[-empyre-] whose "our systems" & body weather

[Johannes Birringer]

Ps.  
lastly two brief excursions into performance after a visit to the "exponential horn at London's Science Museum. There on the 2nd floor they have the full-size reconstruction of the giant 27ft long  ‘Denman horn’, a large dark tube of a monstrous thing, a horn loudspeaker from the 1930 mighty enough to make the walls of Jericho tremble; it apparently was nearly destroyed itself, ironically, by a demolition accident in 1949. Sound artist Aleks Kolkowski discovered the fossil, and it has now been reconstructed to let us revisit an older, though then of course new, sound system which was to provide the public with demonstrations of the highest quality broadcast sound obtainable at the time. The science & theory of how horns propagate sound had only begun to emerge in the mid-1920s, and it was found that a horn with an exponential shape was the most effective means of converting the sound energy from high pressure, low velocity vibrations produced at the narrow end of the horn, into low pressure, high velocity vibrations at its mouth, then radiated into the outside air. However, in order to reproduce the lowest sounding frequencies, this type of horn has to be very long with a correspondingly large opening (it is gigantic).  Denman, an expert on loudspeakers, specially designed the horn in order to reproduce frequencies as low as 32Hz and up to 6kHz....

Well, that afternoon we were treated to sound concerts ("Resounding the Horn"), and I first listened to sound ethnographer John Wynne's exquisite field recordings of voices, Gitxsanmaax and !Xóõ,  the latter reflecting an adventurous exploration of languages on the verge of extinction (he also makes treatments of these sound recordings), an amazing female voice coming from this horn, telling me a story in a language unknown to me (she is one of the click-language speakers from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana), but, we were told, derived from the Khoisan subjects and their relation to their environment. I could have listened for a long time, and as i closed eyes, i began to imagine, the hosts and guests, voice and breath moving into air like a dance, inscribed and ephemeral, and voice invites a listening, bodies and air the medium?   The second "concert" was a resounding of John Cage's 1960 "Cartridge Music" (enacted by four musicians of the Langham Research Center), wonderfull reconstructed with an array of amplified objects, hairbrushes, tins, broken catridges, toothpicks, coil of wire,  paperclips, peppercorns,  plus 'auxiliary sounds'  made with the use of contact microphones....   Again, 54 years later it is quite a revelation to hear the kind of early noise that danced into the music  and electro-acoustic and radio (and dance) worlds during the early years of that weatherman and the concrete music folks, later to be followed by the turntablers and Japanese brût noise artists, who (to circumscribe the "dispositif" term)  helped to disorganize the musical organology and thus a dominant western technical organon (tekhné).


How about ritual?, my colleague Manjunan Gnanaratnam asked me when I sent him my post from last month about cultural transmission through the stomach.  Yes, that was my fear, too, when I walked up the street from Science Museum to Kensington Park and the Serpentine Chapel where performance artist Marina Abramovic is staging "512 Hours", a long durational rapture where unlike at the MoMA Revelation (the Artist is Present) we were not promised a one to one encounter where we'd have to sit facing her until we break down, but a different kind of space, a different mode of embodiment (no object, no art, no artist !) or, if I now allude to our month's theme, a different kind of virtuality and metaphysics. 

After much reflection, and recalling John's earlier post –  conversion of energy from one 'form' to another is itself a  draining process -- it 'wastes' energy, always! –  I am of course aware that I came to the Chapel already drained and pre-disposed, namely not to believe, not to trust the ritual techniques and auratic delusions, not to to became a convert to the cult of Marina Abramović (as Zoe Williams headlines her bizarre review: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/14/marina-abramovic-be-present-nothing-matters).  But today's world, and the cup in Brasil that some may be following, is suffused with cults and icons and long durationial deceptions (e.g. Lance Armstrong), and one treads carefully with icons, as one might with friends who implant a third ear on the arm or experiment with other phantom limbs, prosthetic operational extensions, and real & virtual perversions of the body.  

