barnyard, Constellation, Centrediscs, Continuum, EVE, Fire (U.K.), Rat-drifting, and Tin Angel (U.K.) and has two albums entirely devoted to his compositions in print: Tam Lin on Autumn Records (Vermont) and Aberrare on Collection QB/DAME (Montreal). Martin lectures in the Cultural Studies Department at Trent University and the Department of Art, Culture and Media, University of Toronto Scarborough. Martin also works as a landscape gardener.

Toronto-born John William Beatty (1869 – 1941) worked with his father as a professional house painter and then as a firefighter, painting still lifes and portraits at the fire station between emergencies. In 1900 he travelled to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. Upon his return to Canada in 1909 he began painting the landscapes of northern Ontario, for which he became recognized. While quite friendly with members of the Group of Seven and sharing their artistic concerns, Beatty was never himself a member. He taught at the Ontario College of Art, leaving during the First World War to become an official war artist. After the war’s end, he returned to teach there, to the end of his life.

Jack Behrens (b. 1935) was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He received both his BA and MA in composition at the Julliard

School in New York and a PhD in composition from Harvard University in 1973. He also studied under composers Darius Milhaud, Stefan Wolpe, and John Cage. A composer and teacher, Behrens taught at the University of Saskatchewan, Simon Fraser University, California State University Bakersfield, and Western University where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Music. He has produced several award winning compositions, which have been broadcast by the CBC and US radio.

He is a member of the Canadian League of Composers and an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, André Biéler (1896 – 1989) immigrated to Montreal with his family at the age of 12. He suffered injuries serving for the Canadian Infantry during the First World War and began his study of art while convalescing. He continued his studies at the Art Students League in New York and with his uncle, artist Ernest Biéler. Upon his return to Canada in 1926 he settled in Quebec where he became enamored by the traditional village ways and painted rural scenes and the life of the habitant with the Modernist approach learned from his uncle. He later became artist-in-residence at Queens University in Kingston and taught there until retirement. He remained a prolific artist in a variety of media for the rest of his life. It was Biéler’s vision for a national funding organization for artists that ultimately led to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Born in Wesleyville, Newfoundland, David Blackwood (b. 1941) went to Toronto with a scholarship to study at the Ontario College of Art in 1959. He stayed in Ontario and became one of Canada’s leading printmakers and visual storytellers, depicting scenes of Newfoundland’s traditional culture and landscape. The recipient of a multitude of honours and awards, Blackwood’s work can be found in public and private art collections throughout the world. He has had a documentary made of him by the National Film Board of Canada. An art gallery at the University of Toronto, which he helped to establish, was named in his honour. He has been made a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. David Blackwood currently lives in Port Hope, Ontario, while keeping a studio in Wesleyville, Newfoundland and Labrador.

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John Boyle (b. 1941) was born and raised in London, Ontario, where he attended teacher’s college. He taught elementary

school in St. Catherines, Ontario, before dedicating his life to his art-practice as a self-taught artist in 1968. A figurative painter and strong Canadian nationalist, Boyle focused on the Canadian socio-political figure and was known for the dramatic intensity of colour in his paintings. He has exhibited extensively and his work can be found in major collections across Canada. He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1975. John Boyle now lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

Tyler Brett graduated with a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC in 2001 and completed his MFA at the University of Saskatchewan in 2009. He has produced visual art and music both independently and in collaboration with Tony Romano as ‘T&T’ since 2001. Brett resided in Bruno, Saskatchewan, from 2006–2013 where he and artist Kerri Reid co-directed the Bruno Arts Bank artist residency, gallery, mini-museum, and music venue. In the summer of 2013, Brett relocated to a small fishing village in Sointula, on Malcolm Island, BC, where he and Kerri Reid co-direct the Sointula Art Shed Artist Residency.

Joanne Bristol is an artist whose work investigates relationships between nature and culture, and between the body and language. She received an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (Canada) and has presented installations, performances, and videos in North America and Europe. Bristol also writes, curates and has taught at a number of Canadian universities. She is currently completing a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London (UK), using performance and writing to study interspecies relationships in urban built environments.

John Cage (1912–1992) was born in Los Angeles, California. He studied under Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and was

heavily influenced by various East and South Asian cultures. He was a leading figure in the American musical avant-garde and one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His approach to composition was unorthodox and experimental often using methods of chance and indeterminacy. Cage has also published several books, including Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) and M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973).

Known for being the youngest member of the original Group of Seven, Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945) left his native Orillia, Ontario, to study art in Toronto at Central Technical School, then at the Ontario College of Art where he would later teach.

He had a brief stint studying in Antwerp, Belgium, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in 1913. Primarily a watercolourist with a love of the Ontario landscape, Carmichael was also a commercial success as a designer and illustrator. He was a founding member the Group of Seven and exhibited with them regularly from 1920 to 1932. He co-founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour in 1925 and the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933.

Born in Toronto, Alfred Joseph Casson (1898–1992) began his study of art in Hamilton at the Hamilton Technical School in 1913 and then at the Central Technical School in Toronto in 1915. Casson spent his career primarily as a successful commercial designer. In his early years he apprenticed for Franklin Carmichael (also a commercial designer) who introduced him to the Group of Seven with whom he enjoyed painting in his free time. He would eventually join the group, but would not focus on art as a full-time activity until after his retirement. Casson painted many scenes of Ontario forests and farmland. He co-founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour in 1925 and the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933.

A resident of London, Ontario, John Clement plays guitar, bass, and drums for the Nihilist Spasm Band—a group of London artists who play improvisational noise music on homemade instruments. Artist Greg Curnoe founded the band in 1965 and surviving members still perform together regularly.

John Boyle - Brady Cranfield

crys cole is a Canadian sound artist working in performance and installation. Active listening is the fundamental core of

her practice. By drawing out subtle and imperfect sounds through simple meditative gestures she aims to concentrate the listener’s focus and in turn, reveal the broader sound environment that exists around and within us. She has worked extensively in live improvisation settings and has performed and shown work across Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States.

Harold Copping (1863–1932) was born in Camden Town, England. He first studied art at the Royal Academy in London,

continuing his studies in Paris through a Landseer Scholarship. He was a painter and illustrator, illustrating many popular books including A Queen Among Girls (1900), Little Women (1912), and A Christmas Carol (1920), and several widely read periodicals such as The Royal Magazine, The Temple Magazine and The Windsor Magazine, but he was best know for his illustrations of biblical scenes. His first commissioned bible, The Copping Bible, became a best seller in 1910 and led to many more biblical commissions. He also produced a wealth of religious paintings for the Religious Tract Society. A trip to Canada inspired the collection of watercolour sketches Canadian Pictures.

Born in St. Lambert Quebec, Graham Coughtry (1931–1999) studied at the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and then moved to Toronto to continue his studies at the Ontario College of Art, graduating in 1953.

He was a painter, draftsman, graphic artist, sculptor, printmaker, muralist, and educator. Much of his work was concerned with the abstracted human figure. He also played the trombone for the Artists’ Jazz Band. Graham Coughtry exhibited throughout his career at the Isaac’s Gallery in Toronto and was included in group exhibitions across Canada, the United States, and Europe. He taught at the Ontario College of Art and at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

Marc Couroux is an inframedial artist, pianistic heresiarch, schizophonic magician, teacher (York University, Visual Arts)

and author of speculative theory-fictions. His xenopraxis burroughs into uncharted perceptual aporias, transliminal zones in which objects become processes, surfaces yield to sediment, and extended duration pressures conventions beyond intended function. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally and published by Manchester University Press. With Asounder, a sonic tactic collective, he coordinated the (un)sound occupation workshop (collapsing sound and politics) in Toronto in 2013. He is a founding member of The Occulture (with eldritch Priest and David Cecchetto), a Toronto collective investigating the esoteric imbrications of sound, affect and hyperstition through (among other constellating ventures) Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic Imaginary, an ongoing workshop with yearly iterations, and the Sounding the Counterfactual stream at the 2014 London Conference in Critical Thought (a blog at theocculture.net documents their evolving thought-forms). He is currently working on a handbook of 21st century (futural) listening techniques with fellow phonomagus Lendl Barcelos as well as an expansion of the Glossary in its egregoric, chronoportative, steganophonic and rhythmanalytical vectors. His hyperstitional doppelgänger was famously conjured in Priest's Boring Formless Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Brady Cranf ield is an artist, musician and instructor based in Vancouver, with an avid and varied interest in sound and music. He is the founder and co-organizer (in collaboration with the artist Kathy Slade) of the ongoing public art project The Music Appreciation Society, and he frequently collaborates with artist Jamie Hilder on projects exploring the politics and culture of global capitalism. He has presented work at the Or Gallery, Western Front, Contemporary Art Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and Artspeak in Vancouver. He is also a member of the bands Womankind and Leviathans.

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Catherine Crowston is Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta, having joined the Gallery in 1998. From

1994 to 1997 Crowston was the Director/Curator of the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre and Editor of the Walter Phillips Gallery Editions. Prior to that, she was Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto (1986 to 1994), and a member of the Editorial Board and Chair of the Board of Directors of Fuse Magazine. Over the course of her career, Crowston has curated numerous exhibitions and overseen the production of several national partnership projects and travelling exhibitions. In 2002, Crowston served as the Canadian Commissioner for the Sydney Biennale of Contemporary Art and was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts. In addition to her work at the AGA, Crowston has taught courses on curatorial practice and public art at the University of Alberta.

Maurice Galbraith Cullen (1866–1934) was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and moved to Montreal in 1870. There he

received training at the Institut national des Beaux-Arts et des Sciences as a sculptor. At age 22 he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts where trained in traditional French academic painting, but his exposure to the Impressionists would leave a lasting impression. He returned to Montreal applying Impressionist techniques to Quebec landscapes and Montreal cityscapes and became especially admired for his winter scenes and his luminous renderings of snow. His work was influential to the Group of Seven. Cullen taught at the Art Association of Montreal and served as an official war artist with the Canadian forces in the First World War. He was stepfather and mentor to artist Robert Pilot.

Peter Culley is the author of several books of poetry, including The Age of Briggs & Stratton (New Star 2008) and Parkway

(New Star 2013), his writings on art have been appearing since 1986 and include a text for the photobook To the Dogs (Arsenal Pulp 2008). His photographs were exhibited at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in June 2014 and in the group show Black Diamond Dust at the Nanaimo Art Gallery in September 2014.

Born in London, Ontario, Greg Curnoe (1936–1992) attended the Doon School of Art in Kitchener, Ontario, before studying at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. Curnoe was part of the London Regionalism art movement, a group of London artists who made their home a vital artistic hub, and made their surroundings the subject of their work. He was a successful painter, art-community organizer, and activist. He founded The Region magazine and Region Gallery in London and co-founded the Canadian Artists’ Representation and the Forest City Gallery artist-run centre. He is also known for creating and performing with the Nihilist Spasm Band. Curnoe was an avid cyclist, and his hand built bicycle became a common subject in his later paintings. Curnoe died tragically at the age of 55 when he was fatally hit by a pickup truck while on a bike ride.

Kathleen (Kay) Daly Pepper (1898–1994) was born in Napanee, Ontario. She studied art at Toronto’s Havergal College and

then at the University of Toronto. After graduating in 1920 she studied at the Ontario College of Art under the likes of J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, and J.W. Beatty. She then went to Paris to attend the Parsons School of Design and the Académie de la Grand Chaumière where she would meet and later marry Canadian artist George Pepper. Daly was a skilled artist in a variety of mediums including oil, watercolour, pen and ink, lithographic crayon, pastel and charcoal, and various types of printmaking. She was known for her landscapes and portraits and was also an accomplished writer. She belonged to the Royal Canadian Academy, the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian Group of Painters.

The practice of Kevin Ei-ichi deForest (BFA University of Manitoba 1986, MFA Concordia University 1994) includes video and mixed media installation, painting, drawing, as well as curating and critical writing. He has lived and exhibited in North America, Europe, and Asia. His thematic focus is on the representation of hybrid identity, in particular his Eurasian heritage. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Aboriginal Art at Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba.

Catherine Crowston - Murray Favro

Stan Douglas is a Vancouver-based artist whose interest lies in the way in which histories and social conditions are constructed

and reproduced through the collusions of sound and image in media-generated representations. His pioneering film and video installations are recognized internationally with many major museum collections holding his work including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Douglas received the prestigious Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York, in 2012 and was the recipient of the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award in 2013. Douglas is represented by David Zwirner, New York.

Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based artist who often uses silence and dormant sound in his work. He has produced video,

photographs, performances, neon, LED, billboards, artist's books, records, multiples, one-hundred year whisky and LSD. Recent projects include Water Music (Electric Eclectics Festival), Is It What It Is and Other Questions (Power Plant) and The Day After, Tomorrow (Nuit Blanche). His audio works can be heard on the anthology/CD compilation Aural Cultures (YYZ Books) and on New Life After Fire (Art Metropole), a collaboration with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Dyment is represented by MKG127.

Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) was born in New York’s Lower East side to Polish Jewish immigrants. His interest in art grew from drawing to pass the time during long periods of illness as a child. He began his studies in art in New York, and then went to Paris where he studied sculpture at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. He moved to London, obtaining British citizenship in 1911. There he would become one of the leading portrait sculptors of the twentieth century. Working primarily in large-scale bronze and stone, Epstein’s sculptures were often controversial due to the deliberate abandonment of the classical style and his frequent use of sexual subject matter. Jacob Epstein enjoyed a long a productive career. He was knighted in 1954.

Born in Kisbey, Saskatchewan, Peter Maxwell Ewart (1918–2001) moved with his family to Montreal when he was two years old. As a youth he frequently travelled to Western Canada, cultivating an early love for the Canadian Rockies and the West Coast.

In 1938, he attended the Commercial Illustration Studio of New York City. Ewart was stationed in British Columbia with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. When off duty, he would sketch his surroundings on Vancouver Island and Spider Island, creating the groundwork for paintings he would build up and exhibit upon returning to Montreal after the war’s end. In 1948 he moved to Vancouver and took work as a commercial artist while continuing to work as an independent artist. Landscapes, cityscapes, woodlands and mountains were frequently the subject of Ewart's paintings. He was also the artist behind many posters for Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian Pacific Airlines during the mid-twentieth century.

Born in Huntsville, Ontario, Murray Favro (b. 1940) moved to London, Ontario, as a teenager where he studied art at H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial High School. Favro remained in London where he became a part of the London Regionalist School of artists. His multi-disciplinary practice includes drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation, often incorporating slide and film projections, lighting effects, and computer and electronic technology. He is also one of the original members of the Nihilist Spasm Band. His work is represented in major public collections across Canada. He is the winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

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Barbara Fischer is the Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University of Toronto

Art Centre, as well as Director of and Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. Her curatorial work focuses on contemporary art and its histories, encompassing the internationally circulating retrospective exhibition General Idea Editions 1967-1995 (2003-2007); Projections (2007), the first major survey on projection-based works in the history of contemporary art in Canada; and, the multi-partnered survey of conceptual art in Canada (Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980) which premiered at the University of Toronto Galleries in the fall of 2010 and toured nationally and internationally through 2013. She is the recipient of the 2008 Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, and was appointed commissioner and curator of Mark Lewis’ project of the Canadian Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

Nikki Forrest is a Montreal based artist with a practice that includes video, sound, drawing and installation projects. Her

short experimental videos have been shown at many festivals and galleries including: The Mix Festival (New York), The Glasgow Film and Video Workshop, Dundee Contemporary Arts, The Oberhausen Short Film and Video Festival (Germany), Ausland (Berlin), Le Center d’Art Santa Monica (Barcelona), Signal and Noise (Vancouver), Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery (Halifax), The Images Festival (Toronto), and the Festival Internationale du Films sur l’Art (Montreal). Nikki has also participated in several international artists residencies: The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec studio exchange residency in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and The Canada Council studio at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her current work explores improvisatory flows of ideas, materials, and processes emerging from interdisciplinary studio practices.

Yves Gaucher (1934–2000) was born in Montreal, Quebec. He was expelled from Montreal’s Collège Brébeuf, as well as the École des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, only to return a year later to study printmaking under Albert Dumouchel. While successful as a printmaker, Gaucher turned to painting in 1964, influenced by the New York Modernist painters Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and especially by the composer Anton Webern. Gaucher taught at Concordia University in Montreal. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1981.

Raymond Gervais (b. Montreal, 1946) was involved with the Experimental Music Workshop from 1973 to 1975. Since 1976

he has being doing performances and installations as a practice that relates to both sound art and conceptual art. Collaborating musically to Parachute magazine since its beginning in 1975, he also worked for Radio Canada from 1980 to 1993, doing animation and research. In 1990, he was invited to take part in the exhibition Broken Music curated by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier, the largest survey at the time of artists' musics, sound performances, and recordings. Since then, he has mostly been operating from sound in silence: about sound/without sound. In 2011-12, he was the subject of a double exhibition of a retrospective nature, 3 x 1, curated by Nicole Gingras at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Concordia University), and VOX, both in Montreal. Also in 2012, his installations To End and Achile Barclay (part of Samuel Beckett plays Claude Debussy) were shown in Paris and Brussels, both express his conception of an imaginaire sonore—an acoustic silence.

Sylvie Gilbert has worked with hundreds of artists, has curated a great number of exhibitions, edited various publications

and organized many symposia. She was director at Artexte, Montreal; she was Senior Curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff International Curatorial Institute at the Banff Centre, and Director/Curator of the Lianne and Danny Taran Gallery at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal. She also acted as the Canadian Commissioner to the Biennale of Sydney. She is currently Head of the Visual Arts Section at the Canada Council for the Arts.

Barbara Fischer - Pascal Grandmaison

Based in Montreal, Nicole Gingras is a researcher, independent curator and author. She is particularly interested in the image, be it visual, audio, or textual. The exhibitions and programs she has curated and the publications under her direction, her texts as well as the seminars she has led, deal with such notions as time, the creative process, the movements of thought, traces and memory. She is the co-founder of minute, whose creation and presentation activities in media and sound art have been conducted both nationally and internationally. She has collaborated with Festival International of Films on Art (FIFA) since 2003 and with Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) since 1995. In 2012, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. Her most recent projects include the curatorship of Raymond Gervais 3 x 1 (2011–2012), an exhibition in two parts and publication produced by Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery and VOX, Centre de l’image contemporaine; and Machines – The shapes of movement (2012), a series of 14 exhibitions for Manif d’art in Quebec City.

Born in Calgary, Alberta, Ted Godwin (1933–2013) graduated from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Art in 1955 and moved to Saskatchewan in 1958 where he studied with Barnett Newman, John Ferren, Jules Olitski and Lawrence Alloway at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops. He worked as an art director for television and as a neon sign designer before joining the faculty of the School of Art at the University of Regina in 1964. A founding member of the Regina Five, Godwin brought Canadian abstract painting to the foreground in Western Canada. He is known for his large-scale abstract Tartan Series paintings and richly coloured interpretations of the Canadian landscape. He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1974 and received the Order of Canada in 2004.

Born in San Francisco, California, Ricardo Gómez (b. 1942) studied at the California School of Fine Arts before taking a teaching position at the Vancouver School of Art in British Columbia. He sculpts using a variety of materials including bronze, fiberglass, lead, and clay. He taught at the University of Saskatchewan in Regina where he set up the sculpture department and chaired the Visual Arts Department. He also taught at David Thomson University Centre in Nelson, British Columbia, Concordia University in Montreal and served as Academic Dean at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. Gómez has exhibited solo and in group exhibitions in Canada and the United States. He currently lives and works near Kingston, Ontario.

Richard Gorman (1935–2010) was born in Ottawa, Ontario. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1958.

He was an abstract painter, influenced by the Painters Eleven and the New York abstract expressionists. His first solo show was at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto where he was dubbed one of the Isaacs All-Stars—named for the group of young artists connected to the gallery, including Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, Michael Snow, Dennis Burton, and Joyce Wieland.

Also a musician, Gorman played bass for the Artists’ Jazz Band. He taught painting and drawing at the Ottawa School of Art and the University of Ottawa and was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1949. He graduated from the University of British Columbia

in 1971 and lives and works in Vancouver. Solo exhibitions include Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2010), Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2004), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2002), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001), and Kunsthalle Wien (1999). He has participated in group exhibitions such as the 13th, 14th, and 17th Biennales of Sydney (2002, 2006, 2010), the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006), and the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Toronto (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis, Niedersächsiche Sparkassenstiftung, Germany (2006), and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts, British Columbia (2011).

