Wolf notes: Issue 6

Wolf Notes Issue 6, June 2013

Published by Compost and Height Please do not reproduce content without prior permission from contributors.

2

Wolf Notes

Issue 6 | June 2013

Seth Cooke No Locus

David Stent The Task of the Impossible

Daniel Barbiero Stillness-­‐Energy-­‐Sound

George Charman After the Rings of Saturn

4-­‐9 10-­‐15

16-­‐18 19-­‐24

This special issue of Wolf Notes complements two concurrent exhibitions: 'Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966-­‐1979' at Southampton City Art Gallery and 'Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson: England and Wales 1969' at the John Hansard Gallery. Together, these two shows combine the largest survey of Land Art in Britain with the first overview of the photographic and sculptural works made by Smithson and Holt during a visit to the UK in 1969.

Smithson and Holt's journey around Dorset, Wiltshire and Pembrokeshire was prompted by Smithson's inclusion in 'When Attitudes Become Form', a seminal exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, curated by Harald Szeemann, then Director of Kunsthalle Bern, where the exhibition was first shown. It is widely acknowledged that the exhibition helped transform the current discourse concerning the possibilities for contemporary art and specifically sought out artists who were preoccupied with notions of 'work', 'concept', 'process, 'situation' and 'information', as indicated in the exhibition's thematic subtitle.

As the name suggests, 'Uncommon ground: Land Art in Britain 1966-­‐1979', is not focused exclusively on the work of British artists but that of international practitioners working in Britain during this period. Shown alongside figures such as Richard Long, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Derek Jarman are works by Susan Hiller, Anthony McCall and Jan Dibbets. The curators of 'Uncommon Ground' -­‐ Nicholas Alfrey, Joy Sleeman and Ben Tufnell -­‐ have acknowledged the importance and influence of Smithson and Holt in a parallel exhibition dedicated to their work.

In response to the John Hansard show, Bang the Bore presents 'Displacement Activity', a live event featuring composed music, text works and field recordings that take the inspiration from the work and methods of Smithson and Holt. Alongside compositions by Manfred Werder and James Saunders, the concert includes a performance by Seth Cooke derived from a sonification of Smithson's Mirror Displacement methodology and a publication by Neil Chapman and David Stent based on the slide presentation Hotel Palenque 1969.

This issue of Wolf Notes brings together further texts by Cooke and Stent, alongside writing from Daniel Barbiero and George Charman. These contributions combine to explore interconnected themes of place, space, displacement and site, extending the range of discourse surrounding these two exhibitions to include composition, field recording, writing and research.

Sarah Hughes, Editor

3

Contributors:

Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist and composer with an interest in the material life of sound and gesture. In addition to his solo work he serves as Musical Director for the Nancy Havlik Dance Performance Group.

George Charman’s work explores the social constructs of architecture imbued in the process of making and its ability to act as a bridge between the mutable world and a space beyond what is here. The work plays with notions of aspiration and ideas of eternity as a state of mind; forever progressing in vain to an unknown point like negotiating your way through a mirrored maze that is constantly re-­‐ configuring itself.

Seth Cooke is a percussionist and sound recordist based in Bristol, UK. He frequently uses improvised, process and location-­‐driven methodologies and often works with materials happened upon by chance.

He has been a contributor to the Bang the Bore collective since its inception.

David Stent is an artist, writer, curator and musician. His practice draws on various media including drawing, photography, digital and print publishing, film and video, sonic and sculptural installation. He regularly performs with the Set Ensemble and is the Programme Leader of the Visual Arts Department at West Dean College.

Published by Compost and Height | www.compostandheight.com

Please do not reproduce content without prior permission from contributors.

4

NO LOCUS Seth Cooke

“That place… where the imaginary comes into contact with the local and the real, is what we strive to create.” Michael Pisaro, Ten Encounters

In the West Yorkshire Police control room we used the word ‘locus’ to describe Pisaro’s place-­‐which-­‐is-­‐ not-­‐a-­‐place, a descriptor for the cloud of subjectivities and contingencies that exists around initial reports of any incident before a scene can be established. A ‘scene’ has actors, script, setting, spatial-­‐ temporal bounds and a context within a larger narrative. The locus is more slippery. ‘Locus’ means a place, position or configuration of co-­‐ordinates – but it can also describe a focal point of activity or concentration. There are loci of events, of ideas, of possibility, of uncertainty. Through custom and practice, West Yorkshire Police parlance defined the ‘locus' as a superposition of potentials, mapped from emergency calls, that sets the parameters for an initial response. The ‘scene' is the collapse into materiality of those potentials, determined when officers arrive and make their assessment. The struggle in emergency response, always, is for an accuracy of relation of locus to scene.

