DRIFT Magazine, Issue 5 by Drift Magazine

DRIFT

A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production Issue 5, Winter 2012

Chris Engman

Dust to Dust, 2010 Archival inkjet print Photographic dyptic courtesy of the artist

Creative Commons 2012 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

DRIFT/CAST Publishing January 2012 http://www.driftmagazine.org

From the Editors /// Dear Readers, This issue of DRIFT, our fifth thus far, represents the beginning of our second year in existence. Truth be told, we are ecstatic to be celebrating that anniversary. With landmarks come opportunities for reflection, and with the advent of our sophomore year we are a little wiser, a little tougher, and we hardly ever get picked on by bigger kids anymore. Our fledgling magazine is growing up and we are awfully proud of it. In this issue: Mimi Moncier reprises her choreographic endeavors in the magazine with an interviewbased exploration of embodied storytelling, as told through the practice and performance of the post-modern dance piece Trio A; Sean gets nostalgic, pondering the resurgence of cassette tapes, that most defiantly analog of media; and we welcome three new ongoing columns to DRIFT: Best Of, an interview column by Joey Veltkampâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a Seattlebased artist and writer. In this issue, Joey interviews Chris Engman, whose photographic practice evidences an acute attention to the materiality of time and space. On The Move: Reading Deep Oakland Lara Durback, poet and contributing editor of Deep Oakland, embarks on the first in a series of curated readings of the online compendium. For this issue, Lara addresses the materiality of a digital-to-print translation. Radical Seattle Remembers Seattle-based writer Jeff Stevens brings to light the triumphs and travails of the Colman School occupation, which has circuitously resulted in the opening of the Northwest African American Museum, in this column dedicated to highlighting the obscured radical histories of Seattle. All told, the pieces in this issue trail winding histories, with a decidedly forward-looking intent. In doing so, they project into the current moment and the foreseeable future a degree of speculation that points, not necessarily to uncertainty, but to the possibility of something wonderful and moldable. We hope you enjoy this issue of DRIFT. Sean Collins & E. Maude Haak-Frendscho Editors

Table of Contents ///

Cover: Dust to Dust, 2010, archival inkjet print Chris Engman

This is a Story About Storytelling... Storytelling Through Bodies and Movement Mimi Moncier

Analog Cabin: The Quiet Return of Cassette Tapes Sean Collins

COLUMNS

Best Of: Say Hello to Chris Engman Joey Veltkamp

On The Move: Reading Deep Oakland Lara Durback

Radical Seattle Remembers: Nov, Colman School Jeff Stevens

Contributors

This is a story about storytellingâ&#x20AC;Ś storytelling through bodies and movement Mimi Moncier

This story is about how we are all individuals yet unified simultaneously. This story is told through the transmission of a seminal piece of post-modern dance from 1966: Trio A by Yvonne Rainer, which was originally performed as part of The Mind is a Muscle at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. It is a piece of dance that unifies dancers through the accessibility of its movements, yet allows for the individual to be comfortable in their uniqueness. As a result, it continues to afford sustained popularity within the arts, and not just within dance circles. Rainer was a founding member of the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater that eschewed principles of modern dance. In Trio A, she studies the body almost as an instrument of movement, rather than allowing the individual to be measured against the bar of expectations within traditional forms of dance. The salient movement characteristics of Trio A are the performerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s averting of the gaze, the difficulty in understanding it through typical mnemonic compositional devices on the part of the dancer and the audience, the lack of any emphasis or virtuosic moments, and its tone. Like any alignment of the mind with the body, Trio A affects oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of embodiment. I became interested in Trio A through an Alternative Contexts class in graduate school. I was interested in developing a project at an abandoned gas station site in my neighborhood. I have been an amateur dancer for most of my life and have found that making art is about embodiment for me.

The act of painting or drawing, making a piece of sculpture or an installation is really about the movement and sense of embodiment that I draw from the experience. My encounter with Trio A came through a reading from the book Sensorium. Rainer had written a piece about the documentation of the dance in an essay entitled labanotation and trio a. Rainer states: “Two primary characteristics of the dance are its uninflected continuity and its imperative involving the gaze. The eyes are always averted from the direct confrontation with their audience via independent movement of the head or closure of the eyes or simply casting down of the gaze.” This statement really spoke to me; if the city is a piece of choreography and the inhabitants are the spectators, then the gaze is most certainly a huge part of the relationship. My goal in learning was to perform at this abandoned gas station site as a way of representing a turning away from or a gap in the city. In Trio A’s beginnings Rainer taught it freely to both dancers and non-dancers. Those who learned it could even teach it to others. It became so popularly disseminated that it evolved into something that Rainer felt was not representative of the original intent. In order to maintain the dance’s integrity, Rainer took control of its lineage. Through the use of custodians, or repetiteurs, who have been rigorously trained by Rainer herself, the choreographic intent is upheld. Although still accessible to people with a wide range of physical abilities, is by no means easy to learn. It takes months of rigorous training and coaching by a custodian. This ensures that the spatial, tonal, gestural, and purposeful qualities are fulfilled through a direct languaging and teaching technique that meet Rainer’s qualifications. As a result, the subtle nuances remain intact for audiences viewing the piece over forty years after its first presentation. Linda K. Johnson, who happened to be at Mills College Dance Department at the time of my interest in learning , became the transmitter to myself, Ruth Raniero, Christine Murray and Nancy Nowacek. After eighteen months training on and off, myself, Ruth, Christine and Nancy informally performed Trio A at Mills College Dance Department. The experience of learning it became habit. It was just something that we all did every few weeks. Like the movement, we persevered. Like storytelling, we embody the stories of our individuality and lives of experience through the movement. Our training with Linda culminated in an informal performance at Mills in April of 2011. Subsequently, in September of the same year, Linda, Kristine Anderson, Ruth Raniero and myself performed Trio A at the Berkeley Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition of the painter Silke Otto Knapp. Following my experience with this new collection of Trio A dancers and having a deeper understanding of the history of the genealogy of the dance itself, I felt compelled to tell this new part of the story, or chapter, and to

