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WD_176/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0176 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Cut and Paste: Collage and the Art of Sound" By Kevin Concannon.
Note: Continued from the preceding "page" as "WD_175".
The Influence of Pop Music on Fine Art:
A lot of visual artists who had seen their former classmates abandon their paintbrushes and chisels for the pop life thought they could have it both ways. As it turned out, they could. In 1967 Andy Warhol brought the 'total artwork' into the rock and roll era with his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a psychedelic spectacle that featured a light show and The Velvet Underground. Originally presented in the nightclub that he ran briefly, the Exploding Plastic- Inevitable went on the road. The Velvet Underground and Nico produced by Andy Warhol was released by Verve records that year and featured cover art by Warhol.
Meanwhile, in the world of 'serious' music, Steve Reich had begun his tape recorder experiments in 1965. It's Gonna Rain featured the voice of Brother Walter, a Pentecostal preacher whom Reich recorded on the streets of San Francisco. Reich created two identical tape loops of the preacher's sermon about the end of the world. The loops are played simultaneously and allowed to gradually shift out of phase with one another creating, as Reich calls it, ‘a controlled chaos.' Brian Eno, among others, has cited Reich as an inspiration for his own work with tape loops.
Throughout the 1960s, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs worked with tape recorders and scissors to create audio cut-ups. Burroughs cites the early Dada experiments of Tristan Tzara and others as influences on his tape recorder experiments along with the writing method of Gysin. Burroughs later came to exert a tremendous influence on rock musicians of the 1970s. Artists ranging from Patti Smith to David Bowie have acknowledged him as a source for their own work. The industrial band Throbbing Gristle released a collection of Burrough's cut-ups on their Industrial Records Label. The album was entitled Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1959-1980), (1981).
By the 1970s, performance art had experienced a tremendous growth. Laurie Anderson's first performance in 1972, Automotive, took place in Rochester, Vermont. It was a concert of automobile horns inspired, says the artist, by the local custom of blowing horns instead of applauding at local concerts. While its inspiration was apparently more contemporary, the piece reflects the aesthetic of Futurist performance in its use of 'noise.' Another precedent would be the Concert of the Factory Whistle (1922), in Baku, USSR.
By 1974 Anderson had begun to use pre-recorded elements in her performances. For Duets on Ice she wore ice skites embedded in blocks of ice. A hidden tape recorder played songs that she accompanied on violin. When the ice melted, the performance ended. Different performances featured cowboy songs and classical pieces by other performers who became unknowing 'collaborators.' In 1975 she invented her tape-bow violin, for which she wrote Ethics is the Esthetics of the Few-Ture (Lenin) and Song for Juanita. Lengths of magnetic tape with spoken texts on them replaced the horsehair of the violin bow; to the bridge of the violin, she attached a tape recorder play-back head wired to an amplifier. By moving the tape (bow) against the play-back head at different points along the tape, and by reversing the direction of tape travel, she manipulated the text. Song for Juanita is a particularly clever work. From the word Jaunita, she created a ‘triangaural translation.' As Anderson explains:
The first syllable Juan- or one- reverses as no, producing a rhythmic no-one-no-one; the last syllable -ta is variously ellided with -an to produce ata-nta ata nta (anata).
This song was performed in Paris, September 1977 and simultitneously translated into French. That is: no-per-one-sonne-etc. The Paris performance thus incorporated French, English and Spanish variations of the word Juanita or no-one. The English version appears on Airwaves anthology, published by One Ten Records in 1977.
The tape-bow violin works are not really songs in the popular sense. They are language pieces that extend the cut-up verse of the Dada and Futurist poets in a way that is much more sophisticated both semantically and technologically. However, that same year, Anderson created several pop-style records for her Jukebox installation. One of the songs, It's Not, the Bullet (A Reggae Tune for Chris Burden), was issued in a small edition. The title and the lyrics refer to Burden's performance, Shoot (1971), in which a marksman, standing five steps away, shot the artist in the arm. According to Janet Kardon, Anderson had originally intended to release the Jukebox songs as an album but decided against it being not fully satisfied with them.