On 20th March 1995 members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult orchestrated a sarin attack during rush hour on the Tokyo Metro, killing thirteen people and injuring hundreds. Emergency services, the Subway Authority, hospitals and the media were all criticised for their handling of the incident, ill-­‐equipped to diagnose and respond to circumstances. Those involved in planning and executing the attacks exploited the ambiguity of loci. Initial reports of the five co-­‐ordinated attacks were confused – accounts of unexplained symptoms delivered piecemeal by panicked casualties, caused by an airborne nerve agent spreading throughout trains, tunnels and stations, carried on clothing and communicated outside by direct contact. In case of the Ikebukuro-­‐bound service, the targeted train was only taken out of service one hour and forty minutes after the first package of sarin was punctured. The locus of events, sites and potentiality was vast, confused, moving and growing – an invisible unbounded territory of ideas, of which the eventually identified scene constituted a materialised subset. The slippage between idea territory and actual territory cost lives.

The scene cannot be understood without acknowledging the lingering shadow cast by the cloud from 1 which it emerged, yet “what is most important is what cannot be measured”. Discard the context of emergency response and the principle holds when considering any location. The divisions and conditions determining what constitutes a ‘place’ – whether bounded by geography or ideas, people or process, intention or accident, change or stasis, circumstance or potential – exist in the nebulous realm of the locus before boundaries are marked or maps are drawn. We reside in this ideaspace; “we do not operate behaviourally directly upon the world, but rather we operate through a map or model 2 (a created representation) of what we believe the world to be” . Evidence-­‐based judicial systems resolve these ambiguities at the earliest opportunity; elsewhere ambiguity accumulates and the locus persists alongside the scene. As musicians, recordists and sound artists our most immediate resources exist in that scene – in objects, acoustics, systems and the overall environment. While documenting or interacting with the scene, the locus often eludes us. Microphones cannot point to it, sound does not reflect from it, we cannot handle or manipulate it. But if the struggle in emergency response is to achieve a resemblance between locus and scene, in art we are not held to any such standard.

5

It is here that land artist, sculptor and writer Robert Smithson’s conception of the non-­‐site has continued relevance. In his terms, “By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a ‘logical two dimensional picture.’ A ‘logical picture’ differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for… It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it -­‐ this 3 is the non-­‐site.” Smithson’s non-­‐site sculptures consisted of geometric containers, assembled in gallery spaces and filled with matter gathered from the represented site, with accompanying materials illustrating the dialectic between the two – a dialectic characterised by an inversion of qualities: “The range of convergence between site and non-­‐site consists of a course of hazards, a double path made up of signs, photographs, and maps that belong to both sides of the dialectic at once. Both sides are present and absent at the same time… Is the site a reflection of the non-­‐site (mirror), or is it the other way around? The rules of this network of signs are discovered as you go along uncertain trails both 4 mental and physical.” In music and sound art, site-­‐specificity is often achieved through field recording, acoustic strategies or the deployment of objects found at the site. While these may characterise the scene through its physical properties, Smithson’s technique enables the mapping of territory beyond the physical through the parallactic dialectic of site/non-­‐site, addressing the locus by arresting the collapse into a polarity of representation/represented.

-­‐-­‐-­‐

5 Arthur Russell's 1986 composition, The Name of the Next Song , maps a conceptual space around California by evoking a sense of how that place is referenced throughout popular culture. The piece is constructed as a modular configuration of subsongs, each based on permutations of the same music.

Each subsong is introduced with a pause and a new title; “The name of the next song is ‘Anti-­‐America'”; “The name of the next song is ‘Painted Box’“; “ The name of the next song is ‘I’m Sorry, but This is How I Learn’” -­‐ yet the lyrics for each remain a repeated and constant “California, here I come / California, here I come.” One only needs glance at the Wikipedia page listing Songs about California to appreciate Russell's device – The Name of the Next Song doesn’t just represent his ideas about California, it represents every idea about California throughout the entirety of popular culture. It is the locus of California as it exists within the cultural collective unconscious, a non-­‐site the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere, capable of encompassing all the hidden meanings behind Russell's oblique titles. The listener is left with the impression that the version presented on World of Echo is some kind of fractal, a tiny fragment representing a song that continues out of earshot, in infinite configurations, forever.

Russell’s composition is illustrative of the capacity of the locus to contain conflicting and even diametrically opposed material within its field. A graphic example of this can be found in the context of emergency response. On 5th July 2012, armed police, fire crews and bomb disposal experts closed a twenty seven mile stretch of the M6 motorway in Staffordshire for four hours after a report that a coach passenger had poured an unknown liquid into a bag, producing visible vapour. The locus bore several similarities to the Tokyo sarin attack: an ambiguous location defined by an uncertain event in progress, with the possibility that it might be spread for miles and affect thousands of lives. The scale of the response seemed informed by that earlier tragedy and the impending Olympic Games; the scene, once established, was the result of a member of the public describing vapour rising from an electronic cigarette. These similar loci, in Tokyo and Staffordshire respectively, collapsed in opposite directions, but until the scene can be established all potential scenes must be considered as a single cloud of probabilities. The Zone of Alienation around the scene of the Chernobyl disaster is another example, with its simultaneous conceptual existence as both radioactive wasteland and flourishing wildlife reserve, with a future collapse in either direction being dictated by political as much as – if not

6

more than – scientific considerations. Addressing the locus can enable a simultaneous description of both polarities in a manner that is difficult or impossible when focusing solely on the scene.

