What The Matter Is

Thrillingly, I’m showing new work at Tate Britain next month. My conducting work “Musica Practica” will be performed in seven of the galleries over the course of the Late at Tate event on February 4th.

The Tate curator got in touch last year after she heard about my performance at another gallery – or rather, she heard about a panel discussion during which the performance was discussed – and got in touch to find out more. It’s funny how one thing leads to another.

I wrote about the original “Musica Practica” performance in May last year (post #14), where it took place outside of traditional art contexts.

Moving the performance into a museum makes a change from its original South Bank location, where it took place both outdoors and outside of a designated art space. It meant people stumbled upon the work without any preconception that it could belong to an art context, and as a result, for many people it never did: it was just a thing that had happened to them that day – or perhaps they had happened to it?

Putting the performance in a museum makes it clear from the outset that we’re dealing with an art thing, and there’s no doubt this will substantially change the work. Mindful of its original location, we’re moving the performance through the Tate Britain galleries from space to space over the course of the evening so visitors might encounter the conductor unexpectedly in multiple locations, and might even miss him altogether. Among them I’ve chosen as many “lifelike” places as “artlike” ones (to borrow from Kaprow again) – a cloakroom, an info desk, an entrance way – which more closely recall the work’s original attachment to everyday life. With these adjustments keeping time with the adjusted context of the work, I’m interested to see whether the result feels more like a new work altogether or an adaptation of the original.

Here’s the outline from the Tate Britain website:

A lone orchestra conductor translates the gallery’s ambient sounds and everyday movements into real-time orchestral choreography. Shifting the traditional relations of authorship, score and performance, conductor and audience simultaneously direct one another’s actions.

Musica Practica will be part of Late at Tate Britain: Diffusions
Friday 4 February 2011, 18.30–21.30
Part of the Great British Art Debate

We say: the writing of the text is its dying song.

Other people in three studios:

“‘You know,’ Cage reportedly said, ‘when you enter your studio, everyone is there, the people in your life, other artists, the old masters, everyone. And as you work they leave, one by one. And if it is a really good working day, well, you leave too.’” (Robert Storr, pp. 59-60)

“The best ways to waste time in the studio are those that are unproductive and not related in any ostensible way to making art. I’ve fallen into a new way of wasting time, and it doesn’t involve the internet. My new activity is engaging and completely useless. I can’t tell you what it is; it’s embarrassing to me. I find a lot of what I do in the studio pretty embarrassing, but it’s no more embarrassing than what I make. I’ve never been able to work with people around. I don’t want to think about myself when I’m working. It is very hard to get into this state of un-self-consciousness, where I can get lost in the work.” (Rachel Harrison, p. 217)

“Philip Guston was generous to me as a student first in New York City. […] Puffing on a fat cigar, he told me that before he could begin to work in his studio, he had a daily exorcism to perform. He said, ‘First I have to banish my gallery dealer, then the art historians, the critics, the other painters I am close to, unknown persons, finally my family, and then, when I feel the studio is finally empty of these presences, I can occupy the space and begin to see the brushes, the paints, the canvas’.” (Carolee Schneemann, p. 155)

These are from contributors to The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, Chicago Press (2010)

This month the Icelandic Embassy in London is hosting an evening of readings by four Icelandic poets – Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Ragnhildur Jóhanns, Jón Örn Loðmfjörð and Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl – with responses presented on the evening by eight British poets. I’ve been invited to join in as one of the British contributors, and in preparation I’ve been looking at the work of Ragnhildur Jóhanns.

The disruption and reassembly of her cut-up books (the first picture I’ve posted is one example of these) brings to mind the line drawings I first wrote about in posts #9, 10 and 11. These line drawings – lines drawn between things and pages – are attempts to write things down, or keep them, in a way that words cannot. The lines either begin from the page and stretch out until they reach their object, like extruded words that lack the marked separation of language from the materiality of the object; or they begin at things and then land on the page, extending the materiality of the object all the way to the paper and landing there as material things rather than referential words. And of course once the lines have been drawn their original directions no longer show, and so they hover between referentiality and materiality.

For my reading I’m tempted to reserve a small portion of wall space on either side of the room and draw the lines of a poem between them. It’ll mean fixing a blank sheet of paper to one wall and another to the wall immediately opposite (each framed, with no glass) and walking between them drawing a series of unbroken lines from wall to wall. I’ll carry the lines between the walls in a notebook, and as I carry them I will crimp and curl and form them into words. The words will move with me across the room as I write them into position, and as the pencil moves across the page it will move across the room too, and up, and over, in arches and valleys following my hold on the book.

This week I’ve been experimenting. The second picture I’ve posted here is a spread from my book of line drawings which I’m borrowing for the purpose. I touched the pencil lead to one wall, pushed the book up against the wall and drew a line from wall to page. With the line on the paper I carried the book to the other wall, pushed it against the wall, and drew the line back off the paper and onto the second wall. Between walls, I used the line as words.

(These words aren’t a poem, they’re just temporary words. And ignore the bird, it’s showing through from the page behind.)

I’m not sure yet what will remain after the event to constitute the poem. Words will be written on the pages of the notebook, though I anticipate composing these words in advance to recite and transcribe from memory on the night, so the words themselves are not the entirety of the poem. The poem comprises the words, their movement about the page, the marks they leave at either shore, and the movements of the book about the room which, after all, are the movements of the lines of text.

And I wonder whether the two pages from either wall might ever meet, and whether one day they might be sellotaped together, forcing the pairs of apprehended ends to join and eschew the interim lines of words.

(The event is in association with 3am magazine and Maintenant – there’s an interview with Ragnhildur Jóhanns at maintenant.co.uk > poetry.)

On the train yesterday I was reading the London Review of Books (having unrelatedly had a pot of tea with four words in its name at the LRB Cake Shop the very same day) (and cake).

One of the articles was Do Not Scribble, Amanda Vickery’s review of two new books on letter writing: The Pen and the People: English Letter-Writers 1660-1800 (Susan Whyman) and Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Dena Goodman). Vickery writes:

“No lady’s desk was complete without a secret drawer in which to hide valuables and letters. A place of privacy is central to Goodman’s conception of the autonomy of the letter-writer. The secrétaire guarded a lady’s secrets and advertised her claim to thoughts of her own.” (LRB Nov 2010: Vol. 32 No. 21, p.36)

Advertising one’s secrecy is contradictory. (We can talk about gender or colonialism here if we like, or about artist statements.) Keeping things in a known secret place makes the secrecy a public practice, and only the detail of the secret remains private. If the compartment weren’t generally known about, it follows, then the secrets would only be half valid, the private mind being significant only in relation to the public perception of that mind. (The artist’s anguish.) There is still plenty of space for secrecy within the detail of a secret, but its nature changes somewhat when its form is prepared for in the carpentry of a desk.

Instead one might choose to keep a secret compartment with, secretly, no secrets in it at all, or to hide secret things in another truly secret compartment while leaving nothing of particular interest under lock and key in the known hiding place, or to just leave secrets lying around indifferently, disguised as everyday things.