record another episode of its evolving narrative. The following is an interview with Linda K. Johnson (November 30, 2011) that frames the larger chapter of the story. Inserted throughout are a series of ‘short stories’ that lace input by the other dancers on the specific themes including the gaze, memory and personality qualities of Trio A. --MimiMoncier Hi Linda thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me about Trio A. You are a dancer, you have probably known about Trio A for most of your dance career. So how did you become more interested in it and ultimately become a repetiteur of this dance? LindaKJohnson In my dance history classes at Stanford in the early 80’s, we didn’t get as far as Trio A. It was only fifteen years later and the film that Sallie Banes made in 1978 was only four years old. The way I encountered it and got really gob-smacked by it was that I had travelled to NYC to see the Rauschenburg retrospective at the Guggenheim. It was a treacherously rainy day and I was completely wet when I got to the museum. There were only two places to sit, which were these black cubes so I went over and sat on one of these chair things. Over in the corner was playing this black and white film. I began to watch it as I was drying out and focused myself to being in the room. I had no idea what I was watching. It was clear to me that it was a dance but I had no tools for understanding it. My training had not included looking at post-modernism or that period at all. It is such a slippery term in dance and in all other art forms I think. I sat there for an hour and watched it loop over and over. Eventually, the guard came over and told me it was time to go and I leaned over to look at what it was I had been watching. I had heard that there was this dance called Trio A but I couldn’t place it. I came back to Portland and began to figure out how to encounter it because I felt that How could I teach dance if I really didn’t understand? I didn’t have a way to relate to it physically in my body. So I began to figure out how to learn it. It took about two years before a friend of Linda Austin, a dancer here in Portland, was teaching it in New York in 1999. Clarinda Mac Low had been taught by Yvonne and was teaching it for three weeks in New York at the Trisha Brown Studios and so I got a fellowship to go learn it. And that is when I first met Yvonne, who would come in on Fridays and clean what Clarinda had taught us. Of course I was completely disoriented physically by the experience and poked around with it for two or three years back in Portland just trying to understand it. Then I met Shelley Senter who was in Trisha Brown’s company for five years. She and I both bemoaned how the West Coast didn’t really have a connection to that whole post-modern period

and what was going on at Judson because the West Coast was doing its own thing. So she and I decided that we wanted to formally learn it. We contacted Yvonne and then Pat Catterson and we learned it from Pat in 2001. Pat, at the time, was the only transmitter besides Yvonne. MM Your whole process of encountering the work is so interesting and it reminds me of my experience in architecture school where the movements that were on the tails of contemporary work were not really presented fully in our history courses, if at all. It is almost as if they were waiting for their histories to be documented. But because of that it opened one up for a selfdiscovery or encounter of the unrepresented work. LKJ Yes, they just overlapped too closely and the Stanford Dance Department at the time didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really have anyone in it who was interested or had a passion about that period. Everyone was interested in Graham or Limone, really the modern dance movement. MM

How did you formally become a repetiteur?

LKJ Shelley and I were given permission to perform it and we performed it at Judson in the spring of 2002. Then Pat Wong at Reed College became

very interested in her students encountering the work because of Reed’s history of re-mounting historic works—and Trisha Brown taught there. So she asked me if I would be interested in doing some kind of concert that would include Trio A and that her students have a relationship to it. Shelley and I applied for and received a grant from Reed to present a weekend of work that included Shelley performing some material from Trisha, and a piece by Remy Charlip and me performing a Bebe Miller solo called Rain. We also included two different versions of Trio A and we brought Yvonne out to essentially clean us, to lecture and show her films. A young filmmaker from here asked to film the cleaning. In the process of cleaning us, her language of teaching was recorded for the first time. At that moment she said you guys are really qualified to teach this and so that is when in 2003 we also became transmitters of the work. It hadn’t been our original intention but it resulted from our diligence in trying to perform it correctly for this concert. MM Is that the film that you often referred to when you were teaching us and needed to reference the material? LKJ Yes, that is one of the references and there is also one from the Getty, which is an even more current film that we use, too. MM Previous Page: Mimi Moncier mnemonic device No. 1 (items 1-39 out of 108) 2011 ink on trash Above: Trio A rehearsal stills April 2011 Ruth Rainero and Mimi Moncier

How many people have you taught it to?

LKJ People that I have formally taught it to who have pursued it with the desire to perform it with that kind of detail: seven, and that would include you. MM So you had a very serendipitous moment of being confronted with this dance and you said you didn’t really have any way of understanding it, so once you did pursue it, can you describe what your understanding became? How did you receive it? And has your understanding changed?

LKJ Oh certainly, my understanding of the dance historically and conceptually has matured hugely and my relationship to it physical components has matured. When I first learned it in 1999, I was overwhelmed and disoriented by the kinesthesia of it. Even if I had been trained as a postmodern dancer or if I had had a technical base that was less driven by flow, by weight, by momentum, and by musicality, but that is how I was trained, so for me Trio A was like a big ol’ slap in the face, in the best way. As a dancer and performer, my range just exploded. I hadn’t been exposed to it intellectually but I innately began to understand it and I had an affinity for that period anyway once I was introduced to it. It made a lot more sense to my work and me. But nonetheless, when I first encountered it was extremely disorienting in a way that you want things to be when they really affect you and they require that you re-assemble all the ways that you had previously understood a thing. I am incredibly grateful for my encounter with this work because while I don’t make dance work that is like this necessarily, its introduced me to a whole other period of art making in many other realms also that has really deepened my practice. So now feels like putting on my cozy slippers, like such a familiar place but I am always awed by the confluence of details, the way the movement comes together, its specificity, its asymmetry in the body, its multiple rhythms going on simultaneously in different body parts—it is such a little gem. My appreciation for it has deepened; every time I teach it I get more and more appreciative of its construction.