Pascal Grandmaison lives and works in Montreal. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at

Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’art contemporain Luxembourg; Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto; Galerie René Blouin, Montreal; Galerie Séquence, Chicoutimi; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Galerie B-312 and Espace Vox, Montreal; Galerie Georges Verney-Carron and Galerie BF 15, Lyon, France; and Eponyme Galerie, Bordeaux, France. His work is represented by Galerie René Blouin, Montreal.

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Lawren Stewart Harris (1885–1970) was born in Brantford, Ontario and attended art school at Central Technical School

and St. Andrew’s College in Toronto. From 1904 to 1908 he studied in Berlin. In 1911, Harris became friends with fellow painter J.E.H. MacDonald—together they would gather other like-minded, nationalist landscape painters and form the Group of Seven in 1920. Harris painted in the Algoma region from 1918 to 1924, on the north shore of Lake Superior from 1921 to 1928, in the Rocky Mountains from 1924, and in the Arctic in 1930. At first influenced by Impressionism, over time Harris’ style would become more stark, geometric, and abstract. He founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists who advocated a spiritual form of abstraction. In 1940 Harris settled in Vancouver where he continued to paint for the rest of his life.

Born in Ty’n y groes, Conwy, Wales, Robert Harris (1849–1919) immigrated to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, with his family as a young boy. He first studied art in Boston later travelling to England to study at London's Slade School of Art, then to Paris where he learned to paint landscapes in the French Impressionist style at the Atelier Bonnat. He travelled extensively in Europe, Canada, and the United States, finally settling in Montreal. In 1883 he was commissioned to paint The Fathers of Confederation—the painting that would establish him as a leading portrait painter. He continued to paint hundreds of important figures of his time, including Sir John A. MacDonald and Lord Aberdeen. Harris taught at the Art Association of Montreal. He was a founding member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, elected president in 1893.

Gordon Hatt (BA Hons. 1983, MA 1985, Art History, University of Toronto) is a curator and visual arts administrator. Gordon

has been active in the presentation and the interpretation of contemporary Canadian artists for over 25 years. From 1988 to 2004 he worked in a variety of capacities at Cambridge Galleries (now Idea Exchange), the last seven of those years as curator of temporary exhibitions. He was Director/Curator at Rodman Hall Arts Centre in St. Catharines from 2004 to 2007 and for the last six years has been the Executive Director of CAFKA, the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area in Kitchener, Ontario.

Born in Montreal, Efa Prudence Heward (1896–1947) took her first drawing lesson at the age of 12. She later studied at the Art Association of Montreal under William Brymner and privately with Maurice Cullen. Her studies were interrupted during the First World War while she worked with the Red Cross in London, England, continuing with private instruction from Randolph Hewton, and then at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. In 1920 she returned to Montreal and joined the G Hall group of women artists. Primarily a figure painter, she is best known for her psychologically powerful portraits of children and nudes, often portrayed within a landscape. She co-founded the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933 and was a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Society in 1939.

Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. She has presented artwork across Canada, in Mexico, Scandinavia, and Europe. She is the recipient of an International Stipend for Young Artists in Sound Art from the Federal State of Lower Saxony and Braunschweig HBK, Denmark (2013). She has presented at Make Art Festival, France; Piksel Festival, Norway; La Periferia, Mexico; and MUTEK, Elektra - BIAN, Studio XX, and InterAccess, in Canada. In keeping with her interest in making technology accessible, she teaches do-it-yourself electronics workshops in artist-run organizations, youth centres, schools, and with feminist groups. Hewitt takes part in several open-source technology communities. Her work is represented by Perte De Signal.

Randolph Stanley Hewton (1888–1960) was born in Mégantic, Quebec, and moved to Lachine, near Montreal, with his family at an early age. He first studied painting under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal and then at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1908 to 1913. He met A.Y. Jackson while in Paris and they would become painting companions. During the First World War, Hewton served in the Canadian and British army, receiving the Military Cross in 1918. A painter of portraits, figures, nudes and landscapes, he was also a businessman working for Miller Brothers, a paper box company, of which he would eventually become president. He taught painting at the Art Association of Montreal from 1921 to 1924. He was one of the founding members of the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933 and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1934.

Lawren Stewart Harris - Andrew Hunter

Marla Hlady draws, makes sculpture, works with sites and sounds, and sometimes makes video. Hlady's kinetic sculptures

and sound pieces often consist of common objects (such as teapots, cocktail mixers, jars) that are expanded and animated to reveal unexpected sonic and poetic properties often using a system-based approach to composition. She currently lectures at the University of Toronto. She has mounted site works in such places as the fjords of Norway, a grain silo, an apartment window, a tour bus, the Hudson’s Bay department store display window, an empty shell of a building, a roof top. Marla Hlady lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Jessica Bradley.

Born in Allandale, Ontario, Edwin Holgate (1892–1977) first studied art under Maurice Cullen and William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal. In 1912 he went to Paris to further his studies, returning to Canada at the onset of World War I, which brought him back to France as a soldier for the Canadian Army until 1919. A major player in the Montreal art scene, he was a key figure in the formation of the Beaver Hall Group. Perhaps best known as a portraitist, Holgate was a diverse artist; he was an engraver, draftsman, landscape and figure painter, printmaker, book illustrator, muralist, and war artist. His work was included in several Group of Seven exhibitions and he was made a member of the group in 1929. He taught at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal from 1928 to 1934 and was elected an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1935.

Ihor Holubizky is Senior Curator at the McMaster Museum of Art, McMaster University, Hamilton. He has held curatorial positions across Canada and in Australia, and received a PhD in art history from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Holubizky has contributed to numerous publications in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia on a wide range of topics in visual cultural and social history. He was active as a musician, composer, and crooner in the 1970s and 80s— recording and performing in Canada, Germany and Brazil—and has continued collaborative compositional work for installations, stage, and film when the need arises.

Bess Larkin Housser (1890–1969) was born in Brandon, Manitoba. She took some private painting instruction from F.H. Varley, but was mostly a self-taught artist. Regardless of the lack of formal instruction, Housser’s paintings were strong enough to be exhibited with the Group of Seven throughout the 1920’s and in the U.S. in the 1920’s and 30’s. In the mid 1920’s many of her writings about art were featured in The Canadian Bookman. Her work can be found in private and public collections across Canada. Bess Housser divorced her husband, F.B. Housser, and married Lawren Harris in 1934, after which she would be known as Bess Larkin Housser Harris.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Yvonne McKague Housser (1897–1996) attended the Ontario College of Art during the First World War. She continued to study extensively: in Paris at the Grande Chaumière, the Académie Colarossi, and the Académie Ranso; at the University of Vienna; in Taos, New Mexico; and, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. A colleague of the Group of Seven, Housser travelled to northern Ontario and the Canadian Rockies to paint the Canadian landscape. She first exhibited her work in 1923 with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, later participating in three Group of Seven shows, followed by several national and international exhibitions. Housser was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and Federation of Canadian Artists, and was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists and Royal Canadian Academy. She was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1984. Housser taught at the Ontario College of Art. Andrew Hunter is an accomplished curator, artist, writer and educator. He is currently the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian

Art, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Hunter has held curatorial positions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Kamloops Art Gallery, the University of Waterloo, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre Art Gallery. With Lisa Hirmer, he co-founded DodoLab, an international program of community collaboration and interdisciplinary creative research. Hunter most recently curated the exhibition Alex Colville and oversaw the reinstallation of the Canadian galleries featuring major works by indigenous artists.

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Instant Cof fee [IC] is a service oriented curatorial and artist collective most recently based in Vancouver. IC's frequent practice

is to build venues or stages for organized events from formal lectures and screenings to informal gatherings and workshops.

These artworks often require hosts who initiate some form of performative interaction. As an artist collective they have invested in combining the social with the aesthetic, and as such have worked in public spaces to engage large audiences. In 2013 IC exhibited Take the Easy Way at MKG 127, Toronto, as well as produced The hero, the villain, the salesman, the parent, a side kick and a servant at Teck Gallery, SFU, Vancouver. IC also participated in a residence program at Incheon Art Platform, South Korea, and have designed an installation for the Craft Biennale Cheongju International. IC produced two public artworks, Perpetual Sunset, a sequin sunset in Richmond, BC, and Blanket Mural, a sculptural wall mural for the City of Edmonton. As part of the City of Vancouver’s 2010 Cultural Olympic program, IC opened Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue. In 2009 IC exhibited the Disco Fallout Shelter, at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, and as part of Subvision, Hamburg; Nooks as part of How Soon is Now, Vancouver Art Gallery. Instant Coffee’s current members include Jinhan Ko, Khan Lee, Kelly Lycan, and Jenifer Papararo; past members include Kate Monro, Jon Sasaki, Cecilia Berkovic, Timothy Comeau, and Emily Hogg.

A native of Montreal, a young A.Y. Jackson (1882–1974) took evening art classes at Montreal’s Monument-National while working for a lithograph company. In 1906 he made his way to Chicago, finding work at a commercial art firm while taking courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. The following year, his interest in art took him to France where he studied Impressionism and committed to becoming a serious painter. Studies at Académie Julian in Paris ensued. Shortly after returning to Montreal, Lawren Harris showed interest in buying one of Jackson’s paintings, compelling Jackson to go to Toronto where he would meet the future members of the Group of Seven. Jackson spent his career travelling Canada, sketching and painting landscapes, working towards the creation of a uniquely Canadian national art form, breaking only briefly to serve as a war artist during the First World War from 1917 to 1919. A founder and leading member of the Group of Seven, Jackson was highly influential and played key role in the development of Canadian Art. He taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts.

Illingworth Holey Kerr (1905–1989) was born in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. First studying art at Central Technical School in

Toronto, Kerr went on to study under Arthur Lismer, J.E.H MacDonald, and Frederick Varley at the Ontario College of Art where he was trained in the landscape tradition of the Group of Seven. In the 1930’s he found employment in Saskatchewan on harvest and railway crews, painting when he could, until travelling to London in 1936 to attend the Westminster School of Art. Prairie landscapes were a favourite subject matter. Kerr taught at the Vancouver School of Art from 1945 to 1947 when he became the director of the art department of the Provincial Institute of Technology in Calgary. Kerr was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1983. He was given a retrospective exhibition at nine major public galleries in 1985 and completed his autobiography, Paint and Circumstance, in 1987.

Neil Klassen is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, photography and drawing.

Investigating subjects ranging from the political and environmental crises, to the intertwined nature of spiritual and physical experiences, he seeks to convey tensions between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, and life and death. Neil holds an MFA from Western University, and a BFA from OCADU. He currently teaches Drawing and Painting at Western University.

Film composer and music producer Vikas Kohli from FatLabs is the first composer to receive a Trailblazer Award from the ReelWorld Film Festival, the first composer to receive a Voice Achievers Award, and is also recipient of a MARTY award from the Mississauga Arts Council. Kohli has worked with filmmakers and recording artists from Bollywood, Canada, the United States, and Europe. Kohli has been profiled by ET Canada, CBC’s The National, CTV, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, The Hindustan Times, Times of India, and Zee News.

Instant Cof fee - Timothy Long

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Nobuo Kubota (b. 1932) graduated from the University of Toronto and practiced architecture for ten years before turning to the arts in 1969. In 1970 he spent a year in Kyoto, Japan, studying with a Zen master in a Buddhist monastery—an experience that would be highly influential to his work as an artist. A musician, a sculptor, and a performer Kubota’s work often combines sound, music, installation, and film. He was a member of the Artists’ Jazz Band and played with CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective) free-improv band. He is known for his extended vocal practices and his sound poetry. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2009. Nobuo Kubota lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Meesoo Lee lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Tim Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, and lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia and a Bachelor of Design from the University of Alberta. He has shown, taught, and lectured nationally and internationally and has been collected by major public institutions in Berlin, London, Madrid, Miami, Montreal, Munich, Ottawa, San Francisco, Seoul, Toronto, Vancouver, and Zürich. Lee is represented by the Lisson Gallery in London, Milan, and New York); the Johnen Galerie in Berlin; and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich.

Educated in architecture, sculpture, and industrial design, David Lieberman has been a practicing architect since 1974. He is an Associate Professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, and has a long term adjunct appointment at the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo. Recent publications include research on responsible and sustainable architectures, speculative and constructed landscapes, and critical works on music, acoustics, and architecture.

He is a member of the planning committee for the soundaXis festival of New Music and a board member of the Music Gallery.

David Lieberman is not a musician, but has enjoyed the pleasures of music and is constantly challenged by the space between notes.

Born in Sheffield, England, Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) received his early art training through classes at the Sheffield School of Art while he worked apprenticing for a photoengraving company. In 1906 he travelled to study at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1911 he immigrated to Canada and found work at a Toronto design firm where he met friends J.E.H. MacDonald, F.H. Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael, with whom he would form the Group of Seven in 1920. He joined his fellow artists painting landscapes in Ontario’s North, later painting scenes in the Rockies and Atlantic Canada.

An educator as much as an artist, Lismer served as Principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design (now the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) from 1916 to 1919 and was Vice-Principal of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto from 1919 until 1927. That same year he became supervisor of education at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) becoming a leader in children’s art education. He taught at the Art Association of Montreal from 1940 until 1967.

Kenneth Lochhead (1926–2006) was born in Ottawa, Ontario. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Barnes Foundation. An artist and educator, Lochhead was at the forefront of the modern art movement in Canada, forming The Regina Five group of abstract painters in 1960. He was Director of the Regina School of Art at the University of Saskatchewan in 1950 and created the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops in 1955. He later taught at the University of Manitoba, York University, and at the University of Ottawa until he retired to paint full-time. Lochhead was a member of the Order of Canada the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2006.

Timothy Long has been Head Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, since 2001. His interest in the

mimetic theory of René Girard has resulted in a decade of critical investigations, including the exhibitions: Wanda Koop: Sightlines (2002), The Limits of Life: Arnulf Rainer and Georges Rouault (2002), Let Me Be Your Mirror (2007), Double Space (2008), My Evil Twin (2009), and After Presence (2012). His other interests include interdisciplinary approaches to ceramics, film, dance, and performance art, including the exhibition Masculin/Féminin: Ian Wallace and Jean-Luc Godard (2010) and a series of collaborations with the Regina contemporary dance company New Dance Horizons.

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian artist. In 2007 he was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the

Venice Biennale. He has also shown at biennials in Sydney, Liverpool, Shanghai, Istanbul, Seville, Seoul, Havana, New Orleans, Singapore, and Moscow. His public artwork has been commissioned for events such as the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin, the memorial for the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico, the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. His work is in collections such as MoMA in New York, Jumex in Mexico, Daros in Zürich, and TATE in London.

Born in Biddeford, Maine, in 1866, John Goodwin Lyman (1886–1967) lived in Europe from 1907 to 1931. He attended the Académie Julian in Paris, but most important was the time he spent studying at Académie Matisse, which would inform both his writing and his art practice for his entire career. A proponent of modern art in Canada he was adverse to the style of the Group of Seven, favouring a formal approach to painting that emphasized colour, line, and form. In 1931 he moved to Montreal where he exhibited Fauvist-influenced paintings and became an arts writer for The Montrealer, concerning himself with the promotion of the Canadian art scene. In 1939 Lyman established the Contemporary Arts Society and in 1949 he became an art professor at McGill University in Montreal.

Doris McCarthy (1910–2010) was born in Calgary, Alberta. She studied art in Toronto at the Ontario College of Art under Arthur Lismer, and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, England. McCarthy travelled extensively in Canada and abroad painting landscapes, including many trips to the Canadian Arctic. She became a member of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1945, an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1951 and was the president for the Society of Painters in Water Colour from 1953 to 1955. She was the recipient of both the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada.

McCarthy taught at Central Technical School for forty years.

J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–1932) emigrated with his family from Durham, England, to Hamilton, Ontario when he was 14.

There he would begin his art training at the Hamilton Art School, moving later to Toronto to study at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design. He met Arthur Lismer, F.H. Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael while they all worked as graphic designers at a Toronto design firm. In 1912 he gave up his career as a graphic designer to become a full-time landscape painter, travelling on sketching trips to northern Ontario with his colleagues and fellow painters, with whom he would form the Group of Seven in 1920. MacDonald was also a poet, a calligrapher, and a teacher. He taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, serving as Principal from 1928 until his death.

Anne McGuire began making videos during her studies in the 1980s. She experiments with conventions of perception. For her

film Strain Andromeda, The (1993), she re-edited Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain (1971) in such a way that it starts with the end, and ends with the beginning. In 2010, the San Francisco Film Society named McGuire an “Essential Filmmaker” along with Les Blank, Bruce Conner, Lynn Herschman, and Marlon Riggs. Her newest backwards-edit video Inferno Towering, The, had its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 2011. Anne paints, writes poems and short stories, and performs on stage as a singer as Freddy McGuire Show with longtime musical collaborator Wobbly (Jon Leidecker). Her videos are distributed

by Video Databank in Chicago and LUX Distribution in London. She lives in San Francisco.

Pegi Nicol MacLeod (1904–1949) (born Margaret Kathleen Nicol) hailed from Listowel, Ontario, and studied art at the Ottawa

School of Art and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montréal. She painted landscapes under a Group of Seven influence in Ottawa and Quebec and travelled to western Canada to paint First Nations landscapes and people. She worked in Toronto designing window displays for the T. Eaton Co. and writing and doing illustrations for Canadian Forum before moving to New York in 1937. During the Second World War, MacLeod was commissioned to paint the activities of the women’s division of the Canadian armed forces. She belonged to the Canadian Group of Painters, the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, and taught at the University of New Brunswick.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer - Tricia Middleton and Joel Taylor

Toronto based artist Kelly Mark works in variety of media including: sculpture, video, installation, drawing, photography, sound, multiples, performance, and public interventions (not painting). She shows extensively nationally and internationally and her work is part of the collections of The National Gallery of Canada, The Canada Council Art Bank, Canadian Foreign Affairs, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d'art contemporain, as well as many other public, corporate, and private collections.

Kelly Mark is represented by Diaz Contemporary.

Robert Markle (1936–1990) was born in Hamilton, Ontario, of Mohawk ancestry. He studied at the Ontario College of Art, but was expelled before graduation. He was an artist, writer, educator, and musician who became known early in his career for his controversial paintings of female nudes. Markle worked primarily in painting and ink drawing, and also explored photography, collage, printmaking, wooden sculpture, and neon. He wrote articles on a wide variety of topics for many publications including Toronto Telegram Showcase, Maclean’s, and Toronto Life, and played the tenor saxophone and piano in the Artists’ Jazz Band. He taught at the Ontario College of Art and the University of Guelph.

Born in Belgium, Henri Masson (1907–1996) began his study of art in Brussels at the Athénée Royale when he was 13. After moving to Ottawa he took work at an engraving studio while attending art classes at the Ottawa Art Association and the Ottawa Art Club.

Masson spent many years working as an engraver, painting when he could, in the evenings and on weekends, finally becoming a fulltime painter in 1945. He painted in a colourful style using oils or watercolours and favoured landscapes and scenes from the Ottawa region and the province of Quebec. He was a member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour and the Canadian Society for Graphic Arts. He taught at Queen’s University in Kingston and at the Banff School of Fine Arts.

Sylvia Matas is an interdisciplinary artist. She grew up in Winnipeg, and after living in China, Montreal, and London

(where she received her MFA in 2008), she has returned home. Her work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, including at AKA Gallery, Saskatoon; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; and Uturdur, Reykjavik.

David Merritt ’s drawing and multimedia works have been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally, including the

National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, the Textile Museum of Canada, and TENT CBK in Rotterdam. A touring survey and catalogue of his work, shim/sham/shimmy has been circulated by Museum London in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the MacLaren Art Centre, and the Art Gallery of Windsor. Merritt is based in London, Ontario, where he teaches at Western University. He is represented by Jessica Bradley.

