Seven Studies for a Dying Format

Carillons #1: Stereos and Tape Loops

CARILLONS from Falconator Films on Vimeo.

The impetus for this performance piece (filmed by Bryce Myhre) came from the process of making the song “Voodka”.  By breaking down the song’s many layers into looped sub-mixes on cassette tapes to be controlled separately, the arrangement became freed up temporally and also spatially (for the subject moving through the field of stereos) to be experienced in countless variations while retaining the coherence of the piece.  This potential for multiplicity is one that for has always been latent in “Voodka”.  The initial recording sessions for the song took place before the song had any structure or outline.  Rather, we just recorded a bevy of sounds, textures, and instrumental layers bereft of inherent relation (other than key).  Arrangement was done later in the editing process but I never lost the sense that the song could have been (and still can be) any number of ways. 

Or, this from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Pleateaus, the best ever definition of an assemblage: “neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and different dates and speeds.  To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.  It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements.  In a book, as in all things, there are lines or articulation or segmentarity, strata, and territories; but it is also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.  Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.  All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage”

Introducing Carillons

For the last 3 or more years I’ve been working on this project with Eric Graf and Mitch Manger.  That time has been spent working in private really, but now the mixes are done and we are happy to begin unveiling Carillons to whatever modest public we can scrounge up.  The website has streams of our compositions as well as a video of a performance piece we did using a bunch of boomboxes in the desert.  

Also today the Phoenix New Times ran a feature about us, though it focuses heavily on Eric as he is the one with Phoenix media hookups.

Check it out!

Archive Fragment #6

In my dream the marionettes were afire.

 

There was no backdrop.  Rather a hole in the theater wall staging the selfsame city.

 

The usher was useless.  He kept talking about shuttlecocks.

 

You were an empty body.

Wild Combination

[This piece runs in the summer issue of Signal to Noise.  Out today.  Pick one up at a finer retailer.]

Arthur Russell needs none of the cliché or mythologizing that tends to attach itself to the figure of the “forgotten genius” or artists who die young.  But there is much to compound these tendencies in his case.  The avant-disco cellist gave few interviews before his AIDS related death in 1992 – none of them in circulation, was thought (until now) to have rarely been recoded on video, and the vast majority of his musical recordings – over 1000 cassette tapes – have never been released.  Given this, experimental filmmaker Matt Wolf’s WILD COMBINATION: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, the first documentary attention given Russell (a print biography is expected out this year from Tim Lawrence), could have survived on the strength of its archival discoveries alone.  The film aims higher and succeeds as an evocative and often visually beautiful look at a complex person.

 

Images of childhood and play ruminate in WILD COMBINATION, as they do in Russell’s music (consider song titles like “Treehouse”, “Let’s Go Swimming” and “Calling All Kids”).  A childlike sense of wonder and fascination free of self-consciousness seem to animate Russell’s ovure.  Given the sumptuous footage of late ‘70s parties at The Loft, it’s easy to view such spaces as Russell must have:  as fantastic mirrorballed playgrounds. Wolf revisits Arthur’s Iowa farmland home where the musician’s parents speak fondly of an awkward and bookish boy who was boundlessly curious but shy and whose considerable acne hindered his social confidence. 

 

After a fight with his father over some pot found in his dresser, Arthur ran away to San Francisco, then in the full throes of its Haight-Ashbury hippiedom.  He entered a Buddhist a commune but his renunciation of the world was crippled by the one earthy endeavor he could not loose himself from:  playing his cello. After a period in which he would sneak off to the commune’s closets to practice, it became clear that Arthur was more musician than monk (though he was always to retain a bit of the latter).  California was a flowering for Russell, but his real creative boon was to occur elsewhere.

 

Friend and collaborator Steven Hall describes Arthur’s arrival in the Manhattan, stating “he looked like he just stepped off a tractor, but he was coming in to take over.”  Indeed Arthur was to captivate almost everyone he met, as the films interviews with Hall, Philip Glass, Peter Zummo, Allen Ginsburg and David Toop testify.  The film features some great found footage, including Arthur playing some folksy songs he had written on the acoustic guitar for Ernie Brooks (then in The Modern Lovers), seemingly trying to enlist him in his aspirations.  Indeed Russell was adept at winning people over and before long was the musical director of The Kitchen, then the center of the vibrant downtown avant-garde scene.  One of the films best moments features an episode of the New York City public access show TV Party that someone tipped Wolf off to, in which Russell plays guitar sheepishly behind David Byrne and Brooks, both of whom are dressed like kids playing Cowboys and Indians.  It’s an awkward if comic illustration of the way Russell came to intersect with so many scenes and dominate none of them.