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MM The averting of the performer’s gaze from the audience is what brought me to want to learn Trio A. For you, as a very experienced performer, do you find the averting of the gaze more embodying? Instrumentalists don’t look at the audience, even if I was standing with violin, I would either be looking at the music or looking up. Singers are the only ones who stand front and center and look out at the audience, and yet you don’t want to look directly at anyone person. I remember when I was a beginning singer and dealing with this and it was really hard. I did not know where to look and what you develop over time is what I call looking but not looking and it depends on the circumstances and the logistics of where you are. –Ruth

LKJ Initially learning Trio A, when it was presented to me for the very first time. the quality of the averting of the gaze wasn’t as clearly stated as just the clarity of where the head goes. Of course, one can articulate where the head goes but if one isn’t articulating really using their eyes and the gaze they can sort of get separated. I remember learning the dance and noting that it was the first time where the head was clearly its own limb. It had agency and it was so clearly choreographed. The other movement material that I had been engaged with the head was often a bi-product or it lead, but it was more often synonymous with or reflective of the other movement going on in the body. In Trio A, the head and/or the gaze are entirely intentional on their own

and in a different way. It was disorienting at first to just bring my attention to that clarity in my own dancing. In the use of the gaze it is a reminder to come back to self, the location of the work is with the dancer, with the performer of the movement and I cease to be concerned with the audience. It reminds me that the audience can take care of themselves. The use of the gaze reminds me to be clear about what I am doing and how I am doing it and that I am the center of the activity. I find that the gaze completes a very clear cycle for me as a performer. In other work that I have performed often the gaze and head are not part of the choreography and not dealt with as a part of the activity and so often unaddressed and unspecified and/or the desire in some of the work I have performed has been more to look at and engage with the audience in some sort of way which would be a total counterpoint to what Yvonne is working with. Now whenever I am in someone else’s work and the gaze is unaddressed and its What am I to do with where I am looking? I always ask because it is now part of my repertory experience and its one of the components that I need clarified as a performer. Trio A has required that within my own work and with the work that I perform of other people’s and in my work as an audience member, I want clarity around what people are doing with their gaze. MM

I’m learning a piece now by Todd Eckert and I’m constantly wanting

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As a non-dancer, gaze aversion made learning the piece possible. It was—as it is for most who try this—such a struggle to understand the nature of each task and adapt my body those demands, that the pressure of meeting a gaze would have overwhelmed my already very fragile confidence. It also makes it possible for me to enter into the space of the piece wherever or whenever I can. When the gaze is averted, self-consciousness in the context of the outside world ceases to exist. The affect, however, is a whole new plane of self-consciousness, that’s just between me, my body and space. –Nancy

to know where I am supposed to look and that I want it to be very specific. I suppose it is because of Trio A and that I found that it being a part of the choreography really helped me. LKJ Yes, and so then it becomes another important component of all choreographic work you learn. My experience with dance training is that the gaze and the head are often really not addressed. Usually your head is falling as a result of the momentum of the movement, it is swinging through space or your overly looking or engaged with a romantic look at the audience. It did introduce at the time and continues to keep afloat a whole different articulation of that component of the body. MM I recently googled Trio A just to see what would come up—it had been a while. A 1999 performance of it at MOMA was the first thing that popped up. It was Pat Catterson in two shots, one of which, if you don’t look closely, she appears to be looking at the camera. I realized that it was because of the way the audience was oriented to the dance and that there was no place for the photographer to be within that realm so they were off to the side where the dancers are gazing. I find

Previous Page: Trio A rehearsal stills April 2011 Mimi Moncier, Ruth Rainero and Nancy Nowacek Below: Trio A rehearsal stills April 2011 Mimi Moncier, Ruth Rainero, Christine Murray

this to be such an interesting contradiction to the reality of how the dance is supposed to be experienced. LKJ That is a very interesting point because if you think of the two very iconic photographs of Yvonne performing it, clearly she made choices about which best address the gaze. One of them she is looking upward with her fist in front of the body. When the students performed it at Reed a year and a half ago by the repertory dance company, I had a long conversation with the photographer about where he needed to be because of this very issue you bring up and of course that Yvonne would need to vet any photo that he took before people used them because the photo needs to represent the entirety of the work and the gaze is included in that. If the photo is of a dancer looking at the camera, it mis-represents the actual proscenium-audience experience. So a photographer needs to shoot from the proscenium in the way that the audience was perceiving the work. MM I find Trio A more and more powerful especially when I see contemporary work that has been influenced by the Fluxus movement. I recently went to a performance at SOMArts in SF where the dance

performance was in a gallery setting and the lines between audience and performer were totally blurred. The audience was invited to participate but those that participated were clearly performers already and had planned to participate or the kids in the audience felt liberated in the environment and were allowed to run around like mad. For the most part though, the line between the two was not to be crossed even if they were sharing the same space. There is a natural hesitancy to participate when you are a spectator. This made me really appreciate the brilliance of subverting within the traditional spatial construct of the proscenium. Breaking the gaze between audience and performer is at once subtle and yet incredibly powerful and it defines looking as participation. Of course, there is a chance that some won’t perceive that distinction but when one does, it really hits hard.