Jonathan Middleton is an artist and curator based in Vancouver and has served as director/curator of the Or Gallery since

September 2007. Between 1999 and 2005, he served as director/curator of the Western Front Exhibitions. Middleton co-founded Projectile Publishing Society (1999) and was founding publisher of its art periodical Fillip (2004/2005). He continues to serve as chair of the society’s board of directors.

Tricia Middleton and Joel Taylor began collaborating on film, installation, and single channel video in Vancouver in 1998.

Tricia Middleton holds a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA from Concordia University. Joel Taylor holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University. Middleton and Taylor’s single-channel videotapes have been shown internationally at festivals, screenings, and galleries including the Chicago Filmmaker’s Society (2004); New York Video Festival (2001, 2003); Rencontres internationale Paris/Berlin (2002, 2003); WRO Media Arts Festival, Wroclaw (2003); Videobrasil Electronic Arts Festival, Sao Paolo (2001); Argos Arts Centre, Brussels (2001); amongst many others. Solo exhibitions of their work include Art Star 3 Video Art Biennial, Saw Video, Ottawa (2007); SOS, Khyber Centre, Halifax (2002); and Vampyr, Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver (2002). Group shows include Split Decisions, Vtape Video Salon, Toronto (2005); Video Heroes, Cambridge Galleries (2004); Video Heroes, Saiyde Bronfman Centre, Montreal (2003); and Backpacker, London Art Biennial, London, UK (2002).

Their tapes are distributed by Vtape in Toronto and Video Out in Vancouver.

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Christof Migone is an artist, curator, and writer. He co-edited Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Los Angeles: Errant

Bodies Press, 2001) and his writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, Performance Research, etc. He has curated numerous exhibitions and events, including Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), START (2007), STOP. (2008), and Should I Stay or Should I Go (Nuit Blanche 2010), plus numerous others for the Blackwood Gallery during his tenure as Director/Curator between 2008 and 2013. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal presented a mid-career survey of his work accompanied by a catalogue and a DVD entitled Trou. A book compiling his writings on sound art, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body, was published in 2012 by Errant Bodies Press. He currently lives in Toronto and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University in London, Ontario.

Monique Moumblow was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in

1992. Initially, she was primarily interested in performance and worked collaboratively with Anne Russell. In 1993, Moumblow moved to Montreal where she began to focus on single-channel video. She completed an MFA at Concordia University in 2009. Her videos have screened at festivals and galleries in North America and Europe. She teaches in the Intermedia/Cyberarts department at Concordia University.

Ian Murray, currently based in Toronto, came to be known as an artist and an artist-curator in the late 1960s and 1970s

in Halifax. Interested in radio, television, and print media, Ian Murray’s own work involved highlighting and examining the emergent conventions of media culture, such as in his recording of the crucial (make-or-break) first ten seconds of the top 100 songs of the 1960s as featured on radio. He continues to show his work in festivals and contemporary art contexts in Canada, the US, and Europe.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montreal-born artist and diarist. His creative gestures in video, sound, and text contemplate the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices— sung, spoken, or screamed. Nemerofsky's work has been exhibited in diverse contexts across Canada, Europe, and Asia and has won prizes at festivals in Canada, Germany, Poland, and Portugal. His work is part of numerous private collections as well as the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Lilias Torrance Newton (1896–1980) was born in Lachine, Quebec. She studied at the Art Association of Montreal and later

travelled to Europe, studying privately with Polish-born artist Alfred Wolmark in London, then with the Russian painter Alexandre Jacovleff in Paris. She was a highly respected and prolific portrait artist, painting subjects that ranged from her friends and colleagues to Canada’s elite and members of the British Monarchy. She became a founding member of Beaver Hall Group of women painters in 1920 and the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933. In 1937 she was made a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy—only the third woman, by that time, to achieve that distinction. Newton taught at the Art Association of Montreal.

Alexis O'Hara is an undisciplined artist interested in fort-building, feedback, and allegories of the human voice. She lives

and works in Montreal.

Shannon Oksanen is a Vancouver-based visual artist and musician. Oksanen has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, and was included in the group exhibition Baja to Vancouver at the Seattle Art Museum, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco. Her solo-show Summerland was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, in 2008-2009. She has also shown at: Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Union Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.

Christof Migone - Robert Pilot

Ukrainian born, Jules Olitski (1922–2007) immigrated to New York with his mother when he was two years old. He studied art at the National Academy of Design, New York, then continued his studies in Paris at the Ossip Zadkine School and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He received a BA and MA from New York University. He was a prolific artist, exhibiting internationally throughout his career and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours. He taught at C.W. Post College of Long Island in New York and Bennington College in Vermont.

Born in California to Canadian parents in 1955, Daniel Olson completed degrees in mathematics and architecture before obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1986 from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts in 1995 from York University. Olson’s work—which includes sculpture, multiples, installation, photography, performance, audio, video, and artist’s books—has been exhibited widely, including shows at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec), Galerie Optica (Montreal), and the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris). His work is documented in several publications, including Beside Myself/Hors de moi (St-Hyacinthe, 2010), Playtime (Regina, 2006), and Twenty Minutes’ Sleep (Vancouver, 2005). He has received numerous grants and awards, including the Prix Louis-Comtois (2009) from the Ville de Montréal, where he has lived since 2001.

John Oswald is a composer, mediartist, director, and designer, with a side history as an improvisor on the alto sax and in

dance. He is perhaps best known as the creator of the music genre Plunderphonics, an appropriative form of recording studio creation which he began to develop in the late sixties. Oswald is a Governor General Award Media Arts Laureate, Ars Electronica Digital Musics and Untitled Arts Award winner, and an inductee into the CBC Alternative Walk of Fame, as well as being nominated to third place in a list of the most internationally influential Canadian musicians, tied with Celine Dion.

Ryan Park uses shared objects, encounters, and cultural touchstones as starting points to produce work that oscillate between

serious and playful, clinical and poetic. His interdisciplinary practice results in videos, photographs, and manipulations of found materials that suggest presences and absences, urges and constraints. He currently lives and works in Toronto.

Born in Stratford, Ontario, Ruth May Pawson (1908–1994) moved to Regina with her family as a small child. Pawson worked as an elementary school teacher for ten years before enrolling in art school. She was a children's art instructor for Regina College and a consultant for the Regina Board of Education. In 1938 Pawson began her study of art and art history at the University of Regina. She later attended the Murray Point Summer School of Art at Emma Lake and the Banff School of Fine Arts where she studied under A.Y. Jackson—a primary influence and a good friend. Pawson painted prairie landscapes en plein-air in Regina and Fort Qu'appelle Valley area. In 1976, Ruth Pawson Elementary School in Regina was named after Pawson in recognition of her contributions to education and art. In 1993, she received the Saskatchewan Arts Board's Lifetime Award for Excellence in the Arts and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit.

A native of Ottawa, George Pepper (1903–1962) came to Toronto where he studied painting with J.E.H. MacDonald and J. W. Beatty, continuing his studies abroad in Italy and in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He was heavily influenced by the Group of Seven, which is particularly notable in his early Canadian landscapes. During the Second World War he worked as an official war artist for the Canadian government producing a wealth of paintings, drawings, and illustrations depicting the war.

He would later study Inuit art in the Arctic with his wife and colleague, artist Kathleen Daly. Pepper taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and the Banff School of Fine Arts. He became a founding member of the Group of Canadian Painters in 1933.

Born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Robert Pilot (1989–1967) moved to Montreal when his mother married artist Maurice Cullen.

Pilot assisted Cullen in his studio and joined him on trips to the countryside where they would paint the landscape, making Cullen a key influence in his early life and career. In Montreal he studied under William Brymner and then went to Paris where he studied at the Académie Julian. While in France he became taken by the Impressionist style of painting for which he would later become known. He has an extensive exhibition record and has been the recipient of numerous honours and awards.

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Juliana Pivato holds an MFA in Sculpture from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009), a BFA in Studio Arts from

Concordia University (2003), and a BMus from McGill University (1998). Solo exhibitions include Trading Surfaces at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie (2011), and I want to be here with you at Division Gallery, Montreal (2010). She has participated in group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Italy, and Japan. In 2013 Juliana was an artist in Residence at Threewalls Gallery, Chicago. Since 2008, she has been creating experimental sound and performance series for web radio on freeradiosaic.org (Chicago), most recently: Songs from The West Loop (2013) and Slow Density with Marc Couroux (2013).

Juliana holds the position of Lecturer in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Ben Portis is based in Toronto. He was formerly curator of the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, and a curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From 1998 to 2003, he directed the No Music Festival, an international festival of improvised noise music centred around the Nihilist Spasm Band in its hometown of London, Ontario, and in New York City. In conjunction with the festival's 2000 edition, he also organized No Exhibition: The Art and Spectacle of the Nihilist Spasm Band at Museum London. Portis writes frequently on contemporary art and dance. In addition to numerous publications associated with exhibitions that he has organized or been featured as a guest essayist, his work appears in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine, and The Dance Current.

Born and residing in London, Ontario, Art Pratten (b. 1939) co-founded The Nihilist Spasm Band in 1965—an improvisational noise band comprised of local artists that play unconventional music with homemade instruments. Pratten started out by making and playing his own kazoos but became known for his hand-made violin-like string instrument he called the Pratt-a-various. Other instruments made and played by Pratt include the guitar, a “water pipe” electronic wind instrument, and a self-designed dulcimer-like instrument. The band has made several records together and surviving members still play regular shows. The Nihilist Spasm Band is loud and their records should be played at top volume.

Gordon Rayner (1935–2010) was born in Toronto, Ontario. Coming from a long line of artists, his art training began at home.

Influenced by the abstract work of the Painters Eleven and the New York abstract expressionists he took an experimental approach to media and materials often incorporating found objects into his paintings. Much of the subject matter of his work was taken from his urban surroundings, but he would later turn to painting landscapes of the Magnetawan region in northern Ontario. Rayner was among the celebrated group of artists including Michael Snow, Graham Coughtry, Richard Gorman, and Robert Markle that exhibited at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto.

Rob Ring is a video-based artist currently living and working in Kitchener, Ontario. He holds an MFA from the University of

Guelph. He has been actively exhibiting for over 15 years and his work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and abroad. Rob’s engagement with Video Art began in the mid 1990s, when he began his Performance Anxiety series, in which he adopted techniques used by first-generation Video Artists and explored Body/Endurance Art. His current practice often integrates video projection into live performances for theatre groups, symphonies, and other special events.

Personal career highlights include The Last 15 Seconds (MT Space), Dark Side of the Moon (KW Symphony), Nuit Blanche (2012), His Greatest Hits retrospective exhibition (UW Art Gallery), and curating the I (Heart) Video Art series of screenings.

Stanley Royle (1888–1861) was born in Stalybridge, England. In 1904 he began his studies at the Sheffield Technical School

of Art with encouragement from his older cousin and established painter, Herbert Royle. Upon graduating, he took work as an illustrator and designer for local newspapers. An anti-modernist, Royle painted in a post-impressionist style, often depicting sweeping landscapes and scenes of sea and snow. He immigrated to Halifax in 1931 to accept a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art, and by 1935 he took a position at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick as head of the Fine Arts Department. In 1945 he returned to England where he remained until his death. Royle was an associate member of the Royal Society of British Artists and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Juliana Pivato - Yudi Sewraj

Born in Berlin, Germany, Carl Rungius (1869–1959) attended the Berlin Art Academy between 1888 and 1890. While living in Berlin he focused on sketching animals from life with extreme accuracy and dedication—a practice that made him a leading wildlife painter in Canada and the United States. After a hunting trip to Wyoming in 1894, Rungius moved to the United States, summering in Wyoming to hunt and sketch big game, and wintering in New York to build up his sketches into finished paintings. In 1910 he took a trip to the Canadian Rockies where he fell in love with the land, the wildlife, and the hunt. He travelled there frequently, eventually building a studio in Banff in 1921. He lived there several months of the year painting wildlife for the rest of his life.

Alexandre St-Onge is an audio artist, a musician/improviser and a sound performer. He has studied literature and philosophy

and he is currently doing his PhD in art. He is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach of the ineffable and he has released ten solo albums. He also plays in several bands, including Et Sans, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Klaxon Gueule, Pink Saliva, mineminemine, Shalabi Effect and undo. As a composer he has worked for interactive/mixed-media company kondition pluriel, as well as composing for artists such as Marie Brassard, Karine Denault, Lynda Gaudreau, Line Nault, Jérémie Niel, Maryse Poulin, and Mariko Tanabe.

Born in Hanover, Ontario, Carl Schaefer (1903–1995) studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto under the Group of Seven painters, Arthur Lismer and J.E.H. MacDonald. He painted scenes of rural southern Ontario, and was especially inspired by the countryside of his birthplace in Grey County. His style changed over time from decorative and geometric to a more realistic approach to landscape. In 1930, Schaefer began teaching at the Central Technical School in Toronto. From 1943 to 1946, he worked as an official war artist with the Royal Canadian Air Force, producing numerous war scenes in watercolour, ink, and graphite as well as keeping diaries now held by the Canadian War Museum. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Group of Painters, and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. After the war he taught at the Ontario College of Art until 1970.

Kevin Schmidt (b. 1972) lives and works in Vancouver and Berlin. His works consistently employ displaced spectacles as a

means to examine both contemporary cultural production and constructions around the idea of nature, such as the sublime.

He has shown extensively in Canada and internationally, including solo shows at the contemporary art gallery in Vancouver (2014), the Justina M. Barnicke and Power Plant galleries in Toronto (2011), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011), Galerie van der Mieden in Antwerp (2009), and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin (2009). In 2014, Schmidt had a solo exhibition at the Braunschweig Kunstverein in Germany and had work included in the Montreal and SITE Santa Fe biennales.

He is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver.

Montreal-based artist Erin Sexton explores matter, energy, space, and time through sound, performance, installation, and video. Drawing from both theoretical physics and mysticism, her work exists on the edge of knowledge, revealing immanence through an active vulnerability. With analog electronics, electromagnetic fields, pseudo-science projects, and phenomenological experimentation she creates direct links between lived experience and the processes of nature, drawing us into contact with the micro-macro cosmos. Sexton has presented her performance and installation work in festivals and galleries across North America and Europe, released several albums, and is featured on multiple compilations. She is a member of the Perte de Signal artist collective, FÜNF, Ænth, and often collaborates in improvisation contexts.

Yudi Sewraj has lived and worked in Montreal since 1993. Between 1992 and 2002 he has developed a body of short experimental

videos. His work has explored ideas of authenticity and the particular relationship between the camera and the subject.

His recent work uses installation as a means of generating both content and structure for his single channel work. He holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and teaches filmmaking and media studies at John Abbott College.

Biographies

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146

Jeremy Shaw (b. North Vancouver, 1977) works in a variety of media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific prac-

tices that aspire to, or attempt to map, transcendental experience. Often combining strategies from the realms of conceptual art, documentary film, music video, and scientific research, Shaw’s work has addressed topics ranging from psychedelic drug use, brain imaging, and hypnosis, to snake-handling, straight-edge hardcore, and time travel. Shaw has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Schinkel Pavillon, and MOCCA. Work by Shaw is held in public collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Canada. Jeremy Shaw lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Johann König Gallery.

Steven Shearer lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. He represented Canada at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Other

recent solo exhibitions include shows at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Harlem, New York; The Power Plant, Toronto; Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London, UK; Franco Noero Gallery, Torino; and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. In 2010 he was a part of Double Album, a curated visual “conversation” with Mexican artist Daniel Guzman that showed at MUCA. University Museum of Arts and Sciences, Mexico City and the New Museum, New York, and resulted in an artists book of the same name. Recent group exhibitions include: Altars of Madness, shown at the Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France, and Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Belgium (2013); Collage from 1930 to the Present, L&M Art, Los Angeles, USA (2012); Shore, Forest and Beyond. Art from the Audain Collection, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2012); The Joy of Pleasure, VeneKlasen Werner, Berlin, Germany (2012); It Is What It Is, Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art, National Gallery of Canada, Musée des Beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa, Canada (2010); Fresh Hell – Carte Blanche à Adam McEwen, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. Permanent Trouble - Aktuelle Kunst aus der Sammlung Kopp, Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg, Germany (2010); Sur le dandysme aujourd'hui: From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, A Coruña, Spain (2010); Beg Borrow and Steal, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA (2009).

Inglis Sheldon-Williams (1870–1940) was born in Hampshire, England. At the age of 17, he went to Saskatchewan and

travelled back and forth between Canada and Europe over the next few years, homesteading in Saskatchewan and beginning his art studies in England and France. In 1896 he attended Slade School of Art in London. He travelled extensively sketching and painting, getting his work published in London periodicals and exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. He returned to Saskatchewan in 1913 where he would paint the Regina prairies and commissioned portraits of notable government figures. In 1916, he created the School of Art at Regina College where he would also teach. He went overseas as an Official Canadian war artist in 1918. Unable to find work in Canada upon his return and after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1925, he travelled Europe, exhibiting periodically. He settled in Italy for a number of years before returning to London, England, where he would spend the remainder of his life.

Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change. Her pioneering new-media projects, including

CyberPowWow (1997-2004), Imagining Indians in the 25th Century (2001), and TimeTraveller™ (2008-2013) have been widely exhibited across Canada, the United States, and Australia. Recently shortlisted for the National Media Prize (Canada), she has been honored to win imagineNative’s 2009 Best New Media Award as well as a 2011 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship.

Her work is included in the collections of the Canada Art Bank, Edd J. Guarino, and the Aboriginal Art Centre at Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, among others. Skawennati is based in Montreal. She is Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network of artists, academics, and technologists investigating, creating, and critiquing Indigenous virtual environments.

Ian Skedd is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. He graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and

Design, Vancouver in 2001 and received an MFA from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK, in 2009. Expanding upon philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory “that our whole being is involved in listening just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears,” his practice incorporates an ongoing interest into the psychological processes of acquiring, decoding, and evaluating language and information, focusing on the trigger that identifies relationships between language, thought, and subject matter, and how words, sounds, and images slip into an audience’s media-saturated, cultural unconscious.

Jeremy Shaw - Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté

Michael Snow (b. 1929) was born in Toronto, Ontario, where he attended the Ontario College of Art. He is known inter-

nationally as a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, film, video, sound, photography, books, holography, and music. Snow has had solo exhibitions and retrospectives around the world. He is an extremely influential experimental filmmaker and an accomplished musician releasing more than a half dozen albums since the mid-1970s and still performs regularly with the improvisational music ensemble CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective). He is the recipient of numerous academic appointments, honours, and awards including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, and he is a member of the Canadian Academy of the Arts.

Charles Stankievech has lectured, performed, and exhibited at such platforms as dOCUMENTA13, Kassel; Louisiana

Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Kunst-Werke ICA, Berlin; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; International Symposium on Electronic Arts, ISEA2010, Germany; ISSUE Project Room, New York; MASS MoCA; Musée d’art contemporain and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and several art and architecture biennales (Venice, Berlin, Santa Fe, and Montreal). His writings range from academic journals for MIT Press to experimental texts for art publications. His images have been published in a range of fields from the specialized NASA to the popular WIRED. He has participated in residencies with the Department of National Defence, Banff Centre for the Arts, and Fieldwork in Marfa, Texas. He was a founding faculty member of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, Canada, and is currently Assistant Professor in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto. Since 2011, he has been co-director of the art and theory press K., located in Berlin.

Will Straw is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and Professor in the Department of Art History and

Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Straw received his BA in Film Studies from Carleton University in Ottawa and his Masters and PhD degrees from McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America, and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. He has published widely on music scenes, the music industry, and the relationship of music to media. His current interest centres on night-time culture in cities, the focus of a website he maintains, theurbannight.com.

Philip Surrey (1910–1990) was born in Calgary. At the age of 16, he studied art at the Winnipeg School of Art while apprenticing at a commercial art firm. He moved to Vancouver in 1929 where he worked as a commercial artist and took classes at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, under Fredrick Varley, and then at New York's Art Students League. He finally settled in Montreal where he worked at The Montreal Standard as a photo editor. Surrey was attracted to city street life and much of his work revolved around human activity on the streets of Montreal at night. After a twentyfive-year long career at The Montreal Standard and its successor, Weekend Magazine, Surrey seized the opportunity to become a full-time salaried painter for publisher John McConnell, a job he would have for the next twelve years. Surrey was a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Society and was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1982.

Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté (1869–1937) was born in Arthabaska, Quebec. He studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1891 after which he moved to Montreal where he painted portraits and landscapes, exhibiting regularly at the Art Association of Montreal. Back to France in 1901 to 1904, Suzor-Côté studied painting and sculpture at Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi. In 1908 he set up studios in Montreal and Arthabaska, and cultivated a versatile art practice, painting landscapes, portraits, nudes, still lifes, historical paintings, and sculpture. Suzor-Côté received many awards and distinctions, including the bronze medal at the 1900 Paris World Fair. He was made a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art in 1914.

Biographies

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148

The Canadian composer and visual artist Chiyoko Szlavnics has been living in Berlin since 1998. She graduated from the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto in 1989. She studied privately with the composer James Tenney in Toronto from 1994 to 1997, and after a year at the Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart, relocated to Berlin. From 2000 onward, her compositional process increasingly tended toward a visual structuring of musical notation on the page, and in 2003, line drawings—which Szlavnics had often used while sketching ideas for compositions—finally became the actual basis for them.

Szlavnics continues to practice in both disciplines (composition and visual art), with considerations and observations in each medium continually informing and influencing the other.

Zin Taylor is a Canadian artist currently based in Brussels. Taylor’s The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 1) was recently

presented at MuHKA, Antwerp. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at The Artist’s Institute, New York; KIOSK Gallery, Ghent; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany; Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Centre PasquART, Biel; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Toronto and Presentation House, Vancouver.

Ron Terada has come to be known for his conceptual approach toward various manifestations of popular culture in the contexts of film, television, and news media. Based in Vancouver, his work is particularly concerned with the languages of advertising and promotion, often taking the form of signage, posters, give-away CDs, as well as album covers. Represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver, his work has been shown in major solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally.

Althea Thauberger was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1970. She is currently based in Vancouver. Thauberger obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Concordia University in 2000 and went on to complete her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria in 2002. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves interactions with a group or community that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books, and involve sometimes provocative reflections of social, political, institutional, and aesthetic power relations. Her work has been presented at the 17th Biennale of Sydney; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Guangzhou Triennial, China; Manifesta 7, Trento, Italy; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; BAK, Utrecht; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Singapore History Museum; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Berkeley Art Museum; Insite, San Diego/Tijuana; White Columns, New York; Seattle Art Museum, the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2014 Biennale de Montréal.

Michael Turner is a Vancouver based writer of fiction, criticism, and song. His books include Hard Core Logo, The

Pornographer's Poem, and 8x10, and his essays have appeared in Vancouver Art & Economies (Artspeak), Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists (MuHKA/Belkin), and Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties (Belkin/Grunt). He blogs at this address: mtwebsit.blogspot.com.

Subhadra Vijaykumar, a Toronto-based violinist, is the founder and Artistic Director of Radha Academy of Carnatic Violin.

Radha Academy imparts training in the finest traditions of Carnatic violin playing. Subhadra has trained under the renowned soloist and maestro Prof. T.N. Krishnan. She comes from a family with rich musical traditions and obtained a first-class diploma in violin from the prestigious Bharatiya Music and Arts Society's Music College in Mumbai, India, under the tutelage of the late Mrs. Vijayam Ramaswamy. She is a faculty member at the Royal Conservatory of Music.

Chiyoko Szlavnics - John Wynne

Holly Ward is a Vancouver/Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture,

video, and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Based on research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in a social context. Currently, Ward is re-constructing The Pavilion (now in collaboration with artist Kevin Schmidt), a project Ward commenced in 2009 as part of Langara College’s Artist in Residence Program, as a rural studio and residency facility. Ward received a BFA in English Literature from the University of New Brunswick (1995), a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1999), and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2006). Ward has produced solo exhibitions at Artspeak, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, and the Or Gallery in Vancouver; YYZ Gallery, Toronto; Volta 6, Basel; and others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, England, Mexico, the United States, Norway, and South Korea.

Homer Watson (1855–1936) was born in the village of Doon (now Kitchener), Ontario. He moved to Toronto in 1874 attending

the Toronto Normal School and working at the Notman-Fraser photography studio. A self-taught painter, Watson got most of his artistic inspiration and motivation from exposure to important artists during his travels. When in New York he became influenced by the Hudson River School, painting landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and surrounding area; in England he saw the work of Constable and when in France he learned from the Barbizon painters. He spent most of his career painting the landscapes that he loved around his birthplace in Doon. Watson exhibited widely and won many prestigious awards.

He became a founding member and president of the Canadian Art Club in 1907 and was president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts from 1918 to 1922.

Born in Berlin, Germany, Stefan Wople (1902–1972) attended the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory at the age of fourteen, and the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1920. Meeting the Dadaists at the Bauhaus in the summer of 1920 would shape his modernist vision. He was both an avant-garde composer and a composer of popular music, writing songs for labour unions and socialist dance and theatre groups in the early 1930s. A Jewish Communist, Wolpe fled Nazi Germany to Vienna in 1933 where he studied with Anton Webern. He then moved to Palestine where he taught composition at the Palestine Conservatoire, finally settling in New York in 1938. By the 1950s he was in the art circle of abstract expressionist painters, whose work influenced his music during that time. Wople was the director of music at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1952 to 1956 and then a professor of music at C.W. Post College of Long Island University in Brookville, New York.

Mary E. Wrinch (1877–1869) was born in Kirby-le-Soken, Essex, England. She studied art at the Central Ontario School of

Art in Toronto. In the early part of her career she focused on painting miniature portraits. She went to London, England, to attend Grosvenor Life School and studied miniature painting under Alyn Williams, then to the Art Students League in New York where she studied under Alice Beckington. Wrinch’s art took a dramatic shift after visiting northern Ontario. The landscapes of the Muskoka region became a favourite subject, painted in large scale, directly to canvas without sketches. She became a member of the American Society of Miniature Painters in 1902 and was made an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1918. She was also a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, the Women’s Art Association of Canada, and the Handicrafts Guild.

John Wynne’s practice includes large-scale multi-channel installations for galleries and public spaces, delicate sound sculptures, flying radios, and award-winning "composed documentaries." His installation for 300 speakers, player piano, and vacuum cleaner became the first work of sound art in the Saatchi collection in London. His work with endangered languages includes a project with click languages in the Kalahari Desert and another with one of Canada’s indigenous languages, Gitxsanimaax.

Wynne is a Reader in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts London, a core member of the CRISAP research centre.

Biographies

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List of Works

Soundtracks Come a Singing!

J.W. Beatty

Old Buildings, Kearney, Ontario, no date Oil on panel, 26.4 x 34.9 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.5

Andre Bieler

Family In Blue, 1952 Oil on masonite, 76.8 x 61.0 cm The Edmonton Art Galler y Collection, purchased in 1952 with the Mrs. H. A. Dyde Purchase Fund, 52.8

Village House, c.1955 Oil on masonite, 50.9 x 61.0 cm

Settler’s Cabin and Garden, Russell, Manitoba, c.1911 Watercolour on paper, 22.4 x 36.2 cm

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Mr. and Mrs. C.A.G. Matthews, 1974.13.1

MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Mendy Shar f, 1984-012-007

A.J. Casson

The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, purchased with funds donated by The Women's Society of the EAG and with funds from The Canada Council, 87.2.1

Franklin Carmichael

Woman in a Black Hat, c.1935–1939 Oil on canvas, 51 x 41.2 cm Collection of Confederation Centre Ar t Galler y, purchased 1979, CAG 79.16.2

Farm, Haliburton, 1940 Oil on masonite, 96.3 x 122.0 cm The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, given in memor y of Alice and Douglas Bales by their family, 1997.2

The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.16

Ontario Village, Spring, c.1950–1951 Oil on board, 50.8 x 61.1 cm University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewar t Ar t Centre, Macdonald Institute Purchase, 1953/54, UG900.019

Harold Copping

Logging Camp, Gulf of Georgia, B.C., c.1911 Watercolour on paper, 23.2 x 36.3 cm MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Mendy Sharf, 1984-012-001

Homestead of Prosperous Immigrant Farmer, Manitoba, c.1911 Watercolour on paper, 21.8 x 36.2 cm MacKenzie Art Galler y, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Mendy Sharf, 1984-012-003

Evening on the Prairie, Saskatchewan, children Returning from School, c.1911 Watercolour on paper, 22.3 x 36.2 cm MacKenzie Art Galler y, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Mendy Sharf, 1984-012-005

List of Works

The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Sir Leonard Outerbridge, 1973.15

Robert Harris

North Country Farm, c.1957 Oil on canvas board, 61.0 x 76.2 cm

David Blackwood

Sketch For Outward Bound For The Labrador, 1985 Graphite on paper, 57.2 x 110.2 cm

Quidi Vidi Gut, Newfoundland, 1921 Oil on panel, 26.7 x 35.2 cm

Maurice Cullen

Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, c.1912 Oil on canvas, 56.2 x 71.4 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.22

Kay Daly

L'etable, piece sur piece (St. Urbain), c.1933 Oil on canvas, 53.6 x 63.8 cm The Edmonton Art Gallery Collection, purchased with funds donated by the Women's Society of the Edmonton Ar t Galler y, 82.1

Jacob Epstein

Mary McEvoy, c.1905 Bronze, 42.0 x 39.2 x 27.0 cm Collection of Dr. Richard Hett (on long-term loan to The Edmonton Ar t Galler y)

Peter Ewart

Foothills of Alberta, c.1950 Silkscreen print on card (a Canadian Pacific Print produced by Sampson and Matthews), 119.4 x 91.4 cm Collection of the Sir Alexander Galt Museum and Archives, City of Lethbridge

Lawren S. Harris

Wareham Island, Cumberland Gulf, Baffin Island, c.1930 Oil on panel, 20.2 x 25.4 cm The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, purchased 1973, 1981.85.3

Love Along The Shore Of The Gulf Of St. Lawrence, 1885 Oil on canvas, 149.7 x 236.2 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, 1953-084

Prudence E. Heward

Farmer’s Daughter, 1938 Oil on canvas, 66.6 x 66.5 cm Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery, gift from the estate of Prudence Heward, G-51-170

R.S. Hewton

Benedicta, c.1935 Oil on canvas, 183.0 x 121.0 cm The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Mr. and Mrs. H.J. Campbell, 1969.25.6

Randolph Hewton

Winter, Charlevoix County, no date Oil on canvas, 51.1 x 61.0 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.41

Edwin Holgate

Fishermen’s Houses, c.1933 Oil on canvas, 50.7x 61.1 cm The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Mr. A.B. Gill in memor y of Ar thur B. Gill, 1977.36

Lumberjack, 1924 Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 54.6 cm Galler y Lambton, Sarnia, Ontario, gift of the Sarnia Women’s Conser vation Ar t Association, 1956

151

152

Ploughman (From Other Days and Other Ways, Silhouettes of the Past in French Canada By Georges Bouchard), 1928 Woodcut on paper, 19.9 x 15.5 cm University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewar t Ar t Centre, purchased through the Alma Mater Fund, 1972, UG972.016

Pual, Dog Driver, c.1929 Oil on canvas, 65.2 x 55.3 cm Collection Musée du Québec

Bess Housser

Laurentian Village, c.1928 Oil on canvas, 92.5 x 115.5 cm

Sugar Bush, Montpellier, Quebec, c.1945–1948 Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 63.5 cm

Harbour Life, Nova Scotia, 1931 Oil on canvas, 81.9 x 102.6 cm

John Lyman

Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, gift of Harr y Kangles. 1995-018

The Beaverbrook Ar t Galler y, gift of Lord Beaverbrook

The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of The Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 79.38

Church at St. Urbain, 1931 Oil on canvas, 53.8 x 66.2 cm

Wet Day, 1948 Oil on panel, 30.5 x 40.5 cm

The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Mr. S. Walter Stewart, 1968.8.29

Collection of the MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, bequeathed by Norah McCullough, 1993-112

Illingworth Kerr

Dancers, c.1947 Ink on paper, 23.1 x 15.2 cm

“Turkey in The Straw” Construction Camp, 1929 Oil on canvas, 61.3 x 76.0 cm MacKenzie Art Galler y, University of Regina Collection, 1934-008

Har t House Permanent Collection, University of Toronto

Ravenscrag, Ross’s Ranch, 1930 Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 92.1 cm

Yvonne Housser

MacKenzie Art Galler y, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Norman MacKenzie, 1934-001

On The Ottawa River, c.1925 Oil on board, 31.8 x 39.4 cm

Arthur Lismer

MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, 1977- 010

A.Y. Jackson

Three Lone Shacks, St. Fabien, 1935 Oil on panel, 24.5 x 34.0 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.45

Three Lone Shacks, St. Fabien, 1935 Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 88.6 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.46

Old Sheds, Quebec, 1931 Oil on panel, 21.3 x 26.7 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of the Ar tist, 40.5

Gear And Pail, 1948 Oil on linen, 51.1 x 61.0 cm The Edmonton Art Galler y Collection, purchased in 1962, 62.2

Untitled (Anchor And Rope), no date Graphite on paper, 26.0 x 34.0 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of Mrs. Marjorie Bridges, 81.34.1

Untitled (fish), no date Charcoal, chalk on paper, 26.3 x 33.7 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of Mrs. Marjorie Bridges, 81.34.2

The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, 1981.29

7 Sketches for Come a Singing, Canadian Folk Songs, no date Ink and pencil on paper, 33.1 x 20.4 cm The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Mrs. Marjorie Lismer Bridges, 1981.234

Red Anchor, 1954 Oil on plywood, 30.1 x 40.1 cm The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of the Founders, Robert and Signe McMichael, 1966.16.109

Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson sketching at

Île d’Orléans, 1925 photographed by Marius Barbeau Digital print Cour tesy of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, 66130

Participants in the 1928 Folksongs and Handicraft Festival Quebec City, grouped around Marius Barbeau, Digital print Cour tesy of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, J5105

Come a Singing!

The Convent Garden, c.1957 Oil on board, 53.8 x 56.6 cm

J.E.H. MacDonald

A Northern Home, 1915 Oil on pressed board, 54.0 x 44.8 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, purchased with funds from the Brown estate, 1971-011

Harbour Entrance, Petite Riviere, 1922 Oil on board, 21.5 x 26.4 cm The Edmonton Art Galler y Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.58

Pegi Nichol MacLeod

Canadian Sailors In Training, University Of New Brunswick, c.1943 Oil on canvas, 71.9 x 95.8 cm The Edmonton Art Galler y Collection, purchased in 1979 with funds donated by Imperial Oil, 79.14.2

Henri Masson

Boats, Boat Houses, And Lake, 1951 Oil on canvas, 66.0 x 76.2 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of Mr. H. S. Southam, Esq., C.M.G., 52.5

Invitation Au Voyage, 1951 Oil on canvas, 66.2 x 76.2 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of H.S. Southam Esq., C.M.G., 52.6

The Snow Shovellers, 1939 Oil on canvas, 65.7 x 75.6 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gif t of H.S. Southam Esq., C.M.G., 45.1

Summer Landscape, no date Oil on canvas, 51.1 x 66.3 cm

Harvest Time, Quebec, c.1931 Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 60.8 cm

The Blizzard, 1916 Oil on canvas, 93.7 x 130.2 cm

MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, 1953-093

University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewar t Ar t Centre, gift of Dr. Laura Pepper, 1977, UG977.033

MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Norman MacKenzie, 1917-001

Blue Rocks, N.S., 1933 Oil on canvas, 91.3 x 106.5 cm

Sunrise, no date Watercolour on paper, 53.3 x 72.4 cm

Doris McCarthy

Mal Bay Fishing Station, c.1950 Oil on board, 30.3 x 40.5 cm University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewar t Ar t Centre, Macdonald Institute Purchase, 1957, UG900.093

Clamdiggers (Barachois Bay, Gaspe), no date Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 86.4 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, gift of Regina Council of Women, 1953-023

Lilias Torrance Newton

Two Girls, 1931 Oil on canvas, 61.6 x 76.8 cm The Edmonton Art Gallery Collection, gift of Mr. William Southam, Esq., 31.8

Ruth May Pawson

Wheatfields and Coulee (Near Indian Head), 1950 Oil on canvas board, 50.5 x 60.5 cm Collection of the MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, 1993-003

Cold, Clear and Bright (Brown’s Ice House), 1952 Oil on canvas board, 41.0 x 50.8 cm Collection of the MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, 1993-004

George Pepper

Trawling on the Grand Banks, c.1928 Oil on masonite, 111.7 x 142.2 cm Collection of Confederation Centre Art Gallery, gift of the Estate of Kathleen Day, 1994, CAG 94.5.16

List of Works

The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, purchased with funds donated by the Winspear Foundation, 81.27

Robert Pilot

Village on the St. Lawrence, no date Oil on canvas, 61.6 x 81.3 cm Collection of Confederation Centre Ar t Galler y, gift of The Ernest E. Poole Foundation, Edmonton, 1965, CAG 65.10

Stanley Royle

Peggy's Cove, N.S., 1940 Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 61.0 cm The Edmonton Art Gallery Collection, gift of The Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.77

Carl Rungius

Dark Bay Horse and Rider, no date Oil on canvas, 53.5 x 45.7 cm Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta

Carl Schaefer

Mary Becker's House, Hanover, 1934 Oil on board, 30.1 x 35.3 cm

MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, 1953-058

Phillip Surrey

Sunday Afternoon, 1939 Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 60.0 cm The McMichael Canadian Ar t Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of Mr. and Mrs. N. Simpson, 1993.11

Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté

Calling The Moose, c.1926 Bronze, 52.4 x 21.9 x 31.3 cm The Edmonton Art Gallery Collection, gift of Mr. F.N. Southam and Brothers, 28.1

Le Trophee, c.1927 Bronze, 52.4 x 26.7 x 32.2 cm The Edmonton Art Gallery Collection, gift of Mr. F.N. Southam and Brothers, 28.2

Le Vieux Pionnier, 1912 Bronze, 39.1 x 23.2 x 44.3 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.82

The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, purchased with funds from the Ar t Associates of The Edmonton Ar t Galler y, 88.36

La Compagne Du Vieux Pionnier, 1912 Bronze, 40.1 x 24.4 x 44.7 cm

Inglis Sheldon-Williams

The Edmonton Art Gallery Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation, 68.6.83

The Binder Team, 1915 Oil on canvas, 66.4 x 89.5 cm MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Norman MacKenzie, 1916-001

Femmes De Caughnawaga, 1924 Bronze, 43.7 x 35.0 x 59.2 cm The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, purchased with funds donated by the Women's Society of The Edmonton Ar t Galler y, 87.16

Homer Watson

The River Drivers, c.1913 Oil on cardboard, 25.4 x 35.6 cm MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Norman MacKenzie, 1936-019

The River Drivers, 1914 Oil on canvas, 87.0 x 121.9 cm MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Norman MacKenzie, 1914-003

Mary E. Wrinch

The Fire Rangers Canoe, Agawa River, Algoma, 1926 Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.0 cm MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, gift of the Women’s Educational Club of Regina, 1953-042

1. La Province de Québec Canada 2. La Province de Québec Canada: Have you ever had a French Canadian vacation?

3. Roaming and Rambling in La Province De Québec Canada: Historic Romantic Picturesque Published by the Province of Quebec Tourist Bureau Parliament Buildings, Quebec, Canada, c.1950 Collection of A. Hunter

153

154

At the Campfire From Canoe Mates in Canada by St. George Rathborne, illustrated by “Lawrence,” M.A. Donohue & Co., Chicago, 1912 Collection of A. Hunter

Ballads and Sea Songs of Nova Scotia W. Roy MacKenzie Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1928 Collection of A. Hunter

Banff, Kootenay and Yoho National Parks: “The Three-Park Unit” Department of the Interior, Canada, Hon. Thomas G. Murphy, Minister, R.A. Gibson, Assistant Deputy Minister, J.B. Harkin, Commissioner of National Parks, Ottawa, J.O. Patenaude, I.S.O., Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1935 (3rd printing) Collection of A. Hunter

Boys Singing Film still from New Horizons, c.1935

Canadian Folk Songs (Old and New) Selected and transcribed

by J. Murray Gibbon, harmonization by Geoffrey O’Hara and Oscar O’Brien, decorations by Frank H. Johnston J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London and Toronto, 1927 Collection of A. Hunter

Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation John Murray Gibbon Illustrated by Kathleen Shackleton, W.J. Phillips, R.H. Palenske, Nicholas de Grandmaison, Ernest Neumann and James Crockart McLelland & Stewart Limited, Toronto, 1938 Collection of A. Hunter

Canadian National Railways Menu, c.1940 Collection of A. Hunter

CANADIANA Program Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, Ontario, 1962 Collection of A. Hunter

Saskatchewan Archives Board

Canadians All: A Primer of Canadian National Unity Watson Kirkconnell, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S.C., McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Issued by the Director of Public Information under authority of the Minister of National War Service, June, 1941 Collection of A. Hunter

Come a Singing!