Anderson's songs surfaced on two records in 1977: New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media and Airwaves. The former featured the works of women electronic composers including Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros and Megan Roberts; the latter included work by conceptual, performance and visual artists such is Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Jacki Apple, Meredith Monk and Richard Nonas. In 1981, Anderson's single 0 Superman reached number two on the British pop charts and she signed a record deal with Warner Brothers. The record had originally been released on the One Ten label. Concurrent with Anderson's successful cross-over from performance art venues to the pop charts, performance artists surfaced on several anthologies of recorded works by artists.
Revolutions Per Minute: The Art Record was issued by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1982. Chris Burden contributed a poem, The Atomic Alphabet; other artists’ contributions consist of spoken texts and documentary recordings of lectures and interviews. Les Levine contributed a country and western tune. Hannah Wilke's Stand Up is a feminist anthem. David Smyth orchestrated three typewriters for his piece, Typewriter in D.
Another important compilation, Live To Air: artists’ sound works, was edited by Bill Furlong and Michael Archer and published by Audio Arts in 1982. Included on these three cassette tapes are works by 45 artists categorized under the following headings: Rock Idioms, lmages and Narrative, Technological and Audial Space, and Urban Reference. This diverse and international collection featured artists such as Art & Language, Clive Robertson, Arleen Schloss, David Cunningham, Helen Chadwick and Stuart Brisley. Making reference to the space that the soundworks in this compilation occupy, Bill Furlong states in his introduction:
In many respects this audial/technological 'space' is parallel to the physical space of a gallery, yet extends it through the potential of widespread dissemination inherent in the multiple production of cassettes and through broadcasting.
In 1983, High Perfomance magazine issued its issue No. 23 as a two-album set, featuring songs by performance artists. Editor Linda Frye Burnham is represented with a blues song Downtown Blues. Jo Harvey Allen's Penitentiary of Jealousy would sound at home in a truck stop jukebox. Intermedia artist and radio producer Jacki Apple layers her own spoken text over music to create a poetic portrait of Idaho. She considers the recording studio and its technological instruments to be compositional tools.
Citing the growing number of performance artists who write and perform songs, editor Burnham states that "[f]rom talking to each of these artists, I have found that commercial success is among their goals, but not at the cost of compromise." At least one of the contributing artists, Terry Allen, had met with some success in the business when his New Delhi Freight Train was recorded by the rock group Little Feat in 1979. Allen recorded the song himself on his 1979 album Lubbock (on everything) (Fate Records). Like many of his tunes, New Delhi Freight Train is a pretty straightforward country and western song. A few poke fun at the art world, Truckload of Art is about an accident:
Yeah a truckload of art
Is burning on the highway
Precious objects are scattered
All over the ground
And it's a terrible sight
If a person were to see it
But there weren't nobody around
Following a long tradition of records as after-the-fact documentation of performance (that begins chronologically with Marinetti's recordings of his sound poems), The Uproar Tapes: Volume One, (Island Records, 1986) preserves works by Eric Bogosian, Ann Magnuson, David Cale, Ethyl Eichelberger, Richard Prince and Karen Finley. All of these works were creited for a live performance context. Ann Magnuson's piece, Made for Radio, stands out in that it is more than just a straight documentation of a live performance. For the recording Magnuson presents three of her radio-identified characters: Tiffany LaFox, talk show hostess/porn queen; Sister Alice Tully Hall, radio evangelist; and pop singer Fallopia, protege of Prince. The three characters are separated by the sound of a radio tuner scanning the airwaves, thus incorporating the 'interference between radio stations' that Marinelli suggested in his La Radia manifesto and that has been.used in commercial work for years.
Artsounds Collection (Philips/Polygram Records, 1986) was produced by Jeff and Juanita Gordon and contains songs, readings and interviews by and with artists. As with the earlier Revolutiuons Per Minute, this set was issued in two versions; standard editions including a poster and a deluxe limited edition with signed and numbered artist's prints. Highlights of Artsounds Collection include a Larry Rivers jazz track, a Jonathan Borofsky song with electronic score and a song by Michael Cotton and Prairie Prince of the rock band The Tubes. The decade of the 'cross-over artist' has apparently come full circle.