6 Vermont takes on a similar significance in July Mountain , Michael Pisaro’s setting of the Wallace Stevens poem, a composition for percussion and twenty mono field recordings “made in mountain areas or valleys if possible.” Ten of these recordings are superimposed at any given moment, with the score containing instructions for timings, fades and panning. The result is an extraordinary density of respatialised sound, at once chaotic and harmonious, representative of an essential landscape – a construct that, by confusing the borders between each location, holds potential co-­‐ordinates for all such locations. The instrumentation consists of an array of percussives (a total of one hundred and forty three discrete parts) played using techniques that highlight their timbral capabilities while minimising their attack (bowing, rubbing, sounded with projected sine tones, with seeds or rice placed on their surface or wrapped in tin foil) and selected to cover a similar range of frequencies as the location recordings. The percussion corresponds to and models the field recordings, with the locus mapped by the parallactic tension between the two overlapping constructs. In Stevens' poem, “when we climb a mountain, Vermont throws itself together.” The composition illustrates how a vantage point confers a special momentum to the processes by which we represent and mythologise locations, as our perspective of sensory and conceptual material shifts relative to our position.

Pisaro extrapolated upon these concerns at What is Field?, an event at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London: “…when we talk about Hollywood we mean… a whole collection of images, some of which might have real world components to them and some of which might be imaginary, 7 some of which can be met by an experience and some of which you conceive of yourself.” Pisaro refers to this assemblage as ‘place’, yet moves beyond this by positioning the Vermont of July Mountain in terms of another Stevens poem, “Description Without Place” – “a concept only possible in description.

We arrive at the end of the poem at a place, or what might originally have been called place, Vermont. But that is no longer really that place, it’s no longer Vermont. No longer, in Stevens 8 words, “a false facsimile” but something else.” In the slippage between representation and represented, the properties of the map aberrate to the extent that it can signify something other, a description freed to ambiguate.

James Saunders' Location Composite series achieves a similar effect using a technique that abstracts 9 compositional material from a location via a process of deletion . In Saunders' words, the series “comprises geocaches containing verbal scores. The scores ask the finder to interact with the local environment in an activity which contributes towards the production of a secondary score. These secondary scores are used for subsequent performances.” The activity asked of the finder is the 10 creation of a listening score, a description of the auditory submodalities experienced at each location, with references to the point of origin of each sound redacted. Over time, each listening score becomes an assemblage of multiple visits, or multiple subjective responses to the same visit; an additive process of spatial-­‐temporal layering representative of the locus rather than resembling the location as it can be encountered at a single point in time. These listening scores are used as the basis for performances in which the location is modelled in sound by musicians responding to the earlier listeners' abstracted map, representing a zone experienced by multiple subjectivities on multiple occasions.

11 Inspired by the model of the senses detailed in Aristotle's On the Soul , one is tempted to abstract the inverse of the locus by antonymising the submodality descriptors in Saunders’ listening scores.

Robert Smithson deployed contrast and inversion in his site/non-­‐site dialectic, even offering a table of dialectic correspondence – “Open Limits / Closed Limits; A Series of Points / An Array of Matter; Outer

7

12

Coordinates / Inner Coordinates; Subtraction / Addition… (and so on).” Smithson was known to cite Carl Andre’s maxim, “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not”, that everything contains the conception of its own opposite. By representing the location in auditory submodalities, bereft of referents, Saunders creates a user interface capable of accessing those properties of the locus that map potentialities.

Language makes the locus manipulable, even reversible. The properties of any given map direct behaviour as much as they describe territory; changes to a map change our relationship to the mapped, enabling fresh possibilities as characteristics aberrate. Saunders uses this technique to superimpose descriptions as though layering temporal cross sections to form a four dimensional model.

13 On Chantier 1 , Pascal Battus, Bertrand Gauguet and Eric La Casa surprised a number of reviewers by presenting their work in reverse-­‐chronological order. Self-­‐defining as an improviser rather than sound 14 recordist , La Casa constructed contexts encompassing improvisations by Battus, Gauguet and a 15 Parisian building site . The musicians regrouped months later to recall the experience by way of a series of studio improvisations, two of which are included at the start of Chantier 1 – before the original building site recordings. In the words of Pascal Battus, “The concept of ‘remembering the building site’ was left deliberately imprecise... Memory could be a point of departure or a driver, or it could be a modulator of our playing. And of course we’d already listened to the recordings, so they were also superimposed over our memories and might have denaturalised or even supplanted our 16 sonic memories of the lived experience.” Thus the trio gave primacy to a non-­‐site representation of their building site experience, emphasising the locus by occupying a meta position in relation to their earlier work. Having set that frame, the building site recordings are heard in a continuum that stretches beyond the site itself, into the non-­‐place of the studio – a neutral environment as uniformly ubiquitous as a car park, public lavatory or art gallery.

Chantier 1 is characterised by instability. The ecologist Stewart Brand contrasts planning and 17 construction through denominalisation : “Whereas ‘architecture’ may strive to be permanent, a 18 ‘building’ is always building and rebuilding. The idea is crystalline, the fact fluid.” A construction site is an idea materialising, a process of becoming guided by an idealised representation of an intended result. Battus describes the workers as “the heart of the building site, but the site is a Tower of Babel with different and distinct communities (Africans, Arabs, Turks…)… when we were playing on the roof, one of the workers asked what we were doing, and when we explained and carried on, he took out his 19 phone and made us listen to the music of his people: a Kurdish shepherd playing a kaval flute.” If the studio recordings can be described as a non-­‐site representing the building site, then Chantier 1 also positions the building site as both a non-­‐site for the wider world and a materialisation of the achitect’s conception of the locus. One can define Chantier 1 as an atlas of actors performing the script of an idealised place in a transforming setting alongside improvisers mapping alternate contexts, recalled in a space that could be anywhere.

-­‐-­‐-­‐

A metaphor. Use it as you will, in sound or otherwise:

From the vantage point of the control room, emergency incidents are a collision of multiple, frequently conflicting maps. Triangulated co-­‐ordinates of cell phone signals and postal addresses of landline subscribers are plotted on Ordnance Survey charts that are themselves undergoing constant revision; computer geobases conflict with the endless proliferation of local nicknames for places; impermanent landmarks of shops and public houses rebrand, change ownership or disappear altogether; new places are conjured into being then vanish, defined by seismic events in ways that are seldom static. Crime

8

scenes are cordoned off, roads closed, suspects pursued, houses entered. Reportage is itself the product of psychic maps, consisting of first hand observation, second hand accounts, expert theory, rumour, supposition, mistakes, hallucination and outright lies. Language maps experience, slang jars against jargon, interpreters bridge cultures, dialects diverge. Perhaps all you have to go on is a shout, cry or whisper. The law is a consensus map interacting with local policy, national protocol, proactive strategies, risk assessments and the multiplicity of agendas and overlapping responsibilities of partner agencies and other involved parties. Ubiquitous cellphone and police radio lifelines compress and distort the sound of the scene, losing signal at vital moments, fragile sonic windows opening into environments familiar and unimaginable. Time relativises in confused perceptions, expanding throughout long, dark nights, contracting or repeating with shock, warped by adrenaline, vanishing in the unconscious. Incident logs and crime reports collage the debris of these ruptured maps, our best attempt to plot a course through uncertain territory.

“When one scans the ruined sites of pre-­‐history one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits… The abstract grids containing the raw matter are observed as something incomplete, broken and shattered… How can one contain this ‘oceanic’ site? … The non-­‐site, in a physical way, contains the disruption of the site. The container is in a sense a fragment itself, something that could be called a three-­‐dimensional map… It is a three dimensional perspective that has broken away from the whole, while containing the lack of its own containment.”

Robert Smithson, A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, 1968

Every control room is a non-­‐site for its constabulary, the inverse of the force area. This is the realm of the locus, for which there are no standard maps, in which anyone can be forgiven for getting lost.

-­‐-­‐-­‐

Dedicated to Daniel Bennett and my colleagues at various constabularies, past and present.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Kodansha, 1997) Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson Volume 1 (Meta Publications, 1975) – itself an extrapolation of A. Korzybski’s “A map is not the territory it represents” (Science and Sanity, 1933) Robert Smithson, A Provisional Theory of Non-­‐Sites (1968) Robert Smithson, notes to The Spiral Jetty (1972) A bonus track available on the 2004 Audika and 2005 Rough Trade reissues of World of Echo Engraved Glass 2010, Gravity Wave 2010 What is Place? (Wolf Notes Journal 5, Compost & Height, 2013) What is Place? (Wolf Notes Journal 5, Compost & Height, 2013) “Linguistic deletion... relates to the fact that, in verbal statements, a person, object or relationship, that can enrich or even change the meaning of the statement, is left out or deleted in the verbal Surface Structure” Robert Dilts & Judith DeLozier, Encyclopedia of Neuro-­‐Linguistic Programming (NLP University Press, 2000).

“Deletion is a process which removes portions of the original experience (the world) or full linguistic representation (Deep Structure).” Richard Bandler and John Grinder, The Structure of Magic Volume 1 (Science and Behaviour Books, 1989). Both refer to language patterns taken from Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar and modelled from therapists Gregory Bateson, Milton H. Erickson and Virginia Satir.

In Neuro-­‐Linguistic Programming, submodalities are distinctions within each sensory modality (or representational system) that are used to map and operate upon an individual's represented experience.