Canoe Mates in Canada or Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan St. George Rathborne M.A. Donohue & Company, Chicago, 1912

Don Messer’s Square Dance Tunes Published by Canadian Music Sales Corporation, Toronto, Ontario, 1952 Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Canoeist From Canada in Pictures, produced by the Department of External Affairs, 1953 Digital print

Edith Fulton Fowke, Author and Folklorist, c.1954 Digital print From Folk Songs of Canada, Waterloo Music Company Ltd., Waterloo, Ontario, 1954.

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Come ‘A Singing!

Canadian Folk-Songs

By Marius Barbeau, Arthur Lismer, and Arthur Bourinot Canada: Department of Mines and Resources, Mines and Geology Branch, National Museum of Canada, Bulletin No. 107, Anthropological Series No. 26 Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1947

Family From Canada in Pictures, produced by the Department of External Affairs, 1953 Digital print

Collection of A. Hunter

Come ‘A Singing!

Canadian Folk-Songs Cover of song collection National Museum of Canada, 1947 Digital print Collection of A. Hunter

Cowboy Singer Film still from New Horizons, c.1935 Saskatchewan Archives Board

Collection of A. Hunter

Flock of Geese From Canada in Pictures, produced by the Department of External Affairs, 1953 Digital print Collection of A. Hunter

Folk Songs of Canada Edith Fulton Fowke, Literary Editor Richard Johnston, Music Editor Illustrations by Elizabeth Wilkes Hoey Waterloo Music Company Limited, Waterloo, Ontario, 1954 (4th Edition, 1970) Collection of A. Hunter

Folk Songs of Canada: Choral Edition Literary Editor: Edith Fulton Fowke Music Editing and Choral Arrangements: Richard Johnston Illustrations by Elizabeth Wilkes Hoey Waterloo Music Company Limited, Waterloo, Ontario, 1954 (3rd Edition, 1958)

GASPE VILLAGE, Province of Quebec From Scenic Canada, produced by Canadian National Railways, 1925

HANNA, Alberta, A typical Western Canada Prairie Town From Scenic Canada, produced by Canadian National Railways, 1925

Little Anne of Canada Madeline Brandeis Grosset & Dunlap Publishers New York, 1931

Montage of Canadian “types” from John Murray Gibbon’s Canadian Mosaic McLelland and Stewart, 1939 Digital print

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of Maggie Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Folk Songs of Old Quebec Marius Barbeau Song translations by Regina Lenore Shoolman Illustrations by Arthur Lismer Department of Mines, Hon. W.A. Gordon, Minister; Charles Camsell, Deputy Minister National Museum of Canada, W.H. Collins, Acting Director Bulletin 75, Anthropological Series No. 16, 1935

Helen Creighton recording three fisherman seated on lobster traps, at East Petpeswick, c.1950

By E.A.Bollinger for MacLean’s Magazine, 1952 Digital print Public Archives of Nova Scotia 52160-7

Log Driver From Folk Songs of Canada, Edith Fulton Fowke and Richard Johnston, illustrations by Elizabeth Wilkes Hoey, Waterloo Music Company Ltd., Waterloo, Ontario, 1954 Digital print

Mountie From Canada in Pictures, produced by the Department of External Affairs, 1953 Digital print

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Helen Creighton collecting in a general store from two men, c.1950

By E.A. Bollinger for MacLean’s Magazine, 1952 Digital print Public Archives of Nova Scotia 52160-120

Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods Edith Fowke Tunes Transcribed by Norman Cazden Cover Image: Tom Thomson’s The Drive, 1916–17, University of Guelph Art Collection NC Press Limited, Toronto, 1985 (first published by the University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, c.1970, for the American Folklore Society)

Collection of A. Hunter

Folksongs from Southern New Brunswick Collected and edited by Helen Creighton Musical Transcriptions by Kenneth Peacock Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies National Museum of Man National Museums of Canada, Ottawa, 1971

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Jean Stewart and John Murray Gibbon at Lake McArthur, c.1935 Digital print Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, NA 66 2427

Collection of A. Hunter

John Murray Gibbon, c.1940 Autographed black and white photograph Collection of A. Hunter

List of Works

La Province de Quebec Canada Cover of tourism brochure produced by the Province of Quebec, c.1950 Digital print

Collection of A. Hunter

LUNENBURG, Nova Scotia From Scenic Canada, produced by Canadian National Railways, 1925 Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

New World Ballads John Murray Gibbon The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1939 Collection of A. Hunter

NOMINIGAN CAMP, Algonquin Park, Highlands of Ontario From Scenic Canada, produced by Canadian National Railways, 1925 Collection of A. Hunter

Nova Scotia: Canada’s Ocean Playground Published by Authority of Hon. Harold Connolly, Minister of Industry and Publicity, Nova Scotia, c.1945 Collection of A. Hunter

155

156

Nova Scotia: Canada’s Ocean Playground Cover of tourism brochure produced by the Province of Nova Scotia, c.1945 Digital print Collection of A. Hunter

Other Days Other Ways: Silhouettes of the Past in French Canada Translated from Vieilles Choses Vieilles Gens of George Bouchard, M.P. Woodcut decorations by Edwin H. Holgate Louis Carrier & Co. at the Mercury, Montreal & New York, MCMXXVIII (1928) Collection of A. Hunter

Rodeo Cowboy From Esso (Imperial Oil) Alberta and British Columbia road map, c.1955 Digital print Collection of A. Hunter

Saskatchewan Sings, Volume Two, Diamond Jubilee, 1905-1965 Compiled and arranged by R.J. Staples Student Booklet for the Saskatchewan School Music Broadcast Series Canadian Music Sales Corporation, Toronto, Ontario, 1964 Collection of A. Hunter

Saskatchewan Sings, Volume Two, Diamond Jubilee, 1905-1965 Canadian Music Sales Corporation, Toronto, Ontario, 1964 Records to accompany the songbook Saskatchewan Sings, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, 1964

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

See the Canadian Rockies Canadian Pacific brochure, c.1945 Collection of A. Hunter

Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia Collected by Helen Creighton J.M. Dent & Sons Limited, Toronto & Vancouver, 1933

The Festival Song Book: For Classroom, Glee Club and Festival Use Book Four: Unchanged Voices Easy arrangements for S.A. and Unison with Descant

By Leslie Bell, M.A., Mus.D. Canadian Music Sales Corporation, Toronto, Canada, 1956 Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of A. Hunter

Songs of Canada: Words and Music Published by Gordon V. Thompson, Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1939

The Little Magic Fiddler Lyn Cook Illustrations by Stanley Wyatt The MacMillan Company of Canada Limited, Toronto, 1951

Collection of A. Hunter

Collection of Maggie Hunter

Spinning Wheel From Canada in Pictures, produced by the Department of External Affairs, 1953 Digital print

The Road to Kip’s Cove Lyn Cook Illustrated by William Wheeler The MacMillan Company of Canada Limited, Toronto, 1961 (3rd Edition 1973)

Collection of A. Hunter

The Call of Untrodden Ways Department of the Interior, Canada, Hon. Chas. Stewart, Minister, W.W. Cory, Deputy Minister, J.B. Harkin, Commissioner of National Parks, Ottawa, c.1930 Collection of A. Hunter

Come a Singing!

The Chopping Bee and other Laurentian Stories

By M. Victorin, translation

by James Ferres Illustrated by Thoreau MacDonald The Musson Book Company Limited, 1925 (2nd Edition, 1929)

Collection of Maggie Hunter

This is ONTARIO: Canada’s Variety Vacationland Ontario Department of Travel and Publicity, Toronto, Ontario, c.1960 Collection of A. Hunter

TEMAGAMI FOREST RESERVE, 300 miles North of Toronto From Scenic Canada, produced by Canadian National Railways, 1925 Collection of A. Hunter

Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies Song Sheet, 1931 Collection of A. Hunter

Wilf Carter Cowboy Singer and Song Leader of the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies, c.1940 Digital print Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, NA 66 2407

Wilf Carter Cowboy Singer and Song Leader of the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies, c.1940 Digital print Why te Museum of the Canadian Rockies

Woodcutter From Canada in Pictures, produced by the Department of External Affairs, 1953 Digital print Collection of A. Hunter

See Hear!

Jack Behrens

Original score: Green Centre to a painting of Kenneth Lochhead, 1964 (revised 1990) Ink, graphite on paper Private Collection (Behrens)

Original score: Hot Yellow to a painting of Kenneth Lochhead, 1964 (revised 1990) Ink, graphite on paper Private Collection (Behrens)

John Boyle

Making Bombs, 1965 Oil and enamel paint on plywood, painted both sides 181.8 x 122 x 1.2 cm; free-standing support: 204.7 x 124.7 x 18.5 cm National Galler y of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 2000. 40426

John Cage

Greg Curnoe

Greg Curnoe and Brian Dibb

Variations V: Thirty-seven Remarks Re an Audio Visual Performance, 1965 27.9 x 21.6 cm

Vote Nihilist Destroy Your Ballot, 1963 Linocut on paper (uneditioned), 19 x 17.6 cm

Cour tesy of Edition Peters

Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Variations V, 1966 VHS tape, 50 min. (3 copies)

2nd Base Electric, 1966 Mixed media, 182.9 x 79.6 x 13.3 cm

2 First Nihilist Banquet seating placards (one for Willam E. Exley, one for Gregory Richard Curnoe), 1964 Lino stamps on paper with ballpoint pen drawing

Cunningham Dance Foundation

John Clement

Guitar, c.1971 Mahogany, ivory, and guitar hardware, 142 x 17.8 x 7 cm Collection of John Clement

Arthur Coughtry

The Artists’ Jazz Band, about 1960s Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.9 x 35.7 cm Cour tesy of Ar thur Coughtr y

Graham Coughtry

Nihilist Spasm Band Poster, 1969 Serigraph on paper, 56.4 x 71.1 cm Collection of John and Shirley Clement

The London Six, 1984 Oil on canvas, 65.8 x 96.5 cm Collection of Museum London, gift of the City of London from Suncor Incorporated, 1987. 87.A.24

Brucelosis, 1988 DVD, 16 min.

Collection of John Boyle

Moving Figure, 1959 Oil and lucite 44 on canvas, 182.9 x 137.8 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection. 1960-001

Head Arrangements for an Artists’ Jazz Band, 1981 Collection, Ar t Galler y of Ontario, Toronto

Graham Coughtry

(designer) using a photograph by E.J. Bellocq Joint Concert, about 1970 Poster, 63.8 x 45.6 cm Collection of Nobuo Kubota

Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

Megaphone and Stand, 1966 Mixed media Megaphone, 80 x 44.5 cm in diameter; Stand, 148.6 cm in height Collection of Bill and Norma Exley

Kamikaze, 1967 Oil on plywood, yellow light bulb, lamp fixture, electrical cord, wood stool 240.0 x 120.0 x 120.0 cm (installed) Collection, Ar t Galler y of Ontario, Toronto, gift of Sheila Curnoe, London, Ontario, 1997

Hands Across the Ocean, 1969 Collage on paper mounted in acrylic, 66 x 41.9 cm Collection of John Boyle

Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive and Bill Exley

Murray Favro

Guitar #1, 1966 Wood, masonite, enamel, guitar hardware, 108 x 32 x 7 cm Collection of David Rabinowitch, New York

Clunk, 1966 Mixed media, 144 x 159 x 5 cm Cour tesy of the Carmen Lamanna Collection

Guitar #3, 1967 Mixed media, 107 x 32 x 7 cm Cour tesy of the Carmen Lamanna Collection

The Nihilist Spasm Band No Record, 1968 LP album cover (oriented 45 degrees), 44.1 x 44.1 cm Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Nihilist Spasm Band 7x~x=x, 1984 LP album cover, 31.1 x 31.3 cm Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Yves Gaucher

En Hommage a Webern No. 1, 1963 Impressions in relief on laminated paper (Ed. 23/30), 55.4 x 75.2 cm Collection of David P. Silcox and Linda Intaschi

List of Works

157

158

En Hommage a Webern No. 2, 1963 Impressions in relief on laminated paper (Ed. 23/30), 55.4 x 75.2 cm Collection of David P. Silcox and Linda Intaschi

En Hommage a Webern No. 3, 1963 Impressions in relief on laminated paper (Ed. 23/30), 55.4 x 75.2 cm Collection of David P. Silcox and Linda Intaschi

Signals #2, 1966 Acrylic on canvas, 203.2 x 152.4 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection.

1966-006

Alap, 1967 Acrylic on canvas, 274.3 x 182.9 cm

Magnetic Drawing, 1965 Ink on paper, 61 x 45.7 cm University of Toronto Art Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre

Magnetic Drawing, 1965 Ink on paper, 61 x 45.7 cm University of Toronto Art Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre

Magnetic Drawing, 1965 Ink on paper, 61 x 45.7 cm University of Toronto Art Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre

Magnetic Drawing, 1965 Ink on paper, 61 x 45.7 cm University of Toronto Art Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre

Nobuo Kubota

Reflections I, 1969 Wood and mirror, 183 x 80.5 x 80.5 cm Collection of The Canada Council Art Bank

The Edmonton Ar t Galler y Collection, purchased in 1969, 69.3

Kenneth Lochhead

Ted Godwin

Green Centre, 1963 Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm

River of Time, 1965 Acrylic, oil on canvas, 202.8 x 111.3 cm Collection of the Mendel Ar t Galler y.

Gift of Ernest F. Lindner. 1978.18.3

Ricardo Gómez

Untitled, 1966 Cast lead, 8 x 15 x 30 cm Collection of Ricardo Gómez

Richard Gorman

Green Lady, 1964 Oil, lucite on canvas, 152.7 x 203.7 cm Collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, purchased in 1978

See Hear!

Private Collection (Behrens)

Hot Yellow, 1963 Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm Private Collection (Behrens)

Portrait of Jack Behrens, 1964 Charcoal on paper, 20 x 50 cm

Ian MacEachern

Archie Leitch in repose with slide clarinet, neg# 12-25-26-04 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm Art Pratten on Pratt-avarious, neg# 12-21-22-03 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm Greg Curnoe on kazoo, neg# 12-21-22-03 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm

NSB at corner of Clarence and York, on street and hotel balcony, neg# 09-41-42-05 (Artscanada Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm NSB by Cam’s Alignment & Framing, neg# 09-41-42-36 (Artscanada Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm NSB kazoo & slide clarinet front line, neg# 12-19-20-31 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm Robert Markle

Hugh McIntyre, watched by Art Pratten, neg# 12-23-24-33 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm John Boyle playing amidst audience, neg# 12-17-18-09 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper 27.9 x 35.6 cm Murray Favro and Hugh McIntyre, neg# 12-23-24-13 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm

Private Collection (Behrens)

Murray Favro and Greg Curnoe, neg# 12-17-18-19 (York Hotel Series), 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm

Burlesque Series XI, 1963 Tempera on paper, 89.4 x 58.7 cm Collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, gift of Harry Malcolmson, 1989

Movie Star Series IV, 1963 Tempera on paper, 58 x 87.2 cm Collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, gift of Walter Carsen, 1983

On The Victory Runway Burlesque Series, 1963 Tempera on paper, 88.9 x 58.6 cm Collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, gift of Ron and Mary Tasker, 1991

Falling Figure Series I, 1964 Tempera, ink wash on paper, 58.7 x 89.2 cm Collection of The Rober t McLaughlin Gallery, purchased in 1982

Jules Olitski

Ino Delight, 1962 Acrylic resin on unsized canvas, 233.7 x 142.7 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection, 1963-002

Art Pratten

Pratt-a-Various, 1966 Violin body, wood, hardware, 107.3 x 15.5 x 12.5 cm Collection of Ar t Pratten

Pratt-a-Various, 1970 Java teak, paint, hardware, 56.7 x 9.5 x 10.7 cm

Untitled (frogs), 1965 Relief on paper, 66.0 x 50.8 cm Collection of the Mendel Ar t Galler y, purchased with funds from a Canada Council grant for the acquisition of works by contemporar y Canadian ar tists, 1965. 1965.24.15

Gordon Rayner (designer),

printed by Gordon Rayner and Nobuo Kubota The Artist’s Jazz Band Live!

At Le Hibou, 1967 Poster - serigraph on paper, 86.2 x 86.2 cm Collection of Nobuo Kubota

Collection of Ar t Pratten

William E. Smith

Pratt-a-Various, 1970 Mixed media, 80 x 9 x 10.3 cm Collection of Ar t Pratten

The Nihilist Spasm Band Vol. 2, 1979 LP album cover, 31.1 x 31.4 cm

John Cage (right) and Marcel Duchamp (left) in a performance of Reunion, Ryerson Theatre, Toronto, 1968. Move 6., 1968 Gelatin silver print on paper, 26.1 x 33.7 cm Collection of Gordon Rayner

Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Michael Snow Gordon Rayner

Sis Boom Bah, 1964 Construction mixed media, 181.4 x 123.5 x 7 cm Collection of Av Isaacs

Untitled, 1965 Acrylic monoprint on paper, 8/100, 66.0 x 50.8 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection. 1965-13-15

Untitled, 1965 Monoprint on wove paper, 67.3 x 50.8 cm University of Toronto Ar t Collection.

University of Toronto Ar t Centre

Olympia, 1963 Oil on canvas, 175.3 x 307.1 cm MacKenzie Ar t Galler y, University of Regina Collection. 1972-011

Don Vincent

CHLO Session, 1966 Gelatin silver photographs (3), 27.9 x 35.6 cm (each) Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Greg’s studio, King Street.

Art, John Boyle, Greg, Murray, Hugh, Bill Exley in Megaphone Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.8 x 35.5 cm

Collection of Bernice Vincent

Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the CHLO Studio.

Art Pratten, John Boyle Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.5 x 27.8 cm

In the CHLO studio.

Murray Favro Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.8 x 35.5 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the CHLO studio.

Bill Exley, Art Pratten Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.5 x 27.8 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the recording studio CHLO. Left to right: Greg, John Boyle, Hugh, John Clement, Murray Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.8 x 35.5 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the CHLO studio.

Greg Curnoe Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.5 x 27.8 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the studio CHLO. Greg on drums Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.5 x 27.8 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the CHLO Studio.

Hugh McIntyre Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.5 x 27.8 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

In the CHLO studio.

Left to right: Archie Leitch, Bill Exley, Art Pratten, Greg Curnoe Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.8 x 35.5 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

List of Works

In the CHLO studio.