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LKJ Wouldn’t it have been interesting to be a fly on the wall in the 1960’s. I’m sure that some members of the audience didn’t realize the gaze was averted because of all the other qualities that are also part of Trio A that make it so hard to watch. Dance is hard to watch anyway and then here she creates this long phrase of material that has no hierarchy in terms of movement quality and no movement is fore-grounded to be more virtuosic or more difficult than any other and its tone is even and nothing repeats and there is no gaze. So really, depending on what your drawn to or what frustrates you most or what your expectations are of a performer, I’m sure it was a very disorienting moment of observation. When I first encountered this idea of averting the gaze, I thought it was an overtly political act, that it forcefully shifted the power dynamic between performers and audience members. When making eye contact, the audience is in the more privileged position with the dynamic being something like, “we are here doing this movement for you.” But with the averted gaze, I thought it would create a voyeuristic dynamic, where the performer was more privileged—along the lines of, “we are here doing our movement, and we are allowing you to witness it.” But I found the experience to be much more complex than this. For me, changing the gaze made the focus of the dance entirely internal. I was barely aware of being a “performer” at all; the primary relationship was me and the movement. The secondary relationship was me and the other dancers. A far, far distant third was the audience. –Christine

MM Yes, and I think people still have that experience. I don’t necessarily think that most people who watch dance would have enough knowledge to realize all of the things that are going on and that it is more that they are just trying to realize what they see as it is unfolding. LKJ Yes, and just the level of dance saturation someone has had and then also people’s motivation for coming to dance. Some people will come to dance to be transported and to ride on the kinesthetic wave of the dancer, or they are looking for beauty and transcendence. Depending on what people are coming for they would either fall in love with it or be frustrated by it. When I performed it the other day for my students I got the whole gamut. Why? Where is the passion? Because for them, dance was about this passion and

expression and this one way of thinking about what expression is. Which is why Yvonne gives her current lecture talking about the gaze and about the range of what expression is and can be in relation to Trio A. Dance is so burdened by certain expectations about a certain kind of virtuosity, expressivity and overt skill and Trio A subverts all of it. MM There is definitely a kind of romanticism that is attached to the concept of dance and the experience of viewing dance. LKJ

And it is still there.

So as a dancer yourself, what is your experience in watching Trio A?

LKJ Now it is so changed, when I watch it I admire what each dancer had to do to negotiate revealing the form of the dance. I just watch each of them negotiate their own habits of being in order to realize as close as they can the form of the dance. Being someone that loves to look at movement and loves to watch people move, knowing what the form is asking, I think it is thrilling to watch people navigate realizing it. MM

So itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like an individual body as an instrument of movement.

LKJ Yes, and really striving to come up to these rules and expectations of this particular work that have to do with time, with energy, with physical coordination because they are layered, it is very complicated. MM

I just had an image of a child learning to walk.

LKJ Actually, I think it is different than learning to walk. Trio A has to do with re-learning, it is like asking people to re-think how to get in and out of a chair. It is a movement they all know and they are not learning it for the first time but they are being asked to perform that action with certain levels of consciousness. I need to look over here and it needs to be even from start to finish; no one part of the movement is any more important than another, it is a conscious action. MM Ruth made the observation that she had a subjective and objective experience simultaneously because she what she thought her body was doing and what it was actually doing when she looked in the mirror were two different things. LKJ Yes! It is our sensory misperception. What we think we are doing and what we are doing are two different things. That is why Yvonne doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want somebody learning it off YouTube. Whenever it gets loaded up on YouTube she tries to take it off because people think that they can learn it that way. But you really need someone to clean it and use the language to be clear about what is actually happening. It is an individual-by-individual transmission

because each person brings some kind of history in their bodies, some kind of level of facility or organization and some kind of aesthetic understanding. Also, if someone has never performed before and decides they want to learn it, how does the process of teaching and or cleaning it slightly shift to be different from when you are teaching it to someone who has a lot of performance experience and brings a lot of baggage to that process? That is why teaching it is so fun but also so demanding. You always have to keep the form in mind, the requirement for what the work is. Then you have to teach within the boundaries of language and the criteria of the work that Yvonne has established. That requires some problem solving on my part or on the transmitters parts to figure out what each individual needs to get them there. For instance when I had you do it with your eyes closed. That is a tool that Pat Catterson developed; she required that Shelley and I do it that way, because she understands pretty clearly that one of the requirements of the work is its spatial form. Besides all of its challenging movements it has a very clear spatial design that Yvonne demands be fulfilled. By having your eyes closed not only do you have to negotiate your kinesthesia in space but you really become clear if your body really understands where it is going in relation to the front because it is a proscenium-based work. I have taken this trick in to my repertoire of teaching to ask people to do who want to learn it because it does immediately reveal where their understanding is complete or incomplete about the spatial aspects of the work. I’m sure that we all, as transmitters, have developed small things like that have to assist us in identifying where people are really succeeding so far with the demands of the work and whereas a transmitter I need to spend more time. MM What about the relevance of Trio A today in cultural production, why has it become popular again? LKJ Yvonne says this in her lecture frequently, one of the reasons Trio A keeps resurfacing is as people become interested in that period is that it is one of the first times that a work has a quite complete document that remains of it. So much of that work wasn’t filmed in its entirety and there are only still photographs. Somehow Sally Banes was prescient enough to know that this dance should get recorded even though it was in 1978 long after Yvonne had stopped making dances. So it remains something that people can touch easily. There just isn’t that much out there to look at that is moving image, so people can return to Trio A because people are talking about it a lot and there are people out there doing it—and Yvonne is still alive talking about it. So it is relevant because it can be seen and it can be talked about and dance is just challenging in that way. I also think it seems to contain, while it doesn’t represent the work of her peers, it points to some of the things that her generation was thinking about. And there does seem to be an intense

Mimi moncier, Vestigial Mapping of Trio A performance, acrylic on yupo paper, 2011.

return to study of the minimalists and a huge resurgence of interest in work from this period. Forty years is enough breathing room for a new generation to get captivated by these ideas and I think that there is a huge interest in social practice and audience interaction. Perhaps social networking has helped to generate interest in artwork that has posed over the years different relationships between audience and performer, and sorts of anti-hierarchical presentational values. MM Do you think that it also might have something to do with the fact at first Yvonne really opened the field and let people who were non-dancers learn it and then teach it to other people? There was an almost viral quality to it and it was being disseminated frequently. LKJ I would use the word folkloric. I think viral is such a word of our current time. I think she was interested in Trio A being a kind of potential folk dance of the masses and maybe you could speak about that as being viral. But yes, if you learned it, you could teach it to someone else and everyone could have sort of a connection to each other through dancing in the same way that folkdance served that purpose within a culture. You come to this