Abramovic's shrine was a surprise, to some extent; the ritualized frame not so much (long queue, the guards in black outfits looking stern, giving whispered instructions, lead you in, and in front of one side room, make you wait to be blind folded before a guide carefully takes your arm and then, after a few second, releases you into the void, of twenty or so other blind walkers).  That side room interested me, after quickly getting out of the way of the main room where a crowd or a swarm stood silently, motionless, eyes closed, in the elevated center, some bodies leaning into others, some just there alone in the crowd of hushed silence, trepid onlookers on the side seeking to get a glimpse of the absent glamour star (well, she was out and about I later noted, appearing suddenly to touch someone, reassure them or open/close their eyes to something, then retreating). There was pregnant expectancy, all over the space.  That main room was also lined with chairs (headphones placed on them) where you could sit down and stare at the wall, the headphones silent, blocking out the noise. Not much happening that late afternoon (Brasil was playing), when I came, and as time was precious, I performed the blind walk in the room where we were folded, made to maneuver our presences feeling all the others, and inspite of all manner of tricks I employed, I failed to bump into any one, nor the walls, no one stepped on me either, as I could sense the temperatures and of course my hearing and tactile senses were hyperactive.  The experience of the blindfold was different for others; a friend told me she was fearful that someone would inevitably step on her (broken) toe, her injury guarded her and restricted her.

Incidentally, a comment on the guards and minders; again as I argued last week, differential bodies will experience the arrangements (of the dispositif) very differently depending on various subjective, local and contingent factors. (Petra Kuppers has written eloquently on "Outsider Histories" and disability arts; she mentions how she attended a film installation of Javier Téllez's "Artaud's Cave"  in an underground cellar in Kassel, and how she was relieved when a friendly guard assisted her in her wheelchair, and other guards helped her to navigate complex pathways that allow access).  I expected to be fully annoyed at the guards in black, as I sometimes get frustrated in museums when the security folks with walkie talkies forbid me to enter a video installation telling me to wait or to take my shoes off.  In Kabuki theatre, of course, the assistants dressed in black are there to hand the actors props or assist them in various other ways, in order to make the performance seamless. They are called "kurogo", and to be regarded as non-existent.  In "512 Hours", the kurogo  seemed to master-manage the flow, monitor the movement, quietly police the attendance patterns, thus in my view damaging the "performative space" that Abramovic seemed to have unleashed, where our bodiments and behaviors are becoming the only material, in fact the immatériel, and informe,  our souls meditating in free flow. The faked ritual would be meditational, and I almost freaked out of course when I had withdrawn to the other grey-white gallery space to rest a bit on a chair, and suddenly Abramovic stands behind me and initiates me:  "Sit, the headphone will block out all sound. Close eyes. Do absolutely nothing. Don't feel guilty about it!"

When I turn to voice my protest, she has already vanished. I stay for another 10 minutes, making some notes, then I quietly leave, not without looking fiercely at the kurogo and pretending to be one of them.

My last performance account will be very short; it was a 24 hour durational performance ("Cuddle")  by Francis Wilson, a master student in performance from Ohio.  She proceeded to enact a meticulous double taxidermic operation, which must have lasted three or more hours, on a dead rabbit and a teddy bear, both placed under a camera on a operating table, then slept and cuddled the stuffed toy all night lying on the bed in the gallery, and when audiences arrive the next afternoon, the surgery, skinning of animal, opening up of the innards of the teddy bear, transfer of animal organs and innards to the furskin of the teddy bear, exchanging real and glass eyes, placing voice box ("do you like a cuddle') inside former rabbit, sewing and stitching them both up - this can be perused in the room with its bloody and foam traces, projected à la Timecode in split screens showing the autopsic & taxidermic operation from different angles, as if under the cool gaze of a scientific microscope, silently presenting us with facts, namely the possibility of various kinds of virtual embodiments, organ transplants, surgical exchanges on an extenuated spectrum between human, animal, pet, toy, trophy, icon, relic ....
the cool abject non-live performative gesture, mocking the sentimental, the commercial, and the perverse and (from a feminist perspective perhaps) thus also investigating what notions there are, floating about, of the grotesque and the volatile,  the beautiful and the embarrassing bodies. 


respectfully, signing off
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab