September 01, 2004
No Turning Back Now
i've pretty much got my piece figured out now. it's all about sound, but not very friendly sound I'm afraid. I've committed to this one through some last minute purchases - no going back now.
I've been thinking a lot (thus my moving around between projects) about how to get as directly as possible to my thoughts on our subject matter. Here's where I'm at. I thought I should prepare y'all for discussions next week, but also for a piece that is going to be fairly unfriendly - think about the horror stuff way back on this blog.
I keep coming back to thinking of our show as being about what I've been calling "spaces of potentiality." These holes of presence. (uh-oh, that almost sounds like a cheesy pop ballad...who was that band, "extreme"?)
It seems like we've been looking for things we can make or see that facilitate this experience, this charging of an absence with a potential for presence.
This is something I've been very interested in for a while, as in my theotherend.net project, or the stuff I've been working on with dead air, or my photos of NYC from high points in the midwest.
But I've been troubled by the way in which I keep approaching the creation of "spaces of potentiality" as primarily structural. This has been a concern of mine for awhile. I remember just getting into Found magazine and Spoerri and the celebration of found things on their own, without making stuff from them, when 9/11 happened, and suddenly some NPR guy is going through Manhattan reading WTC memos live onair that he finds blowing around the street. I couldn't say "ah, one of my aesthetic desires is sated by this thing," because it was only there because a bunch of people were murdered.
Likewise with so many of my interests. When you're as structurally stimulated as I am, I think you end up finding yourself in a lot of moral quandaries. Examined structurally, my favorite dada or fluxus artworks are in no way different from a suicide bomb in a Tel-Aviv pizza parlor. This doesn't help anything or anyone.
Likewise, in our conversations here about "absent presence" or spaces of potentiality, I kept finding myself troubled by our lack of addressing content or context, as if all such phenomena were equal.
The other thing that kept nagging at me in our conversations was that the experience of living in a space of potentiality, in which everything ordinary had an aura of potential activation and was thus transformed, sounds a lot like living in a state of potential terrorist attack, (real, imagined, or invented), or even in a state of perpetual news watching.
I then began looking through my various project ideas with these two questions:
1 - How can I make a work about spaces of potentiality without ignoring my role as the artist in an art space, and thus in some kind of power over the viewer? (gnosticism looms everywhere in our subject matter for me)
2 - How can I make an artwork that acknowledges the potentially threatening uses of the structure of "absent presence"?
SO I've got this piece now. I think it will be called BREAKING.
It's very simple. In the middle of the big room, hanging from the ceiling, is an array of loudspeakers, like the ones used for alarms, rectangular horn speakers.
Hooked up to these speakers is a single sound source (a DVD actually, cause I can program it). It works like this:
When you start the piece, you hear a second of very loud, very irritating, high-pitched noise. Then, you will here the same sound again in no less than an hour. Then the cycle repeats until we turn it off. The interval between two sounds is never more than an hour, and changes with each alarm.
Every quiet moment will be one moment closer to hearing it again, but you won't know how close you are. Yikes. I'm afraid it's almost like torture that way, though it's possible some people will never hear it. In the context of our show, I think it helps me really get to some things I've been trying to figure out.
I may monkey around with the exact sound when I get there, but I think I've pretty much got it figured out.
I'm still really interested in the use of sound for haunting and such, but I can't find a way of going that more pleasant route and still address the content I feel I need to.
So that's what I'm doing. Hope it doesn't interfere with anyone else's work - I think the relationship between all the works will be pretty rich. As we've been saying for awhile, we've got a collection of approaches you won't often see under the same roof in the usual art worlds.
See you tuesday night or wednesday morning - sorry I have to miss the party!
Posted by kevin at September 1, 2004 12:32 AMKevin,
I l ike this idea a lot.
As much as it is going to drive me crazy (Always, the jack-in-the-box held the biggest allure/ambivalence for me as a kid... that tension) I think it fits perfectly.
Early on, I wrote about my interest in having general sounds of birds, daily life, broken by intermittent gunshots. A bit literal, but at the time, it was something I had heard on a few late nights. Strange, in greensboro to be awakend at 2:30 AM by two or three shots sounding like they were a few blocks away.