social dance and everyone can do this basic dance form. Anyone and anyone of any age can join in. The form itself doesn’t eliminate anyone through skill or fitness. I think she had some thought that perhaps Trio A could be her generation’s folkdance. But then, of course, she saw a version of it that didn’t hold any of the values of the work that she had made so then she shut it down. The fact that she released the pressure in it and really let it come back again in the early nineties, so I guess it has been twenty years of people being able to re-encounter it. I also think that now there is just so much more writing and cultural theory, and because we are far enough away from it, that period is now included in the history books that young artists are reading. They meet that work because it is being digested and talked about and shown. They want to experience it… they want to be in a happening, they want to be in a Anna Halprin work, see and learn Trio A, they want to do Huddle by Simone Forti. MM It is interesting to me because I am in the art world and I am also around a lot of dancers. The artists who are not dancers are more interested in Trio A than the dancers. I’ve wondered if it is because they may not be currently in school where it would be a subject of discussion or if there is something going on in contemporary dance that I don’t understand. I think there is a huge divide between performance art and dance. Trio A seems to lie somehow in between. LKJ Well I think there are a couple things. One, we are on the West Coast, which lacks a kind of quickening around this period because it occurred in New York and the way the post-Judson period spooled out in New York with its influences and its topicality is really different than the ways in which those ideas infiltrated to the West Coast. Having only lived in SF for a couple of years I can say that I know my colleagues in dance who live there who have moved there from New York find it deeply frustrating. The sort of lack of knowledge and interest in a whole period that has shaped a generation of material that they are doing and they don’t really know the roots. There is just a very different experience between the West Coast and East Coast experiences relative to it. It is not better or worse, it is just what it is. I don’t ever use the words performance art but now I am teaching performance in a fine arts context, which is very different than contemporary performance practice that comes from dance, theater and music. They are entirely different things and they have not figured out how to talk to each other yet. Performance art really comes out of the visual arts through the Fluxus artists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists, but performance art is a particular style of work that is within the larger category of performance. Performance artists don’t really have any tools in which to think about performance from a contemporary performance point of view. Yvonne and I had long

conversations about this because she is teaching material for performance at UC Irvine in the Visual Studies Program and it is an incredibly specific activity. Unless those students come with previous training from the performing arts they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any tools to make a thing except their ideas, which is fine, except they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any notion of rehearsal or practice or composition with their body as the medium for that process. If you are dealing with a musician or actor or dancer it is an entirely different set of tools. MM

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m so glad I asked because there is such a huge gap.

LKJ Yes, and now there is a huge interest from visual arts in performance and the materials of ephemerality, and while one can call those performance activities they are being created with an entirely different subset of tools. MM

If you had to ascribe personality traits to Trio A, what would they be?

LKJ Detail oriented, focused, even-handed, well organized, and consistent. MM Those are beautiful! Are there any contemporary choreographers that you would say are exploring the same ideas that are in Trio A? LKJ There is an aspect about the tone of that work that is inhabited by many dance- makers, a sort of neutrality of approach where the focus is on the movement and that the movement is the subject especially post-Judson artists who have that value in their work and who are dealing with a kind of horizontality about energy and approach. //

Analog Cabin:

The Quiet Return of Cassette Tapes

Sean Collins

In 1877, in Menlo Park, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Since then, the dominant media for recorded sound has changed at an increasing rate. To anyone with a primarily recreational interest in the various media, they might appear and disappear in the manner of empires in a high school history book: the transitions seem much smoother than in reality, and each new regime promises revolutionary improvements in people’s lives. The major players—vinyl, cassette, CD and mp3—are familiar to most people, even if they didn’t live through all of the respective heydays. A few skirmishlevel conflicts, such as the one between DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) in the early 1990’s show as minor footnotes to the more epic clashes. It all feels so inevitable, and so it goes. But as the resurgence of vinyl shows us, old media—like dead empires—don’t just vanish. They hang around in the background, waiting for someone to dig them up and make them divulge their secrets. Now, with vinyl sales already representing a healthy share of the music market, cassettes are finding new appreciation in the hands of music enthusiasts and producers. The question is, why? Vinyl seems to have been given a boost from the rise of DJ culture. But cassettes don’t appear to have the same kind of champion in the competition. Maybe it’s generational. My relationship to the cassette tape is

admittedly sentimental. I was born in the late ‘70s and grew up listening to my mom’s vinyl collection, but bought all of my first music on cassette tapes. I can show you how to pop the tags out of a pre-recorded tape so you can record over, say, your sister’s copy of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. I know that a No. 2 pencil is the perfect implement for manually winding the spools of delicate ribbon. I have mix-tapes made by and for me that document the minutest stages of adolescent cultural awareness. Tapes represent the strata of my youth, documented musically. Eventually, of course (and later than my friends), I transitioned to CDs and eventually digital. When vinyl again became a popular and readily available format, I rediscovered it for myself. Now, for the most part, I buy vinyl and digital (often at the same time, thanks to those handy download codes), and my CD collection has dwindled to a few hardto-find albums that I haven’t yet sold for store credit. Recently, though, my cassette collection has been growing for the first time since the mid-‘90s. The general trajectory for all of that media transition has been towards more efficiency; the storage and organization of ever-increasing amounts of data in smaller and more accessible formats. The futurism of the 1950s that emphasized ludicrous labor saving technologies like pneumatic commuting, whole meals in pellet form, and Vend-A-Baby Machines (I swear I saw it in a black and white reel-to-reel) has come to fruition with vastly more mundanity. Silicon Valley tech-entrepreneur Peter Thiel (who operates not

