when sounds become drawings...

50 sounds of the sea is the earliest work in my upcoming show. the piece consists 50 drawings in ink on index cards, housed in a hand made wooden box with a hand etched piece of tin on the lid. the drawings were made over the course of an hour on the evening of december 1st, 1990. my plan was to repeat the action every night for a year, but i ended up continuing it for only five consecutive evenings.

the drawings were made while standing on a ship at midnight looking at the sea in darkness as one day turned into the next. the piece was an early attempt to allow sound - in this case the ocean - to determine the movements of my hand. it is probably the earliest piece i made attempting to reconcile my interests in both sound and visual activities, as well as the beginning of an exploration of ideas related to recording and translation.

certainly i was thinking about the drum brush drawings of tom marioni, william anastasi's subway drawings, robert morris's blind drawings, and the work of terry fox - all of which i was just beginning to discover. in 1988 while still in grad school, i had been exploring conceptual strategies towards drawing and painting, but it was tentative, and mostly related to richard long and using walks to conceive of objects that would then be made in my studio.

at that time i was struggling with two things. one was to find a way to exploit process towards a different kind of making activity, and the other was to find a way to bring my interest in sound into my visual work - things i'm still exploring and still struggling with 20 years later. these drawings in a box were an important first step towards the exploration of both of these issues, as it suggested a path of making that involved a kind of performative limitation - drawing with my eyes "closed" - and they attempted to use sound to generate images.

also, at its most basic, 50 sounds of the sea was the first work that i made from a score:

"look at the sea in the dark, allow the sound to suggest drawing actions, and don't look at the paper."

i remember in undergraduate school, a life drawing teacher continually yelling "draw what you see, not what you know," and i think the idea of drawing outside at night was a way of messing with that idea, because i couldn't "see" anything but darkness.

certainly, the score for this work was simple, but i had never before attempted to impose a physical or conceptual limitation upon my natural tendency to draw in any way. the action shifted the focus from my eyes to my ears and hands, and it held the potential to generate something i might not expect to make. it also allowed the work to have some level of vulnerability, and accepted failure as a possible outcome (what if the drawings were absolutely uninteresting?). it approached the activity of drawing as an experimental activity, as opposed to a resolved activity.

one other thing that was so interesting is that i found myself incredibly focused on what i was listening to, and realized that one sense could fuel another - in this case sound and touch toward the creation of the visual without the use of sight. listening changed the way i made drawings.

eighteen years after making 50 sounds of the sea, i was working with allan kaprow's scores towards a performance of 18 happenings in 6 parts. while researching his work for a few months at the getty, i realized that the thing i responded to so deeply within his work was how his approach to conceptual process has always been human scaled (as opposed to academically scaled) and how it allows a great deal of room for the intuitive process. kaprow's work always seems to fall on the side of the conversation, rather than the resolved.

my own attempts towards expanding the ways i can mine a conceptual process towards generating intuitive moves, and somewhat traditional objects still feels like an experiment, and much of my work is still, on many levels, an artifact of a score and a performative process.

some collage scores...

sara clark at drunken boat was kind enough to invite me to publish something in their recent issue, which has a sound art section... i submitted a small group from around 250 recently completed small collage "scores"... you can see 15 of them on their website, along with a short statement... suffice to say some can be realized in the real world, while some perhaps only in one's mind...click here to see them... p.s. note i am the only artist whose name is written entirely in lowercase letters... i did not ask for this, but was quite happy to find it...

house music... (when buildings become a field of notes)

at 7:00 pm this coming saturday night, july 25, i will be fortunate enough to be doing a "dream gig". i'm performing at the schindler house (also known as the MAK center for art and architecture). also on the bill is a pair of gosh darned wonderful humans, making music as the climax golden twins. it's my favorite space in los angeles, and along with two solo sets, we will end the evening as a trio...

my relationship to schindler's work dates back to my childhood, and in 2001 i was lucky enough to be invited to create a few installations for the house and site. getting to work with the space a second time feels like a miracle...

the above images are scores for part of my performance (these will be somewhat improvised, while the rest will be entirely improvised...). if you've seen the scores i did for alvaro siza's pavilion, you will recognize the language here, participating upon and within rm schindler's original drawings for the house. if you are in the los angeles area, i would suggest attending the evening... airforms will probably be quiet until next week...

here some words from rm schindler regarding rhythm...

rhythm is a space relationship. it cannot be achieved by an arithmetical repetition of the same part but must be maintained by related spacings of parts, whether they are similar or not... as in music, such a rhythmic scheme may be simple repetition, or the more subtle locking of several rhythms.
1946

one more on windows (and music, and music scores)

"IN THE EARLY MORNING he went back out onto the street. The cafe had only just opened. The air tasted sweet. He accidentally brushed against the ice-cold marble table-top. He thought of the eggshell on the table in his room. His reflections were laid out in artful counterpoint to the streaming current of reality. Through the glass pane he could see an old-fashioned corset-shop in the window opposite, in which a lone bustier hung from a metal mannequin in the otherwise empty display, decorated with lace. He enjoyed the unique musical score of accidental perceptions."

the image is a cabinet photograph circa 1900, that has been in my collection for a few years and was supposedly taken in long beach california. the text is a "chapter" of gerhard roth's 1973 hallucinatory novel in fragments: the will to sickness.

upon re-reading roth's surrealist-ly tactile book saturday morning, i figured i should post this little "window" text as a follow up to friday's windows. much of roth's text reads like a visible "field recording", but it is his last sentence that captured my attention; for in many ways, it reflects the sensibility of the blog, as well as much of my work. it suggests the potential of an invisible, yet "scored, path" in looking, as he deftly balances the words "score", "accidental", and "perceptions", to create an activity of image-perceiving, or gathering, that is not unlike a series of stepping stones. the eyes as gatherer, the mind as archivist.