 

Surely the anecdote most emblematic of the gravity of his personality is boyfriend Tom Lee’s remembrance of meeting Russell.  Lee recounts seeing Arthur on the street and, without thinking, following him.  It was only after following him at a distance on a few separate occasions that Lee was to work up the courage to approach him.  The film wisely foregrounds their love affair, a relationship that ultimately gives us the best glimpse into the musician as person – a man who was thrilled with the advent of the Walkman because it meant he could listen to mixes endlessly, which he often did while jogging or on the Staten Island ferry (he liked to hear the sound of the ocean behind his music).  Here we have a portrait of the man who would leave the blender on all day to listen to the whirring drone, or let the water level in his fish tank drop so that the filter would make gargling sounds for him to play cello alongside of. 

 

Then came disco, which might have seemed an unlikely genre of interest for someone from the avant garde.  But Arthur was attracted to the instantaneous communities of discotheque euphoria.  And while it proved a fruitful pursuit, there is a certain mist surrounding Russell’s engagement with popular disco, one that the film is wise to discard as it does, highlighting the work as a creative experiment rather than career summit – which it was not.  Sure, “Kiss Me Again” was Sire’s first disco single, but few people outside of lower Manhattan ever heard it.  This modest success was insufficient for Arthur, who, while personally gentle, possessed a musical drive that was as relentless as it was perhaps blinding.

 

He recorded incessantly during this time but released little, a trend that was to continue for the rest of his life.  He made splashes with “Is it All Over My Face?” and “Go Bang” but felt the anguish of a plateau in popularity.  His ambition drove his neurosis.  His eccentricities — especially his rampant perfectionism — frustrated collaborators.  He squandered a chance to score a major dance production by harassing the director and haunting the theater during rehearsals. As writer and musician David Toop comments in the film, “He truly wanted to make it, but had none of the characteristics you need to succeed in the entertainment industry.”

 

As collaborators moved away or moved on, Russell withdrew into his apartment, toying endlessly with a stack of electronic instruments, effects boxes, and, increasingly, the instrument he largely set aside during the height of his disco work:  his cello.  This working configuration eventually led to the creation of Russell’s 1986 masterpiece World of Echo, an album as unflinchingly spare and personal as it is sonically cavernous – an unlikely hybrid of fragility and an instrumental dexterity near total. 

 

Perhaps the cumulative effect of WILD COMBINATION and the forthcoming print biography will be to cement the persona of Arthur Russell to his own history – a pairing made improbable by the combination of a recent surge in profile and a public conception of him that has been (at least until now) more an amalgamation of anecdote than coherent narrative.  Of course, the soldering of the legend to his material reality will in no way demystify the music itself, which doesn’t need a back story to compliment its still unfathomable singularity and grace.  But rarely has music so begged the questions of how and by whom it was created.  Now we have somewhere to begin to look for answers. 

 

Archive Fragment #5

First the mapmakers stretched the map to cover the world (Borges), and then the shards of real earth rotting across the map’s surface (Baudrillard), and then the problem of what is a map without the mapped.  As if there would be any impetus to write other than that innermost part of us that in so many ways resembles a motel room; the familiarity of constituents failing to be familiar, the empty space which begs an act of inscription, dimension, the filling of default categories, lines of light and heat to void its unsettling hollowness.  But the allegorical gesture is ultimately unsatisfying as there is no key and it is only the desire for one that begged the question to begin with.

New Address

I can now be reached at

381 Hooper St., Apt # 18

Brooklyn, Ny 11211

Time Out

Oystershells will be inactive for a least a couple weeks while I move and get settled in NYC.  Be back as soon as I again have the head space for such contemplative pleasures.

Marfa Notebook

There is little evidence that the land U.S. Route 90 runs though from El Paso to Marfa (population 2121) is not the fabled middle of nowhere. That is, almost no evidence. On the roadside, about 15 miles outside of Marfa, flanked on all sides by an untouched expanse of low rolling desert is the smallest and remotest Prada store in the world. An immaculate window display of handbags and shoes blurs with the contents of its reflection: two gravel lanes of highway and the Chiahuahuan desert. The display remains lit through the night, casting a solitary glow over the landscape. The nearest inhabitants are cattle ranchers who spend their daylight hours attending to livestock and are likely indifferent to high-end fashion. So why would Prada – with flagship stores in Milan and New York City – put a store near Marfa, a city with a slight fraction of the population of the metropolises that hold the nine other Prada stores in the US? Retailers in Prada’s sphere make it a point not to overextend their retail base in order to maintain the perception of scarcity that derives the aura of upscale consumption. Prada doesn’t slum. But Prada Marfa is also Prada Marfa, that is, a work of art. Though overseen and owned by Prada, the store was conceived as an art instillation by German artists Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen. The company considers it a store, but there’s another catch: it’s sealed. The 2005 collection is permanently on display, only to be viewed – never touched or purchased – through floor-to-ceiling windows that are only about a dozen feet from the road.