far from Edison’s old labs), when he was profiled last November in the New Yorker (“No Death, No Taxes,” by George Packer) said it best: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Digital libraries that offer tens of thousands of songs in compressed and catalogued limbo offer a vision of the present-future defined by media consumption. More than anything, I believe the reemergence of the cassette represents an interest in alternatives to this passive consumption of culture. Music labels like Portland’s Hometapes, and Big Sur’s Gnome Life Records (run by musician and artist Fletcher Tucker, www.gnomeliferecords. com), are turning to cassettes. Part of the motive may be economical; a shipment of 100 cassettes for a small band going on tour can be a far cheaper (and faster) option than vinyl. But for Tucker, who last year began producing a series of cassette releases called Echomancy, analog recording seems to represent something beyond thrift. With his own band, Bird By Snow, and the musicians and bands that appear on Gnome Life, Tucker specializes in producing music that captures the intimacy of being present in the room as it is being played. Cassettes, with their direct-to-tape process and all of its attendant immediacy, lend themselves perfectly to that mission. Vinyl still beats cassette for frequency response, but what cassettes lack in absolute clarity, they make up for in fidelity. In describing one recording in particular, the recent release of Daniel Higgs’ “The Measure of Mystery,” Tucker writes: “You may observe the sounds of both ocean and river on these recordings...and a closer listen may also reward you with the sounds of starlight, mycelium growth, molecular revolution, and an untold number of cosmic musics.” He may or may not be exaggerating. The point is, there is a palpable, animistic life in the music captured on cassettes (especially when they are recorded in a yurt, during a rainstorm, on the coast of Big Sur). Digital is damn near forever, but analog is precious. Cassettes, like vinyl records, demand participation. There is no playlist-making. It requires an active (almost performative), rather than a passive, listening. And cassettes aren’t stable in the digital sense. They are mortal, and they degrade. The ribbon crinkles and frays, a queasy warble creeps into a song here or there, and each listening hastens the affect. But cassettes also present themselves for re-recording—analog rebirth. The return of cassettes obviously doesn’t represent a counterrevolution, any more than vinyl’s revival did. It demonstrates, perhaps, a more inclusive impulse regarding media. I won’t be getting rid of my iPod anytime soon, and I’ll keep buying records for the joy of hearing the static crackle as the needle drops. But now I’ll have those cassettes—one side, perhaps, “longer…to preserve continuity”—and each moment I spend listening is a moment that can never be replicated, in any format. //

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COLUMNS

Best Of is a series of artist interviews by Seattle-based artist and writer Joey Veltkamp, appearing at the humane pace of once quarterly. The interviews with other Northwest artists divulge the intimate processes, inspirations, concepts, and communities behind their work. More at: http://joeyveltkamp.blogspot.com/ On The Move: Reading Deep Oakland is a quarterly inquiry into the Deep Oakland compendium, a curated reading selection by a range of reader-respondents. The column is an opportunity to forge new relationshipsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;between various Oakland communities, through time, across media, and between Oakland and the West Coast at large. The series aims for expansive interventions that explore the possibilities of readership from multiple perspectives, and that translate web-based sources into print media. Explore: http://www.deepoakland.org/ Radical Seattle Remembers is a historical map drawn from a critical moment in the political history of Seattle, written by Jeff Stevens. The 1919 Seattle General Strike and the 1999 WTO protests are merely the tip of the iceberg of that history. This column is dedicated to exposing the iceberg. More at: http://radsearem.wordpress.com/

BEST OF

Say Hello to CHRIS ENGMAN Joey Veltkamp

Dust to Dust, 2010, archival inkjet print

JV I think many folks might be surprised at the amount of preparation, calculation and determination required to create one of your photographs. Can you walk us through a piece like Dust to Dust, from conception to completion? CE Dust to Dust is a photographic diptych- on the left a photograph of a pile of gravel, and on the right a photograph of a very similar looking pile of gravel, sculpted from the same material, on the same spot of land, but rotated 135 degrees. Conception began with an observation about the way the sun traverses across the sky: that other than solar noon when the sun is the highest it will get, every other moment during the day has a twin moment when the height of the sun relative to the horizon is identical. From this observation I realized I could recreate a scene, including the light and shadows falling on it, by rotating an object and carefully timing my shots. After selecting a site and material and finding a front-end loader operator I could work with, we got to work making the first pile. A radial map was drawn straight onto the ground using spray paint. A gravel mound was built and shaped on top. Referencing the map I had made I was able to draw a diagram of the footprint of the mound in its original position. The first photograph was made at 9:58 am the next day. The mound in its second incarnation was constructed using the footprint diagram and snapshots of the original mound as reference tools, first with heavy equipment, then with shovels and rakes and finally by hand. The second photograph was made at 4:04 pm one day after the first. Clouds had filled the sky all day but the sun broke about ten minutes before my shot, just in time. The entire process involved four trips to a site five hours east of Seattle. I love thinking about how the material in this piece was used first to create one mound, then the second, and is now probably part of a road or the foundation of somebodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house. In the same way the physical material used to make up my body is borrowed and someday will no longer belong to me. Same for you. Absolutely everything is temporary, and that is what this piece is about. JV In addition to the intricate planning, many photographs seem designed to test your physical and mental limits; as if the art is a vehicle to create personal challenges. Your piece Variations required you to rearrange a stack of barrels 120 times over a period of 2 days? If you made one error, you would have had to start overâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;why put yourself through that? CE The art is definitely a vehicle to create personal challenges but most of the time I enjoy those challenges. Variations was a pleasure to make. It

Variations, 2010, archival inkjet print, 52 x 44 inches was shot over two days, 60 pictures per day, each shot exactly 10 minutes apart, from 8 am until 5:50 pm on two consecutive days: May 22nd and 23rd, 2010. Physically it was actually less arduous than many of my photographs, and I took a real joy out of seeing a predetermined pattern play itself out in very slow motion over the course of two days. I worked very systematically to avoid any errors, and in truth I wasn’t worried about making any. If I had made a mistake I would have gladly started over. When I’m working on a project that I love working on it doesn’t matter to me how long it takes, in fact sometimes I regret when it’s over. JV Pieces like Three Moments and Equivalence examine the intersection between past and present. What’s most compelling about this convergence to you?