Left to right: Studio staff member, John Boyle Gelatin silver print on paper, 35.5 x 27.8 cm

Roof of Greg’s studio, King Street. Art, John Boyle, Greg, Murray, Hugh, Bill Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.8 x 35.5 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

Roof of Greg’s studio, King Street. John Boyle, Murray, Hugh, Art, Greg, Bill Gelatin silver print on paper, 27.8 x 35.5 cm Collection of Bernice Vincent

The Nihilist Spasm Band (Region cover image), 1966 Gelatin silver photograph, 20.3 x 25.4 cm Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

159

160

3 small Nihilist Party posters, no date (1-black on yellow, 1-black on red, 1-black & red) Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive and Bill Exley

20 cents magazine 4 copies (covers by NSB, Greg Curnoe, John Boyle) Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Canadian Art, January / February 1965 Cover image: Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner and Robert Markle in Rayner’s Studio, Toronto Photo: John Reeves Magazine, 29.1 x 23.3 cm Cour tesy of the MacKenzie Ar t Galler y Resource Centre

Electric Bass, 1968 Mixed media, 115.5 x 5 x 10.3 cm Collection of Hugh McIntyre

Isaacs Gallery concert program (3 sheets), January 29, 1967, 1967 Ink on paper, 35.6 x 21.5 cm (each) Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

Jack Behrens (left) and Stefan Wolpe (right) at Emma Lake, 1964 Photograph, 20.3 x 20.3 cm Cour tesy of Jack and Sonja Behrens

John Cage frying mushrooms at Emma Lake, 1965 Photograph, 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Nihilist Spasm Band / What About Me (ARCD-056) CD

Cour tesy of Jack and Sonja Behrens

Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

Jules Olitski (centre) and Kenneth Lochhead (top left) at Emma Lake, 1964 Photograph, 25.4 x 20.3 cm

Rodman Hall Concert poster, May 5, 1973, 1973 Ink on paper, 27.8 x 21.4 cm

Cour tesy of the University of Regina Archives, Kenneth Lochhead Papers

Jules Olitski (second from left) with painting workshop participants, Emma Lake, 1964 Photograph, 20.3 x 25.4 cm Cour tesy of the University of Regina Archives, Kenneth Lochhead Papers

Lyrics (original) for “I Have Nothing To Say,” c.1992 Ink on paper, 35.5 x 21.5 cm Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

National Gallery of Canada announcement of NSB, June 27, 1981, 1981 Ink on paper, 27.9 x 21.5 cm Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

Nihilist Party membership list (2 sheets), c.1964 Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

Nihilist Picnic ribbons, 1980 4 ribbons Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

Nihilist Spasm Band / No Record (ARCD-082) CD Collection of Ar t and Barbara Pratten

See Hear!

Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

The Artist’s Jazz Band, c. 1970 Poster, 56.9 x 30.9 cm Collection of Nobuo Kubota

The Artists’ Jazz Band Portfolio, 1973 Works by Graham Coughtry, Harvey Cowan, Terry Forster, Jim Jones, Nobuo Kubota, Robert Markle, Gerald McAdam, Gordon Rayner, and Michael Snow Portfolio of nine prints in various media on wove paper, with introduction and two phonograph recordings, in wood and masonite box, 61 x 61 cm (each print) Collection of Av Isaacs

Tube Amplifier, c.1968 Amplifier and painted wood carrier, 33 x 47 x 24.1 cm Collection of Nihilist Spasm Band Archive

Re-play David Armstrong Six

I’ve Been Thinkin’, 2002 DVD Cour tesy of Goodwater Galler y

[excerpt:] I’ve Been Thinkin’ -is that alright?

I’ve been thinkin’ my turn signals on I left it blinkin’ Can’t contend with what’s up front gotta look sideways don’t even think of takin’ the highways a ratta-tat-tat I got an inklin’ you can dig beneath the sewers but it’s more of this stinkin’ we goin’ down and there’s nothin’ to save us hop-on hop-off hijack a bus we gotta get outta here grab your bag and call it a Gucci grab your Gucci and call it an oozi cocaine’s the propane that wipes out the brain I’m dusted your eyes are red but mine are encrusted what’s that you say I’m busted on top of that who you callin’ maladjusted? my fingernails are dirty and my limbs are rusted cause I’ve been diggin’ without any riggin’

List of Works

a-hole in the ground the size my face fill it up with bile and a pinch of mace inhale the plastic pail that’s crazy it keeps the days so hazy is it hot in here or is it just me? this must be the gallery let’s see how many guns do you need to ya head before ya unstunned or undead cause I’ve been thinkin’ -is that alright I’ve been thinkin’ take a look around tell me we ain’t sinking gotta keep movin' before we dissipate get some nails ‘n’ wood to build a crate there is no such thing as a clean slate and I can’t wait to see what you mean by an exchange rate it’s a fraction of that which keeps on buggin’ me cause I’m lost but can’t help to see like when you SEE ME comin’ out the House of Lancaster you see me when all I see is Dizzaster cause I like ta think of myself as the attractor attractor ..a tractor.. attractre de disastre starin’ at th’ rot in th’ ceiling

and th’ plastah or I’m an old master hangin’ at the Galaxy Donuts o ya see me scrapin’ my pipe on th’ bus I’m so upside your head with th’ carboniferous cause if ya had a sense a time I’d clock you 3000 and three is the speed of this stew I’m DASIX, full of ice-picks It’s a face to th’ name and th’ name sticks I’m my own boss weilding th’ ass-floss, packing attitude, mullin’ over th’ crud whats up who you callin’ a dud antimatter island was the dry flood -the cripplah, the shit, the adaptor and the scud cause if ya had a sense a time you’d realize its light years from now not now I idealize & I’m on the twelfth day of being a dog and I’m a stray I suspect we need more than an x-ray to gauge the rage and the decay Joanne Bristol

Dancing to Bowie (circa 1974), outside Regina airport, while objects fly by and through me, June 30, 2002 DVD Cour tesy of the Ar tist

This work was produced through a curiosity to see how popular music I’d experienced as a young person—mostly listened to indoors, in basements, at parties, or inside cars—might translate or appear in relation to the land base on which I was raised (Saskatchewan Plains, Treaty Four). Though my dance moves were made in response to the recorded music—I don’t recall exactly which Bowie album it was—they were also informed by my relation to the many mosquitoes inhabiting the field. The resulting video suggests there is something as unsettling or otherworldly in the appearance of the built environment as there is in the narrative and sonic structures of Bowie’s recording.

Stan Douglas

Hors-Champs, 1992 2 channel DVD installation (black and white, stereo soundtrack, 13 min. 40 sec. each rotation), dimensions variable Collection of Pamela and Richard Kramlich

Hors-Champs can be translated as “out of field” or “outside the field”; in part, it deals with themes of displacement.

Douglas videos a jazz quartet playing Albert Ayler’s composition “Spirits Rejoice,” written in 1965. Ayler was a key figure in a revolutionary

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movement within jazz variously called the “new thing” or “free jazz.” “Spirits Rejoice” was written for his first concert in Paris; it combines American vernacular styles—country tunes, call and response spirituals, heraldic fanfares— with la Marseillaise. In the mid-to-late-1960s free jazz was widely supported in France, its perceived revolutionary stance connected to the larger revolutionary trajectory of the extensive French political activism most vividly manifested in the 1968 occupations, general strikes, and riots.

Its popularity in France faded with the dissipation of revolutionary struggle through the 1980s and 1990s.

Douglas shot Hors-Champs using two moving cameras on dollies. In installation, two versions of the performance are projected, one on each side of a screen suspended in the middle of a gallery. On one side, what Douglas calls the program version of the event is shown, carefully edited to mimic French entertainment shows of the late 1960s, particularly those created by Jean-Christophe Averty for the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF; the now defunct French national agency that provided public radio and television from 1964 to 1974). The other side

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of the screen shows a montage of virtual footage left on the virtual cutting room floor, what the camera moving to capture the next directed shots records en route to that position, moving images not intended to be seen if this was a 1960s French television broadcast: musicians not performing, but visibly enjoying their colleagues’ work or gathering themselves to play. It is significant that these versions can never be watched together; the viewer has to move between one side and its other. There is always something going on that is left unseen. Hors-Champs is dedicated to the people of South Central Los Angeles.

Albert Ayler wrote “Spirits Rejoice” around the time of the Watts riots; Stan Douglas shot Hors-Champs while Los Angeles was experiencing riots triggered by the acquittals of the policemen who assaulted Rodney King.

Along with these layers of critical texts Hors-Champs offers singular music made by the singular group of musicians Douglas assembled for this project: Douglas Ewart (saxophone), George Lewis (trombone), Kent Carter (string bass), and Oliver Johnson (drums).

Dave Dyment

Pop Quiz, 2001-2003 DVD Collection of the ar tist

Pop Quiz consists of every question from the lyrics of every pop song in my personal music collection, presented individually as a sort of Dadaesque survey.

Earworm as Venn diagram.

Pop Quiz was later published as an artists’ book

by Paul+Wendy Projects.

Raymond Gervais

3 + 1 =, 2003 4 black and white posters 3 + 1 =, 2003 4 CD audio installation with portable CD players Cour tesy of the Ar tist

This version of 3 + 1 =, in 2003, is the re-play of 3 + 1 = from 1977. The original installation shown in Montreal operated with four automatic turntables and vinyl recordings instead of the actual radio-CD players with compact discs. The basic functioning is the same though: all four records are played at the same time from the beginning, non-stop, on “repeat” mode. Since each recording is of a different duration, each ends and starts again in the midst of an ongoing complex musical mix.

This set up could play any

kind of music or sounds available on discs. That particular version uses jazz recordings but I have made others also with classical music, sounds of the environment, solo instruments and so on. Each one had a precise theme or narrative and instrumentation in order to achieve a specific sonic result impossible to realize otherwise. Once I have chosen the recordings, I let them play by themselves. I do not intervene during the ongoing process. The installation will play all day and generate its own sound collages and sonic surprises along the way.

The present version is based on the true stories relating those mythical band battles in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century, when jazz was emerging and Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, King Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory and many others were active and competing among themselves to gain the attention of the public, meanwhile pushing the music always a little further creatively. Even though this work is based on real people and actual facts, it is not attempting to be a faithful recreation of history per se.

The machine made music it produces (each CD player acting as a sort of “band

wagon”), expresses nevertheless, to my ears, something of the lively, ebullient spirit of New Orleans Jazz at the turn of the century, while establishing, at the same time, a link with the forthcoming, intense, free collective music of the sixties and later on.

(cf. Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997)).

In a way, 3 + 1 = renews that event as it recycles history, history being a record.

Rodney Graham

Also in my mind is the suggestion, via 3 + 1 =, of an imaginary meeting between Louis Armstrong and Charles Ives, the American composer of many experimental scores for simultaneous groups or orchestras at the very same time that Jazz was being invented in New Orleans and elsewhere. Ives composed and Armstrong improvised but somehow those two parallel approaches meet and merge along the way to convey something of the uplifting spirit and intellectual drive at play at the start of a then new era that of phonography, of sound recording so crucial to the evolution of all musics since, be they written, spontaneous or machine made.

The history of Jazz in Canada, writes historian Mark Miller, begins in 1914 in Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary with the arrival of the Creole Band, the first group of New Orleans Jazz musicians to perform in this country, including the legendary cornet player Freddie Keppard

List of Works

Phonokinetoscope, 2001 16mm film projector, loop device, modified record player, control box, 16mm film (5 min.), LP records Cour tesy Galerie Nelson, Paris, and Galler y 303, New York

Rodney Graham’s Phonokinetoscope comprises a five-minute 16mm film loop and a twelve-inch vinyl record that repeats the same song three times, for a total play of fifteen minutes.

The projector is activated when the needle engages with the record—technically making it a phonokinetoscope, after Edison’s early cinematic invention. The film is set in Berlin’s spring-blooming Tiergarten; its only props are a playing card, a clothespin, a vintage German bicycle, a thermos, and last but not least, a blotter of LSD, which Graham drops on his tongue while reposing on a rock. The phonographic component of the phonokinetoscope is written, performed, and recorded by Graham and his band.

Pascal Grandmaison

SOLO, 2003 DVD installation, dimensions variable Cour tesy of Galerie René Blouin, Montreal

The project SOLO is based on portraits of five people performing music alone. It is a kind of anti-portrait of the traditional action of a musical performance. In this case, you see only a fragment or piece of the person’s body or the instrument they are playing. You need to reconstruct these pieces in your mind in order to imagine the principal action and identity of each musician.

Playing music alone seems to be the new deal—the soundtrack of the 21st century can be seen as a sequence of single tracks in a potential multi-track of individual expressions.

Playing individually is both a form of self-reflection and a self-liberating action. It creates a psychological freespace for thinking through all of the other social selves.

To play music alone is also a form of projection— an expression of the mind but also a liberation that happens through compulsive action (the repetition of musical patterns, the physical feeling of your body in dialogue with the instrument).

When you are playing music solo, you copy-paste yourself in a generic manner between an idea of yourself, your movement, and your musical choice.

You move as if you see some one else move and play.

SOLO is a conceptual project. It is a reflection that relates to compulsion and to the generic idea of musical performance.

Instant Cof fee

Urban Disco Trailer, 2003 Mixed media installation (altered camper trailer, disco ball, turntables, 45 rpm records, spot lights, videos, and monitor) Dimensions variable A Brief History: August 2000 • Urban Disco Trailer (UDT.01) a retrofitted twenty-four foot 1974 Holiday Cruiser, was first launched as part of a performance by Jin’s Banana House for FADO and in conjunction with Whorehouse, an exhibition curated by Instant Coffee for their studio, Workplace. Artists included in Whorehouse: James Carl, Jennifer Murphy and Chris Rogers, Lucy Pullen, Nestor Kruger, Jill Henderson, and Christina Maynall.

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September 2000 • Instant Coffee invites Lucia Del Amor and Ken Ogawa to stage a week of performances from UDT.01.

December 2000 – March 2001 • The second Urban Disco Trailer (UDT.02: a 1968 pop up) made its first appearance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and incorporated the work of over seventy artists. Within the project, Instant Coffee staged three separate events, The Logo Show, The Miniature Show, and The Video Show respectively. The Logo Show commissioned artists to design a logo/bumper sticker for the Urban Disco Trailer.

Artists included James Carl, John McLachlin, Lewis Nicholson, Andrew Di Rosa/ SMALL, 1000km Design Büro, Cecilia Berkovic, Eric Glavin, Fastwürms, Greg Hefford, Jay Wilson, Jennifer Murphy/Chris Rogers, John Marriot, Jenifer Papararo, Kate Monro, Lois Andison, Luis Jacob, Michael Buckland, Michelle Gay, Nestor Kruger, Sally MacKay, Jubal Brown, Michael Barker, Si Si Penaloza, Troy Ouellette, Jin's Banana House. Some artists focused on the UDT as a theme: while others played up the bumper sticker aspect.

For The Miniature Show, Instant Coffee invited artists to contribute and produce

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works for inside the UDT.02.

Artists included Temple Bates, Mark Crofton Bell, Laura Borealis, Amy Bowles, Lisa Brown, Chandra Bulucon, CoCo Chanel, Patrick DeCoste, Janis Demkiw, Terence Dick, Andrew Duff, Dave Dyment, Cliff Eyland, Jennifer Febbraro, Michael Fernandes, Ev Funes, David Grenier, Anitra Hamilton, Jill Henderson, Jay Isaac, Lisa Klapstock, Michael Klein, Jinhan Ko, Germaine Koh, Elizabeth LeMoine, Jennifer Marman, Casey McGlynn, Milosh Rodic, Kate Monro, Katherine Mulherin, Jenifer Papararo, Mitch Robertson, Lisa Deanne Smith, Jordan Sonnenberg, Derek Sullivan, Christy Thompson, and Olexander Wlasenko and Jason van Horne. The Video Show incorporated work that enhanced the leisure and playful aesthetic of the UDT.02. Artists included: Shary Boyle, Kika Thorne, Jinhan Ko, Sandy Plotnikoff, Danny Bowden, Chris Murphy, Amanda Burt, Enzo Mazzulla, Michelle Kasprzak, Jennifer McMackonnon, Travis Gledhill, Laura Cowell, Si Si Penaloza, Jenifer Papararo, Milosh Rodic, Peaches, Lisa Kannako, Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Guntar Kravis, Cecilia Berkovic, Simone Moire, David Clark. The constant in all three

exhibitions was that the individual works were not as important as the assembling of artists and work to make the UDT a better place/piece.

March 2001 • Instant Coffee without invitation brings the UDT.02 to the parking lot outside of The Power Plant, Toronto, during the opening for Substitute City.

July 2001 • Instant Coffee was invited to present UDT.02 in Oasis a group exhibition curated by Sylvie Gilbert, Nelson Hendricks, and François Dion for the Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal.

Within the framework of this group exhibition, Instant Coffee curated another group show, The Soft Show, within the UDT.02. Artists included: Janet Bellotto, Diane Borsato, Lisa Brown, Chandra Bulucon, Kelly Coats, Daniel Cockburn, Galia Eibenschutz, DJ.freshdiscoporkergas, Charles Gagnon, Massimo Guerrera, Angela Hajdu, James Harbison, Shari Hatt, Peter Hobbs, Pandora Hobby, HumanFauxPas, kake, Jinhan Ko, Valerie Lamontagne, Corrine Lemieux, Elizabeth Lemoine, Kelly Lynn, Kate Monro, Richard Moszka, Taien Ng, Natalie Olanick, Jenifer Papararo, Dianne Pearce, Ana Rewakowicz, Kathleen Sellars, Vida

Simon, Lisa Deanne Smith, Lyllie Sue, Txema, Samuel Roy-Bois, Jennifer Wile.

September 2001 • Instant Coffee was invited to participate in and exhibit the UDT.02 at d.o.p. (a third annual performance symposium) organized by SAW Gallery, Ottawa.

October 2001 • Instant Coffee invites Travis Gledhill for residency in the UDT.01. His residency ends as winter sets in.

November 2001 • Instant Coffee and UDT.02 were invited back to the Art Gallery of Ontario for an evening performance. This time Instant Coffee organized The Slide Show and launched the T-Shirt Catalog. The Slide Show included work by Jay Wilson, Gwen MacGregor, Celeste Toogood, Jennifer McDonald, Jubal Brown, Lisa Deanne Smith, Jinhan Ko, Nicole Bauberger, Luis Jacob, Jon Sasaki, Alexander Nagel, John Marriott, Adrian Blackwell, Lucia Del Amor, Kika Thorne, Chandra Bulucon, Dave Dyment, Kate Monro, Karen Azoulay, Paul P., Ingrid Z, Laurel Woodcock, Laura Borealis, Matthew Evans, Michelle Kasprzak, Si Si Penaloza, Timothy Comeau, Tony Romano. The T-shirt Show included work by 1000km Design Büro, Andrew

McLaren, Andrew Reilly, Cecilia Berkovic + Kate Monro, Celeste Toogood, Chantal Rousseau, Chris Martin, drivedrive com, Greg Hefford, Greg Staats, Holly Ward, Instant Coffee, James Carl, Janis Demkiw, Jess Rowland, Jessica Thompson, Jinhan Ko, Jon Sasaki, Jordan Sonnenberg, Kika Thorne, Laura Borealis, Lisa Deanne Smith, Lisa Kannakko, Lisa Klapstock, Marco Bortolussi, Michael Klein, Natalie De Vito, Nicole Bauberger, Peter Kingstone, Sasha Havlick, Simone Moir, Timothy Comeau, Tullis Rose.

April 2002 • IMAGES film and video festival invites Instant Coffee to hold mediatheque within the UDT.01.

May 2002 • Instant Coffee held The Photo Show in the UDT.01. Snapshots covered the entire interior of the trailer.

• Instant Coffee re-launched the T-Shirt Catalog in a warehouse parking lot from UDT.01.

June 2002 • REHAB film and video festival invites Instant Coffee to screen a selection of videos from UDT.01.

• Splice This Super 8 film festival invites Instant Coffee to hold an outdoor screening of films from UDT.01.

List of Works

May 2003 • Instant Coffee revamps the UDT.01, inviting graffiti artists Seth Scriver and Erin Zimmerman to paint Guts and Glory, inside and out of the trailer.

June 2003 • Splice This Super 8 film festival invites Instant Coffee to hold an outdoor screening of films from UDT.01. During the festival Instant Coffee holds private screenings in UDT.01 of self-produced super 8.

June and October 2003 • Instant Coffee was invited to exhibit UDT.03 for Re-play curated by Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer as part of Soundtracks.

Within the framework of this group exhibition, Instant Coffee curated a video programme, Alchemy and Mysticism, for within the confines of the UDT.03. Artists include: Meesoo Lee with The Radio, Scott Russell, Galia Eibenschutz + Alexis Zabe, Txema, Pedro "zulu" Gonzalez, Peaches by Lisa Kannako, Silverio by Miguel Calderon, Jin's Banana House, Tony Romano + Shayne Ehman with The Grassy Knowles, Jon Sasaki, Paige Stain, Jordan Sonenberg with The Evil Plans, Hidden Cameras by Laura Cowell, Chris Mills, and Greg Hefford.