the phrase reminds me a bit of a short quote by walker evans on collecting that i forgot to put into my initial post on his postcard collection:

"i think artists are collectors figuratively. i've noticed that my eye collects."

for evans, this "collecting" (or mindful seeing), becomes a score that sets an action in motion - taking a picture. where roth's Kalb is constantly absorbing and moving, evans is also stopping time to create a physical record of such perceptions. here, the question becomes one surrounding accidents, as one wonders if a photographer like evans began his photographic looking with conscious intentions or if at times he was able to simply happen upon something in the moment, as if he too was able to be led by "the unique musical score of accidental perceptions" rather than a map of his own predetermined seekings. i would imagine it was a bit of both - visible in evans' postcard collecting as well as his photographic practice.

roth suggests that the things we see in sequence are somehow unconsciously connected, and perhaps there is meaning in the supposedly accidental order or sequence of what we see and how we see. even when one is absent minded, moving the eyes from one thing to another can be miraculously active... eyes dance upon things as fingers on piano keys, following a score, and one sees the bones of an idea: perhaps it is not only the seeing that is scored, but one's entire experience of the world...

if looking is like a series of sequential notes in a musical score, then whatever our eyes will rest upon in the next few seconds will be a combination of what is determined (scored) and undetermined (accidental), the path is set in motion... but that doesn't mean there isn't room for wrong notes. roth challenges us to seek meaning in the relationships between each thing, each vision, or each thought...

so how does the text relate to the photograph, other than the fact that there are actual windows in both? roth's "seeing-path" through a world both scored and accidental, perfectly describes the life moments captured by photographic artworks that folks now tend to call a "vernacular photograph"- a spiffy term for what is essentially an amateur snapshot. like the phrase "folk art", the term has become complex and fuzzy, with multiple definitions more or less inclusive depending on the collector that is using the term.

while i can't imagine someone saying that they collect "musical scores of accidental perceptions", roth's phrase is ideal in suggesting the birth of a candid photograph, and yet it doesn't necessitate the maker be an amateur. it clearly suits any un-staged moment regardless of the training and/or ability of the capturer.

certainly, "a musical score of accidental perceptions" could describe any photographic moment, but in line with roth's text as a whole, it seems clearly aligned with the so-called "candid" moment - a moment that is less controlled and more discovered. it's a guy with a camera circa 1900 walking with people at some kind of street fair, stopping to capture in a photograph a complex arrangement of people, on several levels of horizontal space, with several levels of spatial depth, some compressed, some expanded... (or one might simply say, a guy walking down the street, snapping a photo of some street performers...).

the interesting thing is that this moment of perceiving the "accidental" is no different than the one that generated stieglitz's masterpiece's - the "steerage" - which might be the ultimate photographic example of perceiving this "musical score of accidentals". surely both humans, the master and the amateur, felt some inner pangs in their own visual situations that suggested they bust out the camera and capture the visual moment.

all of this, of course, is simply a long winded road, full of left turns, that allows me the small happiness of feeling that in some way, the process of my work, essentially a combination of perceptions, scores, and accidents, is also somehow connected to the process of life; and that in roth's phrase, my being, seeing, making, doing, collecting, etc. are all connected by a tangled mass of invisible threads - sometimes known and most times unknown. roth suggests that these threads continually bind the accidents, perceptions and scores, in such a way that they are always together, and their connectedness can never be broken... god bless the beauty of invisible things felt yet not quite fully understood or known.

when architecture is a sky and windows are rainbows...

"unannounced public panam building spectrum light show

in each room of the panam building which has windows should be placed lightbulbs of the major hues: red, orange, yelllow, green, blue, and violet. the number of bulbs in each room should be determined by the size of the room and the number of windows so that each window emits the same amount of light.

the show will be given at dusk or after dark with the least amount of public announcement as is possible. acceptable exceptions: police and city officials and companies renting space in the building.

the lights are to be lit in the following order: red for ten minutes, orange for ten minutes, and so on through violet. the show should last one hour."

stephen james kaltenbach, from arte povera, 1969

when ads become scores...

the first page of a 4 page ad campaign for klh stereo components from a stereo/hi-fi magazine circa 1965. the "why" page faced another white page that says: (at klh we ask it softly but persistently.)

looking a lot like the visual poetry of ian hamilton finlay or the typewriter poems of henri chopin, one could easily imagine the image of the whys and the description facing them as a score for a performance...

simply speaking the text "softly and persistently"... reading across or down or a combination of various directions where the words dissappear into sounds.

fluxmusic friday...

some suggested activities for the weekend:

rainbow no. 1 for orchestra: soap bubbles are blown out of various wind instruments. the conductor breaks the bubbles with his baton.
ay-o, no date

drip music: for single or multiple performance. a source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.
george brecht, 1959

piece for ben patterson: construct a piano with the treble on left ascending to the bass on the right. play all the old favorite classics.
albert m fine, 1966

music for piano no. 5 (flux variation): an upright piano is poitioned at center stage with its profile toward the audience. the pedal is fixed in a depressed position. a performer, hidden from view in the wings, throws darts into the back of the piano according to the time pattern indicated in the score.
toshi ichiyanagi, no date

south no. 2 (for nam june paik): pronounce "south" during a duration of more than fifteen minutes. pause for breath is permitted but transition from pronunciation of one letter to another should be smooth and slow.
takehisa kosugi, 1965

all texts from the fluxus performance workbook, edited by ken friedman.