CE We only ever get to experience one instant of time at a time. The future doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist yet, the past no longer exists, and the present is fleeting and intangible. For the past there is only memory, and photographs provide fixed images for memory. In the piece Three Moments are three highly labored records of moments, each a month apart, each isolated and made into physical objects. The second moment attempts to recapture the first, while the third attempts to recapture them both. The result is meant to feel like a return to a place that may not seem to have changed, yet- since every instance of time and place is singular- it is perpetually and irrevocably being lost.

Three Moments, 2009, archival inkjet print, 48 x 38 inches

Equivalence, 2009, inkjet print, 38 x 48 inches

JV You frequently work in rural and/or remote areas. Has anything unusual ever happened? CE Well, I do sometimes work in very remote areas, and it enhances the overall experience for me to be so isolated so long as all goes well. However all does not always go well. The most frightening experience Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had on a shoot was the time I got my rental car stuck way way out on the Black Rock Desert, 31 miles from town. I spent an uneasy night in the car kept awake by the strongest winds Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever seen or heard. The next day I walked out, completely exposed and feeling very vulnerable. If nothing else the experience gave me a greater appreciation for the power that the desert and the elements have over us.

JV You recently dipped your toe into the fashion world. How did that come about? CE Last year I was invited to go to France to participate in the Hyeres Fashion and Photography Festival. Chauney and I went, and it was a lot of fun. We got haircuts and wore our nicest clothes but stuck out like sore thumbs just the same. Ten young fine art photographers were chosen from around the world, given an exhibition, and then basically they tried to get us to go into fashion photography. I could be working for Prada or Gucci! One art director, seeing that I was skeptical, told me she would just send me a dress and I could do anything I wanted with it, no restrictions. But the dress is a restriction, as I see it, and I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to make art about a dress, so I turned it down.

Inverse Negative, 2010, inkjet print, 38 x 48 inches

JV I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think one of your structures would have felt out of place in this exhibition. Do you ever consider displaying them, either as a sculpture or as supplementary material? Or are they strictly a way to achieve the final photograph? CE I hear that more and more. My projects really are designed to be photographs, though, which I think is something that makes my work distinguishable from, say, the earthworks artists. On the other hand I am more receptive to the idea than I used to be and I think it is very likely that in the near future I will be making work that is almost as much sculptural as photographic.

Senescence, 2010, archival inkjet print

JV In a recent talk, you discussed the idea of inserting your version of order onto natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s order. Do you have a desire to conquer nature? Or do you view it as working with nature, rather than against it? CE Definitely the latter. In the case of Variations, there is a precise and detailed order to the way the barrels are arranged and rearranged. In the same way that a mathematician strives not just to solve a problem but solve the problem in the most elegant way possible, it was my desire to arrange the barrels in the most rational and elegant way possible. To find not my way, but the way. I see these photographs as attempts to bear witness to order that is observable but outside of myself, and much larger than myself. They are acts of appreciation and participation.

JV Art is traditionally considered an emotional pursuit, but your approach to art-making appears scientific/rational at first glance. CE For me the work is emotive, because I experience the process and the unfolding of events as beautiful. But admittedly it is a cerebral kind of beauty that might not be immediately recognizable to the viewer. Rather it has to be discovered or deduced. When I talk about the work I talk a lot about the process because thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s where the art is, in the action, in how it was done. I had to figure out how to do it, and I enjoyed the figuring it out. The viewer, too, has to figure out how it was done, that is intentional, and I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always make it easy but I do leave clues. My hope is that the viewer will enjoy the figuring it out too, and in that process experience the work the way I did. It is a scientific approach, but it is very much an emotional pursuit as well. //

Abandoned Crates, 2007, archival inkjet print

ON THE MOVE: READING DEEP OAKLAND

Reading #1 Lara Durback

I am following what someone else told me to do for a minute. That makes it easier for me to do what I need to do. I have a direction so then I know where I depart. I love rules. Someone else chose this as a starting point: Soundwalk One (Hidden Creeks and Streams) by Hugh Livingston http://www.deepoakland.org/~deepoak/sound?id=165 “This was the headwaters of what is now called Cemetery Creek, almost all of which is underground. The 3 reservoirs are used by the cemetery to manage irrigation, and the creek then flows underground out to Piedmont Avenue, and from there directly down to the corner of Lake Merritt where it emerges in front of the new cathedral. Only a small portion of this creek is visible, behind the flower shop on Piedmont Ave, or entering from Piedmont Court around the corner.” I wonder if the water flowing under Piedmont Ave. is the reason why fire shot out of a manhole earlier in the fall. (Sort of like when it’s raining and I tend to hear more fire trucks.) I checked my records, it was October 6, 2011.

RADICAL SEATTLE REMEMBERS

Nov. 24, 1985:

The Colman School Occupation Jeff Stevens

Seattle’s Colman School, located in Rainier Valley and built in 1909, stood out for many years as a symbol for the city’s African-American community due to the distinction of being the first school in Seattle attended by black students, as well as having hired many black teachers. When it was closed by the Seattle School District in June 1985 due to the expansion of neighboring Interstate 90, many felt the building should have been converted into a black history museum—an idea which had first been proposed in 1981. When a city government task force formed to discuss the idea went in the direction such endeavors often go—namely, nowhere—a group of AfricanAmerican community activists began, on the date in focus here, a directaction occupation of the building as a means of forcing the issue forward. The activists, numbering roughly 40, entered the building, located at 24th Avenue South and South Atlantic Street, through a window that had been broken earlier by vandals. The building had lights, but no heat and no running water. Charlie James, spokesman for the activists, said, “We understand it’s going to be cold and uncomfortable, but we have a mission to accomplish.” The main roadblocks to the activists’ stated goal of claiming the Colman School for the proposed museum were much more bureaucratic than ideological in nature. While many in Seattle’s city government, including Mayor