This juxtaposition is not without tension. Tonight the windows are splattered in mud from ranchers who come out here drunk after the rains to skid their trucks in the dirt in front of the windows. This is art in the 21st century: irretrievably bound to markets and marketing. But maybe it’s no longer the much conjectured about line between art and commerce that is in play, but rather a matter of how much of the world we are willing to call art in order to survive it.

***

The prospect of small town pizza should be unnerving. But the pie at Pizza Foundation (a small restaurant occupying an old gas station) is a dead ringer for Brooklyn pizza. The guy behind the counter wears a bright blue shirt with a familiar orange logo. In a dusty desert town of 2,000 people, a fan of the New York Metropolitans.

In the center of the city – a title rather too grand in its suggestion — across from Marfa’s weathered City Hall, near the nexus of the city’s two main streets, sits an art bookstore that would quicken the pulse of a seasoned big city art enthusiast – stuffed with pricey coffee table monographs of primarily contemporary artists. Entirely absent is the painterly cowboy or “Southwestern” art that prevails in the lower border states. This is MOMA stuff — art that, if not urban itself, lives on the patronage of urban institutions. It hardly seems that the rather depressed looking Marfa could produce more than a handful of committed patrons of this sort of product.

Of course Marfa is not the normal West Texas small town it might at first appear to be. Nor is this fact a secret. It is rather a significant if outer blip on the radar of the contemporary art world – a status it owes to the Chinati Foundation, a museum founded by Donald Judd and forged in the remains of a defunct Army base, Fort D.A. Russell. The collection’s focus is mid-to-late 20th century conceptual and minimalist art, featuring permanent exhibition of works by heavyweights like Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, and Carl Andre. Judd’s own work, here a huge series of micro-varying aluminum boxes, fills two large hangers.

It’s a great collection, but one that is rather strangely situated. Flavin’s florescent lights and Judd’s riffs on mechanical reproduction would seem to lack their context here. But the town in turn adds something to the works, something other, and this seems to provide much of the draw for the cosmopolitan tourists. For those locals who do not work in art/tourism – and one gets the impression that none of the people who do are local – this must be a rather awkward predicament. When pressed, the tour guide at Chinati divulges a short history in which many locals were initially hesitant to embrace Judd’s projects and he met their concern with an open contempt.

Marfa has a certain uncanny nature about it. Here, one gets the feeling that he is in two places at once: a town inhabited by people for whom things are placid, as they have always been; and another town, inhabited by those for whom the mere fact of being here has an air of whimsical absurdity to it. The suggestion that small town art should be populist or utilitarian is not without a measure of condescension, but the issue lies elsewhere. Chinati benefits from a unilateral relationship to its location: it attracts visitors to what must seem like an otherworldly small town aura, while not speaking to or reflecting that location or mode of existence at all. But the issue doesn’t fold up so nicely as that.

One of the tour’s features is the old base gymnasium, which Judd remodeled — or so the guide alleges. Other than some Zen touches, the building is largely unadorned and unaltered. This is Chinati’s — and Marfa’s – open secret: they thrive on the blurring of the distinction between the art and its surroundings – a phenomena further complicated by the utter disconnect between the two. It is as though – as much as the works themselves – the real draw is that such works could be in a podunk West Texas town. The guide says that Chinati visitors often wander off to untouched portions of the base and fail to realize they are no longer in the curated museum. The cumulative effect of these works and their manner of presentation seems to beg that it is the base and the city that are already art, that this is the apex of American art, that most rarefied aesthetic commodity that is the real America, and through the gaze of its visitors also its representational double. And yet it’s impossible to shake the sense that this gaze, so bent on the authentic, in seeing everything as its image aestheticized, always displaces it.

The most engrossing piece at Chinati is Ilya Kabakov’s School No. 6, in which the artist fills an entire barracks building with the remnants of a Cold War-era Soviet schoolhouse. It’s a desolate scene: disordered wooden desks, faded propaganda posters crumbling off the walls, school papers scattered about the floor – evoking a catastrophic abandonment (either in the wake of the failed socialist state or — more dramatically — the remains of nuclear holocaust). Narrative suggestions notwithstanding, one can’t shake the feeling that the quality which Kabakov outlines is one already there in the dilapidated base – itself decommissioned during the Cold War. The real remaining curiosity is what desires, what lack, drive this encounter, the viewing through the frame of art that which was always already there without art.

Bushwick Lifestyles

The building I used to live in makes the cover of the New York Times.  Absurd.