Some time ago I wrote about Ms Bergvall and expressed some desire to be her in that I wanted to ‘do’ poetry in art galleries. This article is an extended way of saying that I am now doing (more or less) that very thing. Our local art centre has just shortlisted my collaborator (Julian Winslow) and I for its ‘Duets’ competeition and we’ve been there to talk about display and acoustics and everything. According to Ju, this now means that we are artists but I’m not entirely sure that I want to have that much to do with art. What I think I want is to be able to explore the potential for poetry (as poetry) in that kind of quite formal and culturally structured arena.
This is not the same as a performance or reading. I’ve had quite a busy year and have been reading poetry and performing multi-vocal poems in a number of different settings but the art aspect is quite different. The voices are recorded and accompany the ‘film’, the piece (art term, apparently) runs on a fifteen minute loop and will do so throughout the two month duration. So, it’s a rendition that doesn’t need me or anyone else to be present and, as the vocals are layered, it can’t be a book. There will also be times when the gallery is open when it will play right through with nobody present, as if to itself. I like that.
Surprisingly (we didn’t intend to do this until we saw the ad for the competition), we’ve found that making this piece has created a number of further possibilities in that we’re now exploring how this documentary format can present other subjects and events. I’m delighted that both the piece, “Hello Austin!”, and the performances have met with such a warm response: this was a complete shock to me because I just wanted to see if I could get the idea out of my head and into the world – I had no idea that people might relate to it and like it.
Given that I’m now both a performer and an artist it seems time to try and work out some kind of framework for these events / objects to operate in. I don’t think this is the same as Bergvall’s thoughts on ‘language practice’ but it’s a first attempt to build a set of rules for the work that is being produced.
Trust the People.
This isn’t original, it is stolen from Emile de Antonio, the finest documentary film maker that the world has produced who said you should let your interviewees lead and steer your content and recognise that any attempt to impose your own take is doomed to failure. This seems straightforward but isn’t, in the film piece I wanted to talk more about our friendship and the things that maintain that and much less about the practical problems involved in the collaboration. I was also immensely tempted to insert what I think wanted to say rather than what I actually said. There’s a piece that I use which I talk about landscape as a performance, it sounds stilted, it doesn’t contain the central point that I wanted to make but I couldn’t leave it out because that was my staring point in the collaboration.
Keep the poetic in sight.
When I started thinking about this, there was an enormous temptation to break things down and scramble them into each other and was reasonably content with the results but then realised that this was more an exercise in cognition than in creative expression. I then started to take more notice of what seemed to be important to people and the way that they talked about these things and that wilfully breaking up these importances wasn’t very honest. So, I’ve introduced longer phrasing into the performances and recordings and this has created a chance or an opportunity for something with a touch of the lyric. As regular readers will know, this i quite a shock as I am of the view that there is far too much of the poetic in poetry and we need to get rid of (most) of this pernicious vice. I was then taken aback when mastering (technical term) the sound file for the film to discover that it has quite intensely lyrical passages and even more surprised to find that I didn’t mind.
Keep on changing the frame.
This is important. Poetry works best when it puts itself in new and uncomforatable places. It should continually try itself against other forms and in other places and it should not be frightened that this will dilute its purity or strength. One of the reasons poetry isn’t attended to any more is because it looks inward to itself and it has conversations only with itself which results in stupidly (stupidly) spiteful factions that deter and repel any converts that it might attract. The best way to amend this sad malaise is to engage with musicians, painters, sculptors, film makers and any other creative types that are open to dialogue. This should involve explaining and justifying poetry to those who have no attachment to it and working with others to make different but poetic things.
Take care with image and the poem.
We started with what we didn’t want: we wanted to move away from illustration and augmentation. I’m not making a soundtrack and Ju isn’t illustrating the sound(s). I started out with the improv model in that we’ve had broad themes and then working around these in a way that’s mindful of the images. With the ongoing landlying project this has been refined down ready for the next phase. With ‘Hello Austin’ we took collaboration as our theme and ourselves and our processes as the subject matter. So, the sound is a recording of things that were said during this filming session and one other but as an expression rather than an account of the conversation. I’m trying not to get too complicated on this but it is important to be mutually aware in some detail of the processes involved and to share in the making process from both perspectives. We think we’re now at the point where we’re beginning to get what we want but it’s still got a way to go.
Noise is okay.
This is odd. I’ve disccovered the astounding aporee site which collects and presents geo-tagged field recordings from all over the world. I’ve listened to many of these and I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a case to be made for some unmediated recordings as poems. It transpires that there is someone in one of the Baltic states who is making these poems and they are quite wonderful. I’m using ‘noise’ rather than sound as a kind of protest over the way that both technology and architectural strategies have been used in the last 100 years to deny the noise that things make. I don’t want to get to carried away (manic) on this but I was listening to the noise made by patients who were waiting for their drugs in a hospital in Taiwan yeaterday and decided that this was a 5 minute poem….
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