Colman School, photo by Paul A. Hill (May 16, 2009). http://www.flickr.com/photos/pahphotos/ Charles Royer, openly supported the museum in principle, the Seattle School District was at the time negotiating with the Washington State Department of Transportation for the transfer of the property from the city to the state. Thus, the acquisition of the building was a much more complicated legal task than it would have been had the land still been simply owned by the city. The immediate goal of the occupation was to let the city know that the activists were serious about claiming the Colman School as the ideal location for the museum. While the school district warned the group of the illegality of the occupation, it refused to arrest or evict the activists for fear of bad publicity. Four of the activistsâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;James, Earl Debnam, Michael Greenwood and Omari Tahriâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;would continue to occupy the school for eight years, making their action the longest act of civil disobedience in U.S. history to date. The occupation finally ended in 1993 when the Seattle city government at long last agreed to fund the museum. The dream soon

became deferred when the activists found themselves at odds with a group of mainstream local black civic leaders who wanted to use their clout in City Hall to carry the project forward. It would be another ten years of lawsuits and bad blood before Seattle’s Urban League was able to buy the building from the Seattle School District for $800,000. The final result of the Colman School occupation, the Northwest Aftrican American Museum (http://naamnw.org/), part of a complex that also contains 36 apartments dedicated as affordable housing, opened on March 8, 2008. //

Sources: “African American Task Force Formed,” The Seattle Medium, February 13, 1985; Kathleen Klein and Mary Rothschild, “Goal of sit-in: a black museum,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 26, 1985, p. D 1; Charles E. Brown, “Activists move in at old school,” The Seattle Times, November 26, 1985, p. B 1; Kathleen Klein, “Museum supporters plan to stay at school,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 27, 1985, p. D 1; Connie Cameron, “Takeover at Colman,” The Seattle Medium, December 5, 1985; Trevor Griffey, “A Dream Fulfilled,” Colors Northwest, March 2008; Charlie James, “The Complete History of Seattle’s Newest Museum,” The Seattle Times, March 20, 2008.

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Contributors /// DRIFT.

Sean Collins is a writer and student living in Oakland, CA. He is co-editor of

Lara Durback is a notebook writer, using handwriting primarily, and that means walking around and writing. Public transportation is a big part of that city writing. She is also a letterpress printer, excited about future collaborations with Ariel Goldberg, Erin Morrill, Greg Turner, and anyone else she can hook. She only enjoys letterpress as collaboration, otherwise it is tedious. Book Art is her main employment. She is newly an avid biker, which has ceased menstrual cramps. She needs constant sociability, techno, dancing, cats, eggs, and Full House Café (her utopian family of regulars). She is constantly prowling for diverse types of small press work to post on Deep Oakland. Chris Engman lives and works in Los Angeles. He is represented in Seattle by Greg Kucera Gallery, in Los Angeles by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and in Germany and France by Clair Gallerie in Munich. Engman has received several awards for his work including an Artist Trust Fellowship and the Seattle City Artist Award. His work is featured in numerous public collections including The Henry Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Houston Fine Arts Museum, Orange County Art Museum and Microsoft. Linda K. Johnson has been a professional dance artist based in Portland, Oregon for the last 25 years. She has taught, performed, created and produced extensively throughout the region. Her concerns as an artist are social and environmental, and her projects have often addressed these interests in hybrid and unconventional compositional forms, formats and venues. Her teaching and making is informed by her interest in visual art, improvisation, somatic practices, architecture, horticulture and sustainable stewardship of place. An Oregon Artist’s Fellow in 1999, her work has been generously funded by public, private and individual sources, and has received serious critical review in many venues including Metropolis Magazine, Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR, and the Core Sample catalogue. She has received residency fellowships to forward her practice from Yaddo, Sitka and Caldera. She is honored to be a custodian in perpetuity of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal post-modern work, Trio A. San Francisco artist Mimi Moncier focuses on producing trans-disciplinary work that spans the visual arts of painting, sculpture and installation, and recently, animation, sound and movement. Her interest in merging and moving between mediums is based on the idea of breaking down and reconsidering formal systems,

which she deliberately integrates within her studio practice and in the production of her work. Moncier has exhibited in Boston, New York, New Orleans, Atlanta, Nashville, Birmingham and San Francisco. She has an MFA (2010) from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Diploma in Studio Art (2000) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts where she was also a recipient of the prestigious Fifth Year Traveling Scholarship in 2001, and a BArch from the University of Tennessee (1988). For twenty years, Christine Murray has been a documentary filmmaker and interactive media specialist with an emphasis on mobile handheld devices. Her work has appeared in museums and historic sites around the country, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Colonial Williamsburg, The Alamo, and the U.S.S. Midway. In 2009, her architectural exploration of the California Academy of Sciences received a MUSE award for innovative use of media and technology. As a documentary filmmaker, her work includes Demon of the Derby: The Ann Calvello Story, which aired on several PBS affiliates, and Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer (currently in postproduction). She currently works as a Producer at KQED in San Francisco. Nancy Nowacek is an artist who, through a participatory practice, investigates the relationship between the body in space and culture. The uses of the body, movement languages, and the body as site of imagination are specific domains of inquiry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Ruth Rainero holds a Master’s degree in Voice Performance and Pedagogy from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in The Netherlands, and a Bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of the Arts. She has been a professional singer and voice teacher for over 25 years. At her private studios in New York City and San Francisco, she teaches singing, voice rehabilitation, and communication skills. Ruth has taken courses in voice science, and can therefore combine knowledge of anatomy, acoustics, biomechanics, and vocal fold oscillation with her many years of teaching experience. Ruth tailors her teaching to each individual. She speaks five languages, and sings in five more. Ruth teaches internationally, and is a featured lecturer at voice conferences throughout the United States and Europe. Her students perform internationally, both on and off Broadway, and in major opera houses throughout the world. www.speakoutskills.com Jeff Stevens is a native and longtime resident of Seattle. He has written previously for Ruckus and Eat The State!, among other Seattle-based newspapers. He greatly enjoys rainy weather, for some strange reason. Joey Veltkamp is an artist/writer living in Seattle. His contributions have appeared in best of, City Arts Magazine, La Norda Specialo, New American Paintings Blog, Pacific Standard, Visual Art Source, and more. He is fond of rainbows, cheap beer, and Grizzly Adams.

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