They are sometimes presented as pairs of opposites – light/dark, quiet/loud, hard/soft – or as positions along axes, although dualism is inessential and deployed only when useful. They are used for modelling and interventions, for creating maps with malleable properties. As a subjective tool, reliant on the plasticity of experience, the only limitation to the number and scope of available submodality distinctions is what can be usefully conceptualised in specific contexts. Calibration is vital – an astronomer may access different visual submodalities to a PhotoSynth programmer; a marine audiologist may access different auditory submodalities to an Ableton user; a Reichian therapist may access different kinesthetic submodalities to a silat instructor; a

9

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

native Kuuk Thaayorre speaker may access different temporal submodalities to a native English speaker. The value of submodalities is practical; their existence apart from the systems and interventions that presuppose or suggest their presence left deliberately ambiguous.

“The field of each sense is… determined as the range between a single pair of contraries, white and black for sight, acute and grave for hearing, bitter and sweet for taste…” Aristotle, On the Soul Robert Smithson, notes to The Spiral Jetty (1972) Another Timbre, 2012 “I am not making a technical recording; I use my microphones to improvise a relation between the context and the musicians” Interview with Simon Reynell, another timbre.com/page137.html “Chantier” is the literal French translation for “site.”

Interview with Simon Reynell, another timbre.com/page137.html “Nominalisation is a transformational process whereby a process word or verb in the Deep Structure appears as an event word, or noun, in the Surface Structure.... Deep Structure is the full linguistic representation (of the world). The representation of this representation is the Surface Structure – the actual sentence that the client says to communicate his full linguistic model or Deep Structure.” Richard Bandler and John Grinder, The Structure of Magic Volume 1 (Science and Behaviour Books, 1989) Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (Viking Press, 1994) Interview with Simon Reynell, another timbre.com/page137.html

10

THE TASK OF THE IMPOSSIBLE (or The Figure’s Contributions to the Field) David R J Stent

The following text is an extract from one of sixteen individual folios that constitute ‘The Region of Disillusionment ✺ The Experience of Writing as Research as Art', a practice-as-research Fine Art PhD submitted to the University of Reading in 2010.

11

CUT TO:

⬅

At this moment the Figure spies a strange platform set into one of the banks – a semi-circular indentation set into the earth like a stage, book-ended by large mounds as if boulders were concealed under nettles. In amongst those grasses the Figure makes out a series of hard angles glinting in the light, slowly recognising the surfaces of a crude shelter – a tiny hermit’s cabin pinned against the slope, propped up with a stick. Although the coincidence would be lost on the Figure, the setting echoes that of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Antony, missing only the Saint’s holy book and the cross casting a shadow over the hovel.1 What also escapes the Figure would be Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Flaubert’s text as an “exemplary case of literary disaster (...) an act of stupidity” and his insistence, no doubt laced with irony, that Flaubert enjoys the doomed cause of his writing; or rather that he enjoys his lack of enjoyment in the whole “pointless and exhausting enterprise.”2 The Figure would be unaware that Nancy probes the motivation behind the “putting together [of] a text that ends up being a dreadful pain, designed solely to demonstrate that it gets nowhere”, whilst continuing to assert that this was precisely Flaubert’s intention from the beginning – producing writing that relied only on an obscure internal coherence to keep it ‘afloat’.3 For Nancy, Flaubert’s ending to Antony’s trials is a “perfectly ambivalent” flourish consistent with this approach – the Saint is suspended between his deliverance from temptation and his having succumbed to it (as well as a third way whereby he is delivered by succumbing to it), and as such, throughout the composition of the text, Flaubert succeeds in writing himself into a corner, giving himself nowhere to go.4 As a form of self-cancellation the work resists and circles itself, always moving away from a position of steady authority as if its concern were to establish what couldn’t be clearly established. Flaubert’s writing flickers between an exhausted consciousness and an obstinate ‘matter’ underlying everything. Just as Antony, after having penetrated each atom at the end of the book, desires to “become matter”, so the Figure, if it were capable of making the association, could recognise its repetitive, self-cancelling operation as an attempt at writing its ‘entry’ into the matter of potential.5

12

CUT TO:

⬅

Although it is not registered by the Figure, the orientation of the wooden crate wedged into the bank also echoes that of a box in an untitled 1972 work by the Dutch-American artist Bas Jan Ader. In this work a series of photographs show the artist being caught under the box as if in a trap. Dressed in a suit and tie, Ader is shown crawling to the box on his hands and knees, then drinking tea underneath it.

The box is propped up on a stick. In the fifth image the stick is removed and the box falls, trapping Ader underneath. Even if the Figure is unaware of it, the fifth image of the series is immediately striking. It does not show the propping stick being pulled away from the box but as having vanished completely, leaving an unsupported crate hovering in mid-air. The trap has been tripped and yet it holds. The image encapsulates something of the incongruity of Ader’s practice, pinpointing a gesture of suspension and neutrality that springs from the material of the work, as if an internal flaw betrayed the work’s capacity to deny itself or highlighted a detail of impossibility that could never be sustained.