September 2003 • 2nd Tirana Biennial, launch of Instant Coffee multiple and slide show/video screening inside the UDT.04 (a borrowed 1980s leisure trailer from Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana), Albania.

July 2005 • Instant Coffee loaned Viennese artists Severin Hofmann and Patrick Baumüller the UDT.05 for their Würstelstand as part of Unterspiel a group exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

April 2004 • UDT.03 acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

September 2005 • Instant Coffee + Everyone: UDT.02 crushing and its subsequent events @ Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, ON.

June 2004 • Instant Coffee: BASS BED @ UDT.01 as part of Hive Magazine launch, Toronto.

• Instant Coffee: UDT.01 Outdoor Screening as part of Splice This Super 8 Festival, Toronto.

May 2005 • UDT.05 (a 16 foot, 1960s kit made leisure trailer) as part of Year of Perfect Days, a series of exhibitions and events that mix metaphors with icons, confuses kitsch with psychedelics, turns gay with optimism, and levels expectations into mediocrity, IC invited artists to make rainbows. Rainbows by Hadley + Maxwell, Andrew Dadson, Steven Tong + Sally Lee, Kelly Lycan, i.e. creative, Inter-mission.

APPEARANCES: Instant Coffee + Inter-mission, FUSE events @ the Vancouver Art Gallery.

August 2005 • UDT.05 @ TAKING PLACE, a series of cultural investigations and events organized by Sam Gould, Matthew Stadler, and Stephanie Snyder during summer of 2005 in Portland, Oregon. Instant Coffee was invited to participate in the series of often unruly exhibitions using the Urban Disco Trailer #5 as a focus of social gathering and performances which included a 45’s self-DJ station, dancing inside the trailer, and screening of various ongoing instant coffee video projects.

(Aug 2005) June 2010 • UDT.05 as part of International Chilliwack Biennial, Chilliwack, BC. June 2011 • UDT.05 took part in the South Hill Community Day as part of community outreach for the public project

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Instant Coffee designed and facilitated in the neighbourhood, locating an under-used alleyway as a focal point and neighbourhood nexus for things to happen.

May 2013 • UDT.01 disappears from storage in King City, Ontario.

Tim Lee

The Move, The Beastie Boys, 1998, 2001 three-channel video installation, 4 min. 48 sec.

The Move, The Beastie Boys, 1998, 2003 four-colour silkscreen, 96.5 x 122 cm Cour tesy Tracey Lawrence Galler y, Vancouver

In 1998, the Beastie Boys released Hello Nasty, a pure laine hip hop album loaded with old school sentiment, nostalgic street hymns and a type of retro rhythm and rhyme that was enormously coloured by a fondness for a nascent era when hip hop was at its highest. With the topic of their race no longer a question, the Beastie Boys have emerged from the debate of their legitimacy—as three white, upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorkers fronting black culture—with enough cultural currency to be considered respected members of the hip hop vanguard.

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Dispensing with the New York hardcore they started out with as young bourgeois punks and brought back to dubious effect on their previous two albums, the great aesthetic shift with Hello Nasty came in its rhyme style.

A standard trope of early 80s hip hop, the tag-team was the lingua franca of B-boy utopia. With practitioners that included the Treacherous Three and Run DMC, it articulated a complicated multi-vocal rhyme pattern where one person would say a verse and abruptly stop mid-phrase just as another would pick up from where he left off and continue to complete the sentence.

Showcasing a mercurial logic of group dynamism and the organic interaction among three musicians in the studio, "The Move" is a song that exemplifies the aesthetic of the tag-team with an engaging frisson of fun phrase, buoyant cadence, and verbal precision. Equally enmeshed in pleasure and nostalgia, "The Move" encapsulates a reverie for a lost past and where the exercise of depicting the old school also meant memorializing it.

Acting as both aesthetes and historians, the Beastie Boys rejuvenated the practice of an aesthetic past in order to reinvigorate the standards of a contemporary present.

All of a sudden, hip hop— as a medium of relative newness—began to re-historicize itself, and by bringing back the tag-team, the Beastie Boys made the aesthetic history of hip hop more and more apparent. The history of video art is just as short as hip hop. And until very recently at least, video art meant performance. In the seventies artists like Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman used video to primarily capture and render a performance on tape. For them, video was a new way to enact their psychological closetdramas, so they filmed themselves in the studio by dramatizing simple behavior.

Mainly, they acted out small gestures, experimented freely with their bodies and selves, and performed directly for the camera. What emerged from this was a rhetoric of presence that coerced the viewer towards the artist and his machines. Narcissism was at question, and when Acconci and Nauman placed themselves in an enclosed loop of their equipment and selves, they did it partly to displace the viewer outside of it. What’s most interesting is that the priori of an "I" inherent in their videos intersects with an "I" prevalent in hip hop. In the lyrics for The Move, the massive pronoun usage of "I," "me,"

and "my" is indicative of the testimony, self-aggrandizement, and simultaneous ownership and projection of self that matches the rhetoric of hip hop with the performative tropes of Acconci and Nauman's videos. The Move, The Beastie Boys, 1998 is an attempt to align the standards of old school hip hop with the early practice of video art. A video installation that consists of three separate monitors and VCRs, each screen features the artist assuming the identity of a Beastie Boy (Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA) and his rhymes. Comprising a circumnavigational left, right and centre perspective of the artist’s head, the installation splits the self into three separate entities and is connected visually by an eye-line match that faces a fixed central axis, and audibly by an oral phrasing of the song that jumps back and forth between the three. An ersatz reproduction that mimes the process of karaoke singing and the look of early video, the patterned call-and-response of the three heads rhyming with and opposite each other supplies an aural, visual, and physiological counterpart to the multiple dynamism of the tag-team and the strategies of performative video. Yet no matter how the

Beastie Boys have managed to make matters of their race incidental, the installation attempts to make the question of race primal.

In the work, a simulacrum of race is being made indistinguishable—the visual Asian appearance of the performer conflates with white text and coded black grammar to the point where no one race becomes the dominant one. Here, the artist adopts minimalist tactics— in a reduced, deadpan, and mechanical look and performance—as a process of deracination that conflates a triple stage of racial identities. Minimalism acts as the great leveller. In the video everything gets reduced; the production is mathematical, the rhyming made deadpan, the "I" gets extinguished. By systematically rehearsing the tag-team to mechanical effect, the performance attempts to defeat a complex pattern of language by trying to articulate it. And paradoxically, the monotone delivery makes the charged giddiness of hip hop strangely rational, foreign, and strange.

Ian Murray

The Top Song, 1970 mixed media, signed original graphic, audio recording, playback station, wood table (removable legs) with

List of Works

AC/DC adapter, CD player, headphones, framed graphic, 62.8 x 62.8 cm Cour tesy of the ar tist

Keeping On Top Of The Top Song, 1970 mixed media, signed original graphic, audio recording, playback station, wood table (removable legs) with AC/DC adapter, CD player, headphones, framed graphic, 62.8 x 62.8 cm

Radius Etch: Flock Repetition, 1969 mixed media, signed original graphic, audio recording, playback station, wood table (removable legs) with AC/DC adapter, CD player, headphones framed graphic, 62.8 x 62.8 cm Cour tesy of the ar tist

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay

I am a Boyband, 2002 DVD

Cour tesy of the ar tist

Collection of the ar tist

KEEPING ON TOP OF THE TOP SONG

In I am a Boyband, I perform as four different members of a contemporary boyband, singing a 16th-century English madrigal rearranged to have a pop-synth backbeat.

I am a Boyband explores sameness in contemporary culture, examining the prefab, uncritical articulations of masculinity, love, and relationships that are massproduced as both entertainment and instructive socializing agents. It also seeks to underscore the startling similarities between lyrics from Elizabethan court songs and contemporary pop music.

A drummer has been contracted through the local musicians' union to play along with an audio recording which he has not previously heard. He has been told only that the music goes through a number of changes and that he should play continuously − always searching for a point of reference, an underlying beat − allowing him to play along without changing his rhythm.

The audio recording the drummer will be performing along with is THE TOP SONG by Ian Murray, 1970.

I use my video practice as a tool through which to participate in a critical dialogue with popular culture and also to explore my own role as an individual— in particular as a consumer— in the media-saturated

culture that surrounds me.

I am interested in the selfreflexive gaze between consumers and consumer media, and the way in which popular culture becomes a lens through which individuals understand themselves.

My practice has decidedly personal roots, and while my hope is that my work poses broader questions about the consumption and internalization of pop-cultural images and texts, my practice is also clearly driven by personal desires to inhabit these spaces, perhaps to disarm them from the instructive power they hold, destabilizing and interrupting them somehow, but also taking pleasure in these images and spaces, gaining access to them, and transforming them.

I am interested in exploring the autobiographical potential held by pop culture and in particular pop song lyrics, and in co-opting and reinhabiting these images and texts as my own storytelling tool.

Shannon Oksanen

40 Portraits of Nana Mouskouri, 2002–ongoing Graphite on paper (total 39), 70 x 70 cm (each) Collection of the ar tist

Oksanen has an interest in repeatedly representing already over-represented

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images. She is well known for her serial portraits of popular and historical figures. Her forty ink on paper drawings of Nana Mouskouri, one of the world’s biggest selling female singers, were her first serial portraits and her first attempt to look closely at how the image of one figure has informed the pop star’s representation of herself and in turn, transformed her image into a recognizable icon. Mouskouri has released over 400 albums and, according to the online magazine HomeboyMediaNews 230 of them are platinum or gold.

Almost all have an image of the singer on the cover.

Collectively these images of Mouskouri simplify a career that seems an impossibility in its very description. She released her first album in 1960 and her last in 2007. She has produced albums in her native language Greek, but also French, Spanish, German, English, and others.

She moves freely between singing jazz, folk, pop, and classical styles of music.

She is an inexhaustible artist whose image has changed little in comparison to her vigorous career, but has come to mean more.

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Even though I can’t name, let alone hum, one of Mouskouri’s songs, I remember her as a striking figure with long straight black hair, usually in shimmering evening gowns and always wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses. Oksanen’s portraits are simple line drawings; they are uniform and centered headshots scaled to the dimensions of an album cover. Mouskouri is easily identifiable by the heavy glasses, (even though they change in style from 1950s horn-rims to a more contemporary rectangle shape over the years), her hair, as well as a small mole on the lower left side of her face.

With few lines and simple closed curves Oksanen represents this icon as well as chronicles the making of one. What is made clear in viewing this series is the power of repetition and how this repetition begets nostalgia.

In the mega-superstar’s nearly forty-year career her image has changed little; it is as if her image embodies both the past and the present.

Through these portraits, we can see how the past was imagined from beginning to end. (Jenifer Papararo, "A General Feel for Summerland," Shannon Oksanen: Summerland. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2008)

Kevin Schmidt

Steven Shearer

Long Beach Led Zep, 2002 DVD loop of performance with Marshall Amplifier, Fender Telecaster, and Generator

Activity Cell with Warlock Bass Guitar, 1997 Plywood, upholstery, and aluminum, 145 x 244 cm

Collection of the ar tist

In this work, I play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” on a deserted wilderness beach on Vancouver Island. This beach was a hippy settlement in the 1970’s.

For the work, I wanted to combine things that had become overly familiar (sunsets on the beach, depictions of wilderness, and ideas of rebellion and freedom incorporated in the bombastic strains of “Stairway to Heaven”) in such a way that would redeem them. At first the work seems to be in jest, with such an over-the-top combination of sentimentality.

However, as I stumble through the song, becoming increasingly confident, the waves crash and the sunset deepens behind me and what was merely humorous becomes beautiful.

The work is an assertion of the commons, of space open to public use. It asserts this not only for physical space, but also for the space of culture, by using a song that commodified the utopian ideals of the 1960s.

National Galler y of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 2003

Guitar #4, 2002 Archival inkjet print, 114.3 x 198.1 cm Cour tesy Steven Shearer Galler y of Contemporar y Ar t, featuring the ar t of Steven Shearer / Galerie Hauser Wir th Presenhuber, Zurich

Scrap #1, 2003 Mixed media installation, 213 x 914 cm (approximately) Collection of The Morris and Helen Belkin Ar t Galler y, Vancouver

xytraguptorh@yahoo.com, 2002 Digi-print, artist multiple Cour tesy Steven Shearer Galler y of Contemporar y Ar t featuring the ar t of Steven Shearer

ARMAGEDDON, 2002 Pencil on paper Cour tesy Blum & Poe, Santa Monica

Zin Taylor

The Rapture, June 15, 2003 Photograph, 27.9 x 35.5 cm Collection of the ar tist

Theatrics in a re-patriated closet, 2002 Ink on paper, 21.6 x 27.9 cm Collection of the ar tist

Chicks on Speed, March 21, 2003 Photograph, 27.9 x 35.5 cm Collection of the ar tist

A Pan-Global Conversation to an History of Kraut, 2002 Ink on paper, 21.6 x 27.9 cm

Polymer, balsa wood, teak, paper, headphones, dimensions variable

Collection of the ar tist

Collection of the ar tist

Trans Am, June 14, 2003 Photograph, 27.9 x 35.5 cm

The Rapture, bootleg, 2002 Audio CD (4 copies)

Collection of the ar tist

Collection of the ar tist

An Intro Assessment of Kraut, 2002 Ink on paper, 21.6 x 27.9 cm

Chicks on Speed, bootleg, 2002 Audio CD (4 copies)

Collection of the ar tist

Collection of the ar tist

The American Analog Set, September 25, 2003 Photograph, 27.9 x 35.5 cm

Chicks on Speed, March 21, 2003 Photograph, 27.9 x 35.5 cm

Collection of the ar tist

Collection of the ar tist

An Austin Sentiment Towards Krautrock, 2001 Ink on paper, 21.6 x 27.9 cm

Trans Am, bootleg, 2002 Audio CD (4 copies) Collection of the ar tist

Collection of the ar tist

A Kind Suggestion For Those Involved, 2003 Found poster and vinyl sticker, 45.7 x 61 cm Collection of the ar tist

A Temporal Plug (beginning), 2003 Photograph, 25.4 x 30.4 cm

The American Analog Set, bootleg, 2001 Audio CD (4 copies) Collection of the ar tist

Zin Taylor: trying to make friends

This project is an evolving archive, one that is concerned Collection of the ar tist with the documentation and description of situations, A Temporal Plug groups, and individuals (established), 2003 who exemplify characteristics Photograph, 25.4 x 30.4 cm that can be labeled cinematic.

Collection of the ar tist This identification is a process that involves “sound Hand Crafted Points of A tracking”: a personalizing Nomadic Mediation, 2001–2003 of social space through a filter of created and found experience.

List of Works

Drawing from a variety of live music, the subject matter is chosen for its ability to participate in a musical and social history that is defined by a repetitive process that maintains a forward rhythm while actively promoting deviation, and for its ability to describe ideologies, environment, and social structure. In turn, it provides a rendering of community.

The ability to encode oneself with the knowledge, experience, and details relating to a subculture allows for someone to exist within an alternative social structure while simultaneously participating in the common day.

The listening to, or visual enactment of, a performance or cinematic circumstance is a form of spatial travel which can operate in a sonic mode of discussion that suspends the listener/participant for as long as they wish. The knowledge, selection, and organization of these details (aural and visual) are what leads to and develops an archive of community.

into an archive. The bootlegged recordings evoke the characters and situations within a narrative that run parallel to the everyday: the themed instrumentals of the American Analog Set, The Rapture's awkward hybrid of reggae/punk/disco that is as telling of the original music’s ability to describe a community, the indoctrinating call to arms of the Chicks on Speed, and the intro to Trans Am which establishes their own themes within a new rhythm structure.

These musical examples are all drawn under a narrative umbrella alluding to Krautrock of the late 1960s and 1970s, more specifically the genre’s ability to combine different musical elements as a form of social discussion.

The works are descriptive of an architectural relationship between individuals and groups that exist as the content of an event. The expansion of this project hinges on a sustained presence in the accumulation and distribution of the The project’s candid documen- source material, i.e.: the act tation of homemade recorders, of recording performances camouflage devices and and the tracing of influence other remnants of the booton the public as seen legged event are displayed in through a cinematic narrative. an effort to lend transparency (Rory Hanchard) (in subjective degrees) to what someone may incorporate

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Ron Terada

Big Star, 2003 Neon sign with transformers Big Star is a large neon light piece that refers to the 1970s American Rock band of the same name. The band has been remembered by history as producing a small but devoted cult following. The sign is directly lifted from the logo of the band, which in turn lifted it from a supermarket chain.

The Journey of Soul, 2 min. 41 sec. © Sung Hee Park-Talbot Vocals and piano Sung Hee Park-Talbot Percussion - Anthony Duke Reaching Over, 2 min. 51 sec. © Katrina Kadoski Vocals and acoustic guitar Katrina Kadoski

Holly Ward

Sunshine, 2 min. 51 sec. © Julia Skagfjord Vocals and acoustic guitar Julia Skagfjord

Althea Thauberger

Songstress, 2001-2002 16mm to DVD (installation-6 mounted colour photographs, bench), 50.8 x 60.9 cm (photographs - each) Collection of the ar tist

Songstress features the music of 8 young female singer/songwriters from Victoria B.C. who answered an ad in a local entertainment weekly. Some of the young women were experienced performers and some had never performed publicly at all. Their songs were professionally recorded, then each songstress was filmed in a lip-synched performance in a natural setting in or around Victoria.

Goodbye Love, 2 min. 34 sec. © Elise Hall-Meyer Vocals and acoustic guitar Elise Hall-Meyer

Re-play

All songs recorded and mixed at The Recordist’s Workshop, Victoria, BC, Canada Audio engineer - Bill Crapelle Audio mastering - Hugh MacMillan Direction, editing, and environmental audio Althea Thauberger Camera - Milutin Gubash

folklore, 2000–2001 Analogue audiotapes, car stereo, speakers, dimensions variable Cour tesy of the ar tist

Looking for Something, 2 min. 43 sec. © Kathryn Calder Vocals - Kathryn Calder Electric guitar Luke Kozlowski Bass guitar - Brooke Gallup Percussion - Caley Campbell Denial, 2 min. 14 sec. © Gillian Stone Vocals - Gillian Stone Why, 2 min. 27 sec. © Marlene Battryn Vocals and electric guitar Marlene Battryn Tomorrow, 3 min. 5 sec. © Leah Abramson Vocals and acoustic guitar Leah Abramson Second acoustic guitar Gordon Breckenridge

Folklore was a project commenced during the summer of 2000, as Ward travelled overland from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Vancouver, BC, after completing her BFA at NSCAD. During this journey, Ward began to notice a form of then-contemporary tumbleweed in ditches and sidewalks: jumbles of magnetic cassette tape strips.

Curious to determine whether the material on these tapes was still readable, Ward collected and spliced these scraps together, constructing a series of compilations reflective of cast-off listening material ranging from discernable pop songs, right wing Christian sermons, Bangra, and hip hop, to totally warped and dissonant clips and garbled voices.

Folklore consists of a group of five mixed tapes, displayed in the gallery on a car stereo, where the viewer can select which tape and side to play.

This series of mixed tapes was followed by Cancions Populaires, a similarly derived mixed tape Ward constructed during her overland travels through Mexico later that year.

Video Heroes David Armstrong Six

I’ve Been Thinkin’, 2002 (See Re-play) Tyler Brett

Propane, 2003 Propane is a music video I had made for my original, home-recorded song called “Propane.” The video itself was simply a series of long shots taken around 2002–2003 of sections of forest, big box box stores and power lines that ran alongside the Trans Canada Highway heading east toward the original Port Mann bridge spanning the Fraser River near New Westminster.

Kevin Ei-ichi deForest

Foxy, 2003 For the Foxy video, I mimed to a Japanese version of Jimi Hendrix’s classic “Foxy Lady” in front of a green screen. I dropped in clips from Pennebaker’s famous Live at Monterey documentary as well as crowd scenes from a Japanese rock festival. The audio went back and forth between dubbing in the actual studio recording of the song and the ambient sound that included the track being

List of Works

played in the space while we were shooting the video.

