[-empyre-] of strings and tech

[Antoinette LaFarge]

I have been going backwards in time a lot this week, and it's partly because of my interest in where things come from. Even if Shani's later work is arguably more powerful, more influential, more lots of things, I find myself still thinking about that early robotic "Cello" piece. There is something especially haunting about the way her cello is brought from a speaking to a behaving object, and moreover one with a strong solipsistic bent through the endless self-retuning and self-untuning. Unsatisfied, agentic cello. Shani herself connects her cello to the history of musical automata, but it also speaks to a longer history of symbolization centered on the cello (and its cousins such as the violin and viola) as a stand-in for 'woman'. The most famous artwork using this trope is probably Man Ray's photo of a woman's back with the f-shaped sound holes of a violin superimposed.

(http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=61240)

The title of this work, "Le violon d'Ingres" (The Violin of Ingres) refers to the 19th century French master of orientalist imagery to whom Ray is paying homage. Through imagery and title--which is also a colloquialism meaning 'hobby'--Ray doubly reinscribes painting's history of female objectification within modernist photography. (That the back shown in the photograph is that of the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse is only sometimes remembered, and when she is identified, it is usually as Ray's model and mistress.)

Around the same time as Ray's 1924 photo, there begin to be photographs and paintings of women *playing* rather than *being* the cello; a fine example is a flamboyant 1923 Augustus John portrait of the internationally celebrated Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia. 

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suggia-augustus-john.jpg)

Apparently, before the spike was added to the base of the cello in the late 19th century, it was considered indecorous for women to play the cello because (horrors!) they would have to grasp it between their knees to stabilize it. So the emergence of women as masters of the cello can be seen as partially indebted to a technological kluge that routed around an unsolved social problem (differential standards of decorum for women). 

One peculiarity of the cello is that despite its 'womanly' shape, it is said to be the instrument whose sound most closely resembles the male voice. And here I am reminded of another artwork that stands behind Shani's "Cello," but in quite a different relation to it than the Man Ray piece. I'm thinking of the tape-bow violin that the performance artist Laurie Anderson invented in the 1970s. 

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/LA21uitsnede.jpg/238px-LA21uitsnede.jpg}

In this instrument, the strings are replaced by a piece of pre-recorded magnetic tape that 'speaks' when a bow with a magnetic head is drawn across it. Anderson used the tape-bow violin in at least one of her shows to play back (really, to play with) William Burroughs speaking a short text. As with the voice filters she frequently used to masculinize her own voice, Anderson was reversing the usual power dynamic: she was the one who allowed the (male) voice to speak, asserting full control over it. 

In Shani's piece, a generation later, the question of women as masters and women as players in the public sphere is somewhat taken for granted. Instead, Shani has turned to the focus back on the instrument: on the kind of responsive systems it can be part of (apart from the familiar orchestral one), and how that activity can still be meaningful to the people in the room.

Later,

--Antoinette