13

CUT TO:

⬅

The Figure remains unaware that the implanted impossibility exemplified by Ader’s ‘missing stick’ is echoed in other instances throughout his body of work. In other cases the locations of such a nodal points are more ambiguous. In Search of the Miraculous, a project from 1975 destined to remain unfinished, saw Ader attempt to sail across the Atlantic in a small, one-man boat. Though an experienced sailor, the artist never completed his journey. The wrecked ‘Guppy 13’ was picked up some ten months later off the coast of Ireland and Ader disappeared at sea. Erik Beenker, writing in a catalogue accompanying an exhibition of Ader’s work in 2006, makes casual reference to the ‘Guppy 13’ being “unsinkable” and Ader being attached to it by a “lifeline.”6 Although the implication is somewhat different, it is compelling to consider this umbilical connection in relation to an unsustainable space of impossibility – a space Ader seemed intent on approaching, even falling into, throughout his life and work. In the case of In Search of the Miraculous the notion of ‘being attached to the unsinkable’ is a paradoxical conjunction, resonant with notions of immanent nullity and self-cancellation. Yet the sentence might also be misread to produce another suitably strange concept relevant to Ader’s endeavour: being attached to the impossible. Given the perfectly ambivalent ending to Ader’s trials, it is as if the artist had always been attached to and divorced from the ability to sink, as if this said something about potentiality as both capacity and incapacity, an ability to do and to not do. Ader was always already attracted and tied to such potentiality. In this sense the lifeline committed him to an untenable position. It made him a component in a process that, once engaged upon, supplied its own undoing, as if it were always essential to the founding premise of the enterprise. An attachment to the impossible implies a double bind of affirmation and self-cancellation – the artist sailing into an

14

incommensurable relationship with the ocean, posing a problem for which there can never be a solution.

The ligature between the artist and the vehicle of his disappearance supplies the most incongruous of suppositions – a clause that ruins, or sets up for ruination, the ostensive boundaries of its journey. This is what drives Ader’s inclination toward the impossible – an umbilical connection to potentiality that opened him up to assuming the ultimately undecidable designation of ‘lost at sea’. Ader’s work so often involved his surrender to ‘superior forces’ – his relenting to gravity when falling from the roof of his house, his cycling into an Amsterdam canal or the slip from a tree into a ditch. Yet his acts of abandonment formed part of a broader quest to disappear, often reinforced by processes of un-working being allowed back into events as they unfold. Throughout his work Ader is always concerned with setting the conditions for a state of crisis, as well as the mechanics necessary for ‘making a scene’.

According to Jan Verwoert, in establishing requirements for these crises, Ader succeeds in inducing a “moment of necessity (…) out of a situation of contingency.”7 This is to say that the contingent is forced into necessity through Ader’s actions. For Verwoert, this goading of a decisive moment of necessity from contingency is central to Ader’s practice, asserting that he does not seek failure as such but rather the environs of a necessary decision which might lead either to failure or its dismissal.

Verwoert goes on to argue that Ader’s work is a “proactive technique, an emotional skill of provoking decisions through an attitude of decisive indecisiveness”, but is this what is going on in In Search of the Miraculous?8 In relation to this question it is tempting to read significance into the two books allegedly found among Ader’s belongings – G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Strange Journey of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall. Although more obvious associations can be drawn between Ader and Crowhurst (in 1969 Crowhurst, an amateur sailor took part in a round-theworld yacht race during which he abandoned the competition and faked his position before apparently descending into insanity and committing suicide), it is the connections to Hegel that may be most useful.9 In 2004, the filmmaker Rene Daalder quotes a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology in an article claiming that various sections of the text were underlined in Ader’s personal copy of the book: Formation is the vanishing of being into nothing and the vanishing of nothing into being.10

It is possible to approach this fragment of text outside its specific placement in the context of Hegel’s thought, as if it were an image excised from the original text. It not only touches on the ambiguities accompanying the act of vanishing but also inherent in creativity (‘formation’) and the task of the artist.

The co-existence of absence and presence, work and its denial, embedded in this un-contextualised fragment echoes the kind of incommensurable space that runs through many of Ader’s works. But if throughout his work Ader transformed this incommensurability into a material gesture within his work whereby transformative regions are opened that are beyond its limits, In Search of the Miraculous does something else with this gesture. Rather than the “unauthored uprising” Sally O’Reilly sees in In Search of the Miraculous (described as an instance where a practice revolts against an artist in an implosion sourced not in an authorial contrivance but in the self-reflexivity of all circumstance and culminating in an unforeseen ‘incident’), there is an inversion of the equation that Verwoert assigns to Ader’s oeuvre.11 15

Instead of necessity being extracted from contingency, In Search of the Miraculous produces absolute contingency out of necessity. Ader is ‘lost at sea’, having moving toward a point of potentiality – a point of no return.