All the thoughts and adrenaline came at once-- just goofing around? A fight? A death? Who? What's it like to be in that situation? Right now!
I do place my portraits in this category... the simultaneity of experience and thought. Each persona with responsibilities, shortcomings, problems, praises...
Seems like Jered's circle is the same way. In his and mine, there is a filter in place... the editors of the paper or my preference for this portrait over that one... and in yours, the system of timing and what it means to get the alarm sometimes and not others.
Cool idea. Plus, I like the abrasiveness of it for sheer imapct and the way it may drive UICA employees batty.
Posted by: ct at September 1, 2004 08:56 AMkevin. i too am in support of this project
as you describe it, it is so concise/pure
looking forawd to jumping out of my suit
sorry you cant make it this weekend
but we'll see you in a week
Bravo!
Kevin, I was just having a discussion with an aquaintance about "28 Days Later". It followed a similar track as I see your piece. The audiences expectation based off of the sound element, will cause them to be aware of other sounds within the space and also for the next sound event as programmed by you. In "28...", I was taken in by the effectiveness of the use of "beauty" to heighten the sense of horror. Whether it is the version of "Abide with me" in the background during a lull in the movie or a panoramic view of the lush green countryside, the viewer (me) was left in an edgy expectation of the eventuality of the next thing.
Kevin, I was wondering about your use of "gnosticism" in your earlier comments. Could you possibly clarify the definition as it applies there. Is it about our knowing as the authors of the works of the show? Or audience knowing as informed viewers? Is it about some other special knowledge to be sought out (spirtitual or not)? Or...?
I think the questions you formulated pose a good filter or vantage point to take stock of the show as it comes together.
I too will not make the party, but look forward to seeing everyone Tuesday night.
Posted by: jered at September 1, 2004 10:45 AMthanks for the feedback everyone - that's great to hear.
on the gnostic stuff, for jered-
I have some pretty active radar for gnosticism - I see its dualistic, anti-materialist approaches as totally infused in our western world, especially in Christianity (mine too). See a great book from about a decade ago, "Against the Protestant Gnostics," by a guy named Larkin I think.
Here though, I'm referring specifically to the "secret knowledge" part of gnostic practice, as it applies to the creation and enjoyment of "absent presence" in a lot of contemporary art. The best example I think would be the work of Cornelia Parker, where you have to rely wholly on the artist, the gallery/museum, the labels on the wall, to understand the object as significant. There is no information in her objects that is available to perception - we have to get it from the institution that sponsors the work. Knowledge is hidden from the eye, but provided through words.
So, as in gnostic cults, we have:
-disembodied approach to knowledge
-reinforcement of a power structure through management of hidden knowledge
-material objects become mute and irrelevant
I think some have been able to do this in their work in a way that ends up critical and revelatory of the way this happens in even less conceptual art, but I see less of that in present-day engagment of the topic.
I'm skeptical of my own work that engages this topic, frankly.
Posted by: Kevin at September 2, 2004 10:39 AMi like 'spaces of potentiality'. makes me think of the topic in more neutral way.
on thinking of this, your project, and an email from adam about the breakdown of secular/non-secular, i've been wondering how evil fits into aura. i didn't connect the horror drawings to this until now. not that your project, kevin, is about evil, but the form of it seems to be recognizing a startling/horrific/10000 trumpets aspect of aura.
the breakdown of secular and non is easier when speaking of the holy, but what about evil?
[regretfully, i won't make the party either. i just started grad school at SAIC today, have a housewarming party on friday, and family will be in town for the weekend, but CHEERS!]
Posted by: rowley at September 3, 2004 12:38 AMI really like this one. The simplicity of the head and the head phones and the contrasting of the blue and white is really sweet. So ya, that's all I have to say.
Posted by: Kevin Martin at September 20, 2004 06:50 PMwhat are you talking about? you think we've been going on like this about that little icon i stole from somewhere? maybe you're joking.
Posted by: kevin at September 21, 2004 11:10 AM