Smarter than you

Recorded music and the recorded performance in objects of contemporary art, and an aside about the roles of documentation in performative practices

When I started this project it was from one point: I am not a musician. It was an easy assumption at the time; I hadn’t been playing seriously for a couple of years with only occasional moments where I would pick up the violin. I played the piano for fun, but here I was in Glasgow without one. I wanted to play the violin again but I was not going to be a musician.

Its gotten more complicated since then. Of course I’ve complained in the past about artists taking up music or other forms without believing themselves musicians, and without considering that part of their work in itself, alone. So I was committed to doing a good job of it, of performing with an idea of rigour, if a twisted one. I didn’t want to make something bad, because it would reduce the project to a joke.

So I had to practice, and it’s easy to become a musician by accident when you do that too much. I was poor, so I started busking too. But I’m still trying to keep these things somewhat separate.

Why am I not a musician?

Music is boring. There is so much. And, worse than art, everyone thinks they like it. Many people actually do not. But although they don’t know art but they know what they don’t like. There are a few places in music where that is also true—that is where I want to be.

I’m very interested in the ways that people use aesthetics as political tools and identification. It’s there in my previous work, I think. It was a part of my painting from the start. It’s in the exaggerated posturing and sometimes over-romantic narratives and framing of my games projects. It’s about discomfort with misguided us-vs-them divisions, about experimenting on the street with where the real boundaries are, finding the real violence in our society by making the narrative too much to take seriously.

I think New Music is perhaps the most instantly recognisable such division. It’s an unusual space because outside observers have so little literacy within it. Unlike art, where the passive observer may not be able to perfectly put it into words, but will be able to distinguish modern and contemporary, abstract from pop from dada from conceptual in some gut way. “I know what I like.” More to the point, people who go to hear any of its variations—drone or noise rock, post-jazz improvisation, contemporary composed music, whatever, are totally conscious of the fact that this action distinguishes them more than one thousand grad-student ponytails. They know that other people “just don’t get it” and that’s find—it’s part of the thrill of genre, the romance of the avant-garde.

I want my audience to feel that thrill but to also be uncomfortable with it. My work must be likeable, polished and carefully framed, but ultimately grating. My audience must want to see more, must excitedly describe the performance after the fact to those who missed it, but actually be glad that they could just walk away from it, that they weren’t trapped in a theatre with a real musician.

Those who do not see the performance must understand that they did not see it.

The worst thing about music is that everyone listens to recordings that a corporate system has convinced us of a strange emotional use-value for. It is as if expressionist painting had become the undisputedly preferred mode of art experience. It isn’t even about the duplication, but about decoration. For those who don’t like art, expression is the assumed motive of the artist and the work is used as decoration-entertainment and marker of misguided class aspirations. Recorded music is background and on-demand emotional context not unlike choosing the colour scheme of a room.

It’s not too controversial to describe conceptual art as having been recuperated by the system it was invented to challenge. It is the central principle of my experience of British art since moving here, and although the star system here makes it visible it certainly works its way through practices in Canada and elsewhere too. British art is an object that suggests the performance of its construction as a literal bringing-together of separate ideas, a connection being formed. It allows the viewers to flatter themselves by imagining that they can experience a perfect reproduction of the performative moment—since the artist’s hand is not too visible or too precise, it can disappear in the viewers’ minds. We can “get it” just like the artist. And then we can exchange money for this emotional simulation.

So I must leave nothing behind. Being not a musician means avoiding recording, means the viewer must always feel that they are missing something. Like the ideal bewildered spectator of a game played in downtown public spaces, they must brand themselves non-participant, must not be allowed illusions of control or narrative agency. They have only one important choice—to stay and observe and perhaps try to understand second-hand, or to forget, ignore, leave, go back to their drink (although that may be complicit still) and conversation. Their only questions should be: do I like this bewilderment? Or better yet: do I want to be perceived as the kind of person who would go to see this event?

A complication

The eternal trouble: why can I so dismissively write off conceptual art as failure? I too must of course struggle with the compromise of career. I would like to be a famous artist, sure. I have to document my work. I fact, I recently produced a version of this project for documentation. Performance for the camera. How can I justify this recording? Only partly. Here is my strategy:

  1. Position my video narratives in opposition to cinema.

    This is the first, liberating possibility for me. It was an accidental discovery from editing footage of a spy game in Edmonton. The joyous impossibility of rendering a participatory, many-agent game narrative to film, doubled by choppy hand-held flip video and incomplete images including essentially no action bolstered by on-the-go audio interviews. My eyes were opened to alternative models of documentation that reinforce the distance from the work rather than trying to bring an accurate representation of any part of it. My audience is far away.

    These realisations were supported by soaking up the work of Harun Farocki for three weeks as well as considering the contradictions of game narratives in the mainstream of computer games—which strive to fool players into believing in their agency in pursuit of an auteur experience—and of role-playing games strainging to breaking point from participatory folk-game roots to sell “cinematic” experiences desired by computer game fans. Aesthetic crises result.

  2. Commitment to alternative documentation and experience.

    I want this work to be documented in a way similar to its experience in the gallery. The viewer is not held prisoner by the theatre and is expected to move in and out of the art display space—I will refuse to stop playing while viewers are present to deny the cinematic moment of applause, because I am not a musician. So any documentation must capture this incompleteness. I want to document my performance in passing. I will be cut by the limits of documentary forms: half-remembered testimonial, out-of-focus photography and faint and interfered audio recordings.

  3. The viewer must decide whether they want to see more or less but either way be unsatisfied.

    My performance-to-video is made in the hope of capturing a little bit of what it is like to search out performance documentation online, where only fragments on gallery websites, recordings of recordings made on camera-phones in gallery video displays and still images with descriptive texts are published. Although one can get a very clear and specific sense of the shape of the work, the details remain out of reach. My overblown, almost comically romantic aspirations produce something beautiful but unintelligible as the sounds of the performance of my tiny, distant figure are swept into the too-picturesque landscape by the wind and my form is rendered indistinct against the stunning landscape, recognisable only by the accoutrements of aesthetic-political differentiation: the violin, concert attire and movement.

  1. emanuel-alec said: Can’t wait for the Vimeo channel
  2. smarterthanyou posted this