1

“The setting is (…) high on a mountain, where a platform curves to a half-moon, shut in by large boulders. The hermit’s cabin occupies the rear. It consists of mud and reeds, with a flat roof and no door.” Flaubert, G. (1983) [1874] (trans. Mrosovsky, K.) The Temptation of St Antony. London: Penguin Classics, 61.

2 Nancy, J-L. (2006) ‘On Writing: Which Reveals Nothing’ in (ed. Sparks, S.) Multiple Arts: The Muses II. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 70 & 76.

3 Ibid., 71.

4 Ibid.

5 Flaubert 1983, 232.

6 Beenker, E. (2006) ‘Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975 missing at sea): the man who wanted to look beyond the horizon’ in Bas Jan Ader: Please Don’t Leave Me. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 10.

7 Verwoert, J. (2006) Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous. London: Afterall Books, 28.

8 Ibid., 31.

9 The British artist Tacita Dean has made several works involving aspects of Crowhurst’s story, including Disappearance at Sea (1996) and Teignmouth Electron (1999).

10 Quoted in Daalder, R. (2004) ‘Bas Jan Ader in the Age of Jackass’ in Contemporary Magazine, February 2004, 2. <http://www.basjanader.com> 11 O’Reilly, S. (2005) ‘Self-Reflexivity’ in Art Monthly, Issue 289, September 2005, 7-10.

16

STILLNESS-­‐ENERGY-­‐SOUND: NOTES ON NEGATIVE SPACE Daniel Barbiero

“I am interested in stillness, in the silence that emanates from objects. I see this stillness as a form of energy that these objects radiate.”

1 Reiner Ruthenbeck

If stillness is a form of an object’s energy, then its sound is the realization of that energy in its active form.

Consider stillness as the sound latent in objects. Sound is released from stillness the way energy is released when, for example, an atom’s nucleus is disturbed. In a more prosaic, musical context, disturb the string by plucking it or pulling a bow across it and a series of vibrations is released, which we receive as sound.

(Moving beyond conventional musical instruments, we can find sound lying dormant in nearly any kind of object if we approach it properly and with open minds.)

On this view, the sound is in potentia here in things as they are, as a force that's always-­‐already there and simply needs to be realized by the activity of the person attending to it. The silence emanating from objects simply is their sound signatures, as yet unrealized. Imagined this way, sound and stillness aren’t opposite qualities or states existing in an orthogonal, mutually canceling relationship to each other, but instead are the obverse and reverse of the same phenomenon.

In the realization of a composition or the performance of an improvisation, sound and stillness appear as positive and negative space respectively.

Positive space is the presence of intended audible matter, i.e., the realization in sound of the composition or improvisation. Negative space is the opening produced by the absence of intended audible matter.

Negative space can have two functions. The first is a structural function separating and apportioning events consisting of intended audible matter. The second is as a carrier of possibility, as a space in which something could happen: that is, in which a sound could arise. Thus negative space is by no means empty space; rather it is a space potentially inhabited by sounds existing outside of, and surrounding, the sounds produced by the realization of the composition or the performance of the improvisation.

Both positive and negative spaces play a role in the ecology of the listening situation by soliciting the listener’s attention in specific ways.

Positive space invites attention to the internal relationships defining and characterizing the work, that is, to its compositional structure, harmonic and melodic content, phrasing, timbre integration of pitched and unpitched sound material, and so forth.

17

Negative space, when embodied in significant passages of stillness, directs attention to the work’s external relationships, and thus to itself. This is because the work’s most fundamental external relationship is that between positive space and negative space.

The analogy here is to Robert Morris’ observation about a certain type of sculpture: that the work “takes relationships out of the work and instead makes them a function of space, light, and the 2 viewer’s field of vision”. When we make the necessary changes to allow for differences of media, we find that the piece of music that integrates significant negative space moves the focus from one exclusively concerned with relationships within the work itself (of, for example, tones to rhythms, tones to timbres, tones to themselves) to one now including the relationship of the work to the physical context of its presentation—its relationship to the room in which it occurs, say, or to the listeners individually and as a group, or to the accidental sounds present. Certainly these contextual elements overlap: The room, for instance, is a physical space defined by not only by its dimension, materials and boundaries, but by the collection of listeners it encompasses.

(Because any given sound signature will be affected by the contingent facts of its release, the physical environment in which that release takes place conveys information about itself through its shaping of the sound. Some environments—particularly “live” ones constructed of hard reflecting surfaces, for example—may play as great a role in shaping sound as will the instruments or objects used by the performers.)

These external relationships by definition are not relationships between parts contained within the work. But there is no reason why significant occurrences of negative space cannot be one of these parts and hence an element of the composition.

Significant events of negative space do not necessarily function as ends in themselves, much as they may at first appear to. On the contrary, a focus on compositional stillness is liable to lead out beyond itself to a focus on the compositional events surrounding, and surrounded by, stillness.