My interest was in the mixing of the fake and the real, the slippage of the familiar (in this case the icon of Hendrix) into a more hybrid Asian version of the song. I use myself in most of my videos to represent my Eurasian identity, which eleven years later has a greater media presence but I feel is still quite invisible as a cultural presence.

...There's a little place, a place called space It's a pretty little place, it's across the tracks, Across the tracks and the name of the place is you like it like that…

The sea's the possibility…

There is no land but the land…

There is no sea but the sea…

There is no keeper but the key…

Except for one who seizes possibilities, one who seizes possibilities…

Nikki Forrest

(from the song “Land” on Horses, the debut studio album by Patti Smith, released on December 13, 1975)

My Heart the Rock Star, 2002 1 min. 33 sec.

MHTRS was originally made as part of a collaborative series called “My Heart…” initiated by Annie Martin and myself in 1999. Found Super 8 film footage and samples from a live recording of a 1970’s rock song were combined, processed, and re-edited to produce a kind of bricolage. The voice over explores some of the transcendent, uncontainable identities-in-flux I saw in certain early-seventies rock/ glam/pre-punk performers: beyond fixed meaning or single interpretation, the voices, sounds, images and desires were hard to grasp but full of possibility.

Meesoo Lee

Deer Dreams, 2003 Back in 2003 I was making a lot of what I called “minimalist music videos” using footage appropriated from TV and movies set to music that I liked to listen to. Deer Dreams synchronizes a sequence from Bambi (1942) with the song “Colours” (1968) by Donovan.

I feel the overall effect is sentimental (i.e., nostalgic, tender, emotional, affectionate). I was thinking of someone at the time.

Tim Lee

Funny Face, George & Ira Gershwin, 1933, 2002

Like a lot of my work, the video installation is a sight gag. The initial idea came from a moment of fantasy in that I don’t know how to play the guitar and tried to imagine a scenario where I might be seen as being able to. While attending a concert, I noticed that various members of the audience would move their heads along with the performers on stage, which had the odd effect of appearing like they were imagining themselves as musicians. In this way, the relatively simple idea of taking two separate video recordings—one of myself from the chest up mimicking another video of a guitarist seen shoulders down performing a jazz standard—and recombining them on top of another resulted in the awkward illusion that I was proficient in playing the Gershwin brothers American jazz standard.

Kelly Mark

War Pigs, 2002 The artist’s cat is sitting between speakers while “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath plays.

The cat displays no interest in the song. It is likely that the cat is not listening or even hearing; the cat is probably asleep.

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Anne McGuire

a formalized and much trunI Am Crazy and You’re cated version. While Acconci's Not Wrong, 1997 persona is intent on seducing the viewer, in Theme Song 2 This video is the result of the text assumes the position an accident, which took place of a viewer. Rebuking the in November, 1995, in which characters’ self-obsession that I broke my jaw and wrist; is really only a mirror of the and, seeing Judy Garland: rampant image-based The Concert Years on public narcissism that permeates a television. It was a tumultusociety ever increasingly ous period and I wrote hung up on "celebrity." a lot of poems. I wanted to Produced in 2001, Theme make a show like Judy’s, so I Song II appears towards the called my cameraman and beginning of the flood set up a shoot for Saint of micro performances for Patrick’s Day, 1996. With the camera to come in just my cameraman present, our trash saturated culture I sang my poetry to an when everyone has a recording imaginary audience, a cappella, device in their pocket. This improvising the whole thing. phenomenon was perhaps A year later, using my record foretold in the early uses of collection, turntable, and these consumer technologies cassette recorder, I DJ’d a series in the video performance of sound tracks to accompany works of the 1970s. Looking the video, and in a hurried back, Acconci’s Theme Song editing session laid the tracks may have partly conjured this to the video. That technique reality from afar. resulted in the rather disjointed but weirdly accurate Monique Moumblow and Yudi Sewraj mix of picture and sound that captures the psyche of Accordion, 2000 the haunted singer alone on a stage.

Accordion is a short video in which the artists play Tricia Middleton and “Little Annie Roonie,” Joel Taylor a popular music-hall song Theme Song II, 2001 from the 1890’s. Working in unison to play an instrument Theme Song II borrows its that usually only requires name from the seminal Vito one musician, Moumblow Acconci tape, re-packaging and Sewraj enact an absurd the self-delusional banter and cumbersome recital. of the Acconci piece in

Video Heroes

An accordion becomes a kind of piano, and the unnecessary presence of two musicians evokes the complexities of any collaboration.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay

happens—but in an interesting way; like some of Dylan’s songs, this video is about twelve minutes—during which the artist watches, listens, and waits. What was he thinking this time?

I am a Boyband, 2002 Rob Ring

(see Re-play)

Ultra Hustle Dance Party, 2002

Daniel Olson

Sad Eyed Lady, 2003

In my work I use the tradition of absurd humour to reflect on the absurdity of many of Sad Eyed Lady is a video life’s, and art’s, structures. recorded in a studio in Dublin: improvised scenario, Absurdity enters into the modern condition in stationary camera, no rehearsal, one shot, one take— all aspects—but perhaps most notably in art and popular that’s it that’s all (comme entertainment. One can do on dit à Montréal). Viewed from behind, the seated artist things under the guise of art that would, in any other is observed smoking a cigar, drinking a glass of dark beer, context, be absurd—things like trying to teach a plant to and looking up at a photoread (John Baldessari), or copied picture of a woman a dog to spell (William floating in an undefined Wegman). Similarly, from grey gloom. Bob Dylan’s Sad Buster Keaton to Andy Eyed Lady of the Lowlands Kaufman, absurdity has (1966)—an insidiously haunting pop song, variously played a major role in comedic film and television. described as a thirteen minute [sic] one-trick pony, In my video work I am simultaneously embracing part inventory, part arsenal, and critiquing both as much funeral procession as wedding march, a dream, contemporary art and pop culture media. a riddle, and a prayer— plays from an unseen sound Jeremy Shaw system. As the music swirls and the harmonica wails, Morning Has Broken, 2001 the smoke drifts and curls in Morning has broken; tired the beam of an off-screen ravers leave an all night party spotlight. Like many of Olson’s videos, nothing much at dawn.

Skawennati

80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music, 200080 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music is an ongoing digital-video project which invites Generation X-ers to expose their inner rock star.

The generation of people who grew up in the Eighties never knew a time without television, or without Rock ’n Roll. We grew up “in the nuclear shadow,” worrying, while watching Dynasty, that we might not even make it to adulthood, or ever get the chance to be millionaires, like Alexis. For suburban teens not yet old enough to go to clubs, the most incredible aspect of 80s pop culture was certainly the music video.

We believed it was a brand new medium, and when MTV and MuchMusic began, we were hooked. Who needed sitcoms? These media nuggets allowed us to catch a glimpse of the people who really mattered to us: rock stars. We were young enough to think that maybe, someday, it could be us in that video. At least, that’s what I thought.

And I have found that I am not alone.

In the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden, the main character’s alter ego (played

List of Works

by Brad Pitt) matter-offactly says: “We were raised by television to believe that we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars— but we won't… And we're very, very pissed-off.” Yes, television encouraged us to believe that we could be rock stars. But we’re not really that pissed off. Most of us have only a fleeting desire to beat up our peers.

We’ve grown up to become teachers and scientists and artists, satisfied with the lives we’re living. It’s just that once in a while, we need a little reminder of the inner rock star we secretly cultivated in front of our mirrors, in the privacy of our bedrooms, after Friday Night Videos had ended.

From a menu of over one hundred Eighties songs, individuals are asked to choose a favourite which they will sing along to as I videotape them. This performance forms the basis of a one-minute music video with a familiar format: close-ups of the star singing the tune intercut with scenes from a simple narrative.

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Volume: Hear Here

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once imagined running the needle of a gramophone through the coronal suture of a human skull—a jagged furrow that he likened to the grooves of a gramophone record—an act he imaged would activate what he called the “primal sound.”

ultra-sonic range). I think of this work as primarily a gallery space empty of insects and rodents. In Untitled (Headset) a pair of headphones is altered so that one earpiece becomes a microphone, picking up its own sound from the speaker and creating a continuous feedback loop, which is disrupted by attempts to listen closer.

The silence serves as a blunt metaphor for the inability to understand infinity (your head gets in the way).

crys cole

Darsha Hewitt

Mitchell Akiyama

Ur-sound, or, the noise no writing can store, 2012

sweeper, 2009 Audio-video work, 16 min. 58 sec. sweeper is a meditation on the banal chore of sweeping.

The exaggerated soundtrack, captured by a contact microphone in the bristles of the broom, distorts and amplifies the artist's gestures, altering our perception of this ordinary activity.

Dave Dyment

Nothing (for Robert Barry), 2007 Power-bar, electronic pest control devices Untitled (Headset), 2007 Altered headphones Nothing (for Robert Barry) is ostensibly a tone-cluster sound work (albeit one in the

Volume: Hear Here

Electrostatic Bell Choir, 2012 Electromechanical installation, 20 prepared cathode ray tube (CRT) television monitors, 20 electrostatic bell sets, custom made electronics, variable dimensions Electrostatic Bell Choir consists of 20 Cathode Ray Tube TVs that are repurposed and used as static electricity generators.

The TVs turn on and off in automated sequences and accumulate static build up on the screens. These charges agitate small strikers on a series of small bell assemblies sitting in front of the monitors, causing them to waver and lightly hit the bells.

The glow of the screens and the subtle resonance of the bells magically punctuate the dark surroundings of the installation.

Marla Hlady

Basement Bass (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery), 2013 Dimensions variable Basement Bass (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery) is an audio architectural work that turns a floor into a rotating, resonating, bass speaker.

When viewers walk on the floor, they feel the audio through their bodies more than they hear it through their ears. Audio from the subbasement below the gallery (the bass-basement of the building) is my sounding (source) material.

Vikas Kohli & Subhadra Vijaykumar

This speakerbox dome is a proposal for collaborative soundmaking by ephemeral bands of vocalists.

John Oswald

Whisperfield, 2002 66 min.

Whisperfield is the independent, non-synchronous soundtrack accompanying, on CD, the commercial DVD Arc d'Apparition (published

by OHM/Avatar, directed

by Oswald). The sound is of individual and sometimes multitudinous whisperers each describing their appearance in their native tongue, about eight languages in all.

Improvisation (with Alexis O'Hara's SQUEEEQUE! The Improbable Igloo), 2013

Neil Klassen

Vikas Kohli, playing guitar and accompanied by violinist Subhadra Vijaykumar, explored the sonic possibilities provided by Alexis O'Hara's installation by using it as a filtering device for conventional instruments.

Requiem and Ruin #2, 2011 Digital Print mounted on brass, 71 x 109 cm

Alexis O'Hara

SQUEEEQUE! The Improbable Igloo, 2009 Recycled speakers, wire, xlr cable, microphones, 1/4" cable, effect unit, mixer, LED light organ, amplifier, pillows, approx. 3m in diameter, 1.5m in height.

Requiem and Ruin #1, 2011 trumpet and tar

Drawing from an innate interest in human nature, my work explores the conditions that determine and influence a sense of self and place on earth. Requiem and Ruin examines the relating landscape to the preserved surfaces of the built environment. An awareness of the ephemerality of our constructions and their incorporation within systems of the natural world is at the

centre of this project as it questions the balance between natural and industrial while conveying the friction between value and preservation.

reading, the set pieces are removed leaving only the ephemeral presence and the material physicality of sounds that may or may not have been heard.

Sylvia Matas

Ryan Park

In Every Direction, 2011 Deconstructed bookwork, 15 x 17.8 x 1.9 cm (44 pages), digitally printed and mounted on wood

untitled (4'33"), 2006 Graphite on book.

20.3 x 17.8 x 2.3 cm (closed)

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

In Every Direction consists of images and text. There is no narrative—it is more of an incomplete collection of information that describes overlapping mental and physical environments. There are references to (among other things) sound and movement through time and space, in and out of intensity, and in and out of focus.

David Lieberman

performance performity performativity performance, 2008 - 2012 Spoken word, 19 min., 60 cm diameter table and chair The reading was presented as either live performance or as an audio recording. The text is a poetic meditation on aurality and sound exploring the limits of spatial containment and understanding as a fundamental principle in architectural composition.

Experiential time, durational time, and mimetic time all figure in the speculative musings of architectures yet to be constructed. Critical commentary is balanced with proposition as defining space in its ability to contain, to bound, to reflect, and to allow sound to bleed to the edges of inaudibility. Each day at a given time, a table and a chair are placed in the gallery for the artist to read and to write. On the table is a sketchbook filled only with sounds, drawing instruments, a surveyor’s compass, a thumb piano, a copy of a handmade book, a bottle of Aquavite, a glass, and an espresso cup. On completion of the

List of Works

Last Breath, 2012 Motor, bellows, plexiglass, digital display, custom circuitry, arduino processor, respiration tubing, brown paper bags, apparatus 60 x 27.5 x 23 cm, tube up to 15 m long. 8kg.

Last Breath is an installation designed to store and circulate the breath of a person forever. The piece consists of a small brown paper bag that inflates and deflates automatically thanks to motorized bellows similar to those found in artificial respirators in hospitals.

The apparatus hangs on a wall and is activated 10,000 times a day, the typical respiratory frequency for an adult at rest, including 158 sighs. Each stroke of the machine advances a digital counter that beeps. The breath circulates between the bellows and the paper bag through a ribbed transparent plastic tube that emits a faint and hypnotic low sound.

The brown paper bag makes a rhythmic crushing sound as it inflates and deflates.

David Merritt

untitled (here), 2007 graphite and watercolour on paper 163.2 x 142.8 cm (framed) Collection of the ar tist

untitled (now), 2007 graphite and watercolour on paper 163.2 x 142.8 cm (framed) Collection of the ar tist

Approaching written language as a sign for sound, untitled (here) and untitled (now) are sister drawings that involve the graphic mapping of recorded song titles. Transcribing the titles using an open-ended process of drawing and erasure, the works are playfully organized to glean a game of presence and absence embedded in the titles themselves.

Silence by John Cage, rubbed and buffed with graphite from cover to cover.

Juliana Pivato

Yesterday Wants More, 2013 4 min.

For the duration of the exhibition I have given a daily performance of “Yesterday Once More” by the Carpenters.

I performed this song backwards and without accompaniment. On days when I was unable to be at the gallery, the live performance was replaced by a cassette recording.

Performed in retrograde, the components of this well-used Carpenters song are loosened, recalibrated, and carefully relearned to satisfy a very different hearing. This work was made in response to a series of collaborative, live performances undertaken with Marc Couroux between 2005-2010.

Alexandre St-Onge

L'indécidable crowbar cosmogonique, 2010 Video, 9 min.

L'indécidable crowbar cosmogonique is a video documentation of different experimentations on the

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emergence of monstrosity and hermetic entities through the creative process.

Erin Sexton

SPACE (with Darsha Hewitt's Electrostatic Bell Choir) Sound performanceintervention, 31 min.

The physicality of sound is explored with handheld oscillators, activating space through acoustics, enclosure, threshold, and movement.

Recordings of Hewitt's electrostatic bells are extended beyond the gallery with portable amplifiers on multilevel mezzanines, resonating with the oscillators throughout the building.

Ian Skedd

Sign Singing: Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division, 1979, Deaf Choir, 2009, 2009 Single-channel video, 4 min. 19 sec.

Sign Singing: Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division, 1979, Deaf Choir, 2009 explores the translation of the rhythm and emotion of a seminal pop song into sign language, a silent, visual, and gestural form of communication. The choir was formed with 12 individual members of Vancouver, BC’s deaf community in order to create a signed interpretation of British post-punk band

Volume: Hear Here

Joy Division’s 1979 single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” matching the cadence of the original song to sign motions that capture its emotional meaning. This song, which became a brooding anthem for the post-punk generation, was written by the band’s vocalist Ian Curtis—whose onstage performance was extremely gestural—and was the band’s first chart hit.

In Sign Singing, sound is expressed through an inaudible form of communication. Visually, the choir’s hands, bodies, and facial movements become the only readable aspects of the song.

Silence—rather than sound— is emphasized, yet when engaged with the motions of the choir, the familiarity of the song takes hold.

Charles Stankievech

Get Out of My Head, Get Out of My Mind, 2008 Stereo sound with wireless headphones, 6 min. loop Collection of the artist, photo by Paul Litherland, cour tesy of Leonard and Bina Ellen Galler y and Charles Stankievech

Working from Bruce Nauman’s Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), I covered the piece but within the new context of virtual architecture and disembodied subjectivity. Unlike Nauman’s original, the new work Get Out of My Head,

Get Out of My Mind (2008) denies hard architecture and explores the unique relation between virtual space and psychotopology.

Chiyoko Szlavnics

Moiré Series, 2012 Ink on paper 8 x 33.5 x 3 cm Moiré Series, 2010 Ink on paper 38 x 33.5 x 3 cm Not yet titled, 2012 Ink on paper 70 x 100 cm These drawings explore two to four layers of lines drawn on top of one another, resulting in moiré patterns that are suggestive of a third dimension. How these drawings read from far away becomes important, especially how light is reflected off of the sections where there are wider spaces between the lines.

John Wynne

Cold Atlantic, 2007–2012 Hearing aids, jewel box, projector. Dimensions variable.

My father died in 2006, leaving behind three pairs of hearing aids and a supply of batteries. This piece makes use of the minute but complex feedback field produced by what is essentially

a set of tiny microphones and tiny speakers. The projected photograph was taken by my father somewhere in the mid-Atlantic in 1959 while we were on our way to Canada, where I was to grow up.

It was uncharacteristic of him to take such an empty picture, and even more so to label it with the poetic title Cold Atlantic. This small installation is uncharacteristically personal for me: it addresses notions of absence, and for this purpose, feedback could not be more suitable. Feedback’s “tautological elegance” contradicts its status as problem or systemic fault: in this piece, its antagonistic relationship to hearing aids is harnessed to explore the presence of loss.

Free searchable PDF of publication available through blackwoodgallery.ca

Colophon

Volumes

Andrew Hunter, Timothy Long, Jonathan Middleton,

Published by the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga) in partnership with the Art Gallery of Alberta, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto), MacKenzie Art Gallery, and SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. Publication

Editors: Martin Arnold and Christof Migone

Managing Editors: Christof Migone and Christine Shaw

Audio Editor: Christof Migone

Graphic Designer: Matthew Hof fman

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Christof Migone, Ben Portis, Will Straw, Michael Turner

Translator: Timothy Barnard Image Processing: Renée Lear, Visual Resource Library (UTM)

Printing: Captain Printworks, Toronto, Ontario Record: SAMO media, Toronto, Ontario Audio Mastering: Grey Market Mastering, Montreal, Quebec

Acknowledgments: Renée Lear, Helen Markellos, Clint Wilson

Photo Credits: Toni Hafkenscheid, and numerous others. We have endeavored to credit all images but the signif icant lag between inception and completion

Volumes / edited by Martin Arnold and Christof Migone.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE USED OR REPRODUCED IN ANY In partnership with the MANNER WITHOUT Art Gallery of Alberta, WRITTEN PERMISSION Justina M. Barnicke FROM THE PUBLISHER, Gallery (Hart House, EXCEPT IN THE CONTEXT University of Toronto), OF REVIEWS. THE PUBMacKenzie Art Gallery, LISHER HAS MADE EVERY SBC Gallery of EFFORT TO CONTACT Contemporary Art. ALL COPYRIGHT HOLDERS. IF PROPER ACKNOWLEDGEIncludes bibliographical refer- MENT HAS NOT BEEN ences and index.

MADE, WE ASK COPYRIGHT ISBN 978-0-7727-8212-0 HOLDERS TO CONTACT (pbk.)

THE PUBLISHER. 1. Sound installations (Art). 2. Art and music.

3. Sound in art. 4. Video art.

5. Art, Canadian-21st century. I. Arnold, Martin (Martin John), 1959-, editor II. Migone, Christof, 1964-, editor III. Blackwood Gallery

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Exhibition Coordinator: Texts: Martin Arnold, Marc Couroux, Catherine Crowston, Peter Culley, Barbara Fischer, Sylvie Gilbert, Nicole Gingras, Ihor Holubizky,

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