Stillness as a compositional or performative element in fact fosters a heightened attentiveness in the listener such that it frees the listener to become acutely aware not only of the performance’s environment, but of the composition or improvisation being performed.

Through the listener’s awareness, stillness in a sense leads through itself to a point beyond itself. This self-­‐overcoming of stillness is what we might call the essential dialectic of negative space.

This is an area I have explored in recent work such as Not One Nor, Eighteen Events for Double Bass, and x-­‐(y+z)=0, which take as their focus the phenomenological structure of the listener’s absorption in the reciprocal relationship between positive and negative spaces. These works attempt to represent or create an image of the zero point at which the perceiver interfaces with the world through an opening inhabited by the flux of perception.

The musical material in these works is minimal, often consisting of long tones, pitched series or unpitched sounds separated by substantial passages in which no intentional sounds are produced. The hypothesis is that our apprehension of alternating sounds and rests follows a certain pattern of increasing sensitivity to nuance, of detecting subtle variation in appearances we initially take to be simple.

18

Thus the goal of these and similar works is to create a sound environment in which positive and negative spaces are mutually implicating and equally weighted, as quite often is the case in everyday situations in which our attention is directed to the intermittent beckonings of aural stimuli—that is, to the sounds emanating from objects.

1

Quoted in Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), p. 231 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Gregory Battcock ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 222-­‐235. Quote on p. 232

2

19

na

e gro e G

me

nt

ar y

co

ll is io ns

n

â&#x20AC;Ś

Af â&#x20AC;Śt

er

e h t

ri

s g n

of

ur t Sa

m

C r ah

A

ec l l co

on i t

of

ve e s

n

mo

The bell

chimes

the mayfly

as

c o l l i

d

e

s w life. t h

Scattering into a newborn a r t h , it s e

a

r

c

h e

Its arrival, determined by the of chance, dumb hand is made hopeful by eht dnoyeb its immense .noziroh number.

s

for the s t a

knabrevir eht

b i l i

fo

Those who reach

glimpse of

the terminus are

compelling but faint a witness to

a new world b e y o n d

t t

i

m

h e

e

i .

r

t

y

The museum, a place of displaced artefacts. With the dog days behind them, they rest idly in cabinets and on plinths waiting, as it were, for recognition of past glories.

A swirling mass of viewers casually collides as they parade through the peripheral vision of composed camera phones, fixed on the odd coupling of the animate and inanimate.

The instantly fleeting white-hot light of the flash marks the consummation of this momentary union.

k n e e s

b a a o s I r t m m r i t m e n r u t i o e y e n h i n d m t r s e r f e e e t s r l t t o e c r c h . t e i d o , n

T s o t o b s a a b w h h n f e n o i n b u e o r t l m n g n e a u c e p e n d p a o c p o t l m o i n s e m n g i n g .

ss

u

s gl

me

nt ti h

ug

ro

ti

A

fr

th

ac

of

ed

mo a of on

ch ea

as

p nt

to

pu sh.

u

u

p l

yo

fo ed nc

la

ly

en

dd

ce

I

a

as

m b

gy

ro

,f

er

ch

en

it

re

sw

Su

pu

a

y.

l

an d

an ll pu I nt

et me

me

t

. sh

se

pu

dg

ri

I

le

es

d

ow

ey

an ll

fo

kn

r

sh

ou

pu

d

u

as

yo

Y

â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s er th

ac

in

es

pu

ll

.

W i t h

e

yup

re

su ……

yu p

e…

r su … …

su re

p…

s

yu … …

ok yu p

p yu

re su

su re

p yu

su re

Yu

re su

p…

p…

yu

p yu

e…

r su … …

e ur

yu p…

yup

yup

re su

e sur

p

sur e

p…

yu ……

p…

yu ……

r …su … …

yup

sure

h d ize smoot ent s t m a pal ed to onsis open A c t e p ty cul c by a rds th twen rc s , s a of ne wa sto lar di ed to angle allow ber sh ell an num egu irr s prop ng at ds in a inate force i rm en ts A ati sea, , rot t desc indete ker, i ish. r i n a e wat es. As t of anh its m o demi time e t t s r ss deg e fir ons wi nning acro slow h i i to t ollis y beg l skip by a e d h c u a of alre racef lowed l to t l g is nal fo fal fi ll be entle bed. g wi sea and

sure

yu

r ne

Turning the cor

on

to

a

po

or

ly

li

t

cu

t-

th

ro

ug

h

I am stopped stillin my tracks. The

s pa ce

eb t ew ne

intimate. us wholly is feels not concentration, shared ni of s sense gi a n of i virtue if by c yet na t ,

The shadow of the street lamp acts like am ethereal bridge connecting our two locations.

equilibrium the distance

noise

ve

me

nt

An y

the

An

mo

d

l ou

.

jo

in

in te gr of it th y is

th

e

co

mp

ro

mi

be

disrupts near in indefinite

a n d t h e b r i d g e

se

to

w

delicate

f a l l s .