Many other visual artists have made records. Yves Klein issued a record in I959, Concert of Vacuum, which contained no sound at all, reinforcing his concept of the 'void.' In the 1960s and 1970s, a few recordings of sound sculptures were made to document that work; conceptual artists also employed phonograph records for documentary purposes during this period. Fluxus artist Yoko Ono has made several records in collaboration with John Lennon and solo recordings prior to and since Lennon's death. Her own recorded work has evolved from pre-Fluxus performance (in a 1961 performance of her AOS, for example, successively recording live sounds throughout her performance which were later played back as successive layers of audio tape, one over the other) to more commercial rock records such as the 1985 Starpeace that contains hard-rock and conventional ballads and her stunning 1995 Rising. Painter and musician A.R. Penck has recorded several albums of improvised jazz in recent years.
Artist Jonathan Borofsky has been using audio in his multimedia installations since 1983. In 1982 he began noticing that the sound energy that occurred naturally in his exhibitions gave the installations a special character. At the time, the energy emanated from the ping-pong tables that he frequently included in his shows or more precisely from the gallery visitors playing ping-pong - and from the enormous mechanized sculptures of Hammering Men. The whining of the Hammering Men's motors and the gasps and cries of the ping-pong players sparked Borofsky's interest in sound as yet another element of his multi-media installations. He soon began collaborating on sound works with New York musician, painter and filmmaker Ed Tomney.
A carnival-like atmosphere characterizes Borofsky's exhibitions. Paintings sing, sculptures sing, and Sounds of the World resonate throughout, catalogued one after the other on tape. Another tape-music piece that appears in Borofsky's shows, Music for Numbers, Computer and Voice (Reggie), was issued in cassette format by Reach Out International Records in 1987 (ROIR A-149) as Opus for Voice, Movements /, 2, 3, under the name The Radical Songbirds of Islam (Borofsky and Tomney). The piece is based on Borofsky's counting. He began counting from zero in 1969 and is up to over 3 million now. Tomney designed a computer program to translate the numbers that Borofsky sporadically gives him into a score constructed from a library of tones sung by Borofsky and stored on audiotape. The aleatory nature of the piece suggests the influence of composers ranging from Eno to Cage and the numbered balls of Duchamp, with which he composed his The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Erratum Musical.
A more recent cassette of Borofsky/Tomney music, with the working title Three Dogs in Your Helmut, combines a selection of real events, treated and re-configured into a new formal framework. They use both analogue (tape) and digital (microchip) samples of recorded sounds citing a distinct difference between the quality of reproduction, to weave together everything from guitar tracks to the sound of spilling pebbles:
It's rather like making a drawing or painting with which you start with no specific idea other than to begin to have fun with the brush or the colour and to just let it happen.
The pieces range from collages of' Voices to ‘instrumental’ tracks such as Low Level Run in which the sounds of jet engines and people yelling are panned across the stereo spectrum. This piece was inspired by the bombing of Tripoli. Foi- Hope in Chinese Means Forever a cheery melody is constructed with the sampled sounds of someone blowing into a bottle. In We, the only track that uses a first- person narrative, the singers, Borofsky / Tomney, are the 'dogs on the block. They 'see you leave and see you come home again.' Gurgling water is the only readily identified sound other than voices and much of the song's considerable charm lies in the instrumentation, that tugs at one's curiosity for an explanation. There's enough of the familiar and alien to create a world that is equally intriguing both sensually and intellectually. Using recorded sounds, distorted and manipulated with electronics, Borofsky and Tomney tread the thin line between 'accurate transcriptions of reality' and invention.
Jack Goldstein, known for his paintings of astral phenomena based on photographs, is another contemporary artist who makes records using sounds of the world. He made three series of them between 1976 and 1979 that were compiled from existing sound effects records and in some cases minimally altered. The first of the three suites of records were made in a seven-inch 45 RPM format on coloured vinyl. The titles and the vinyl colours reflected the sound effects contained on the records. The Dying Wind was pressed on clear vinyl, suggesting the ephemeral quality of the wind. The third series was pressed on ten-inch discs (a nonstandard format) of black vinyl with different coloured labels on each side. On one record the white label side contained the sound of an airpline landing, while the opposite, silver label side preserved the sounds of dropping bombs whistling to their destination but never making contact. Many of these records emphasize the 'framing' of sound in a manner analogous to photographic recording. The 'view' from the plane as the bombs drop is contrasted with the 'view' from the ground as the plane lands. In The Lost Ocean Liner from the first series, one side contains a 'close-up' of water lapping, while the other contains the 'distant' sounds of foghorns.
The Record as Secular Icon:
The increasing importance of records within popular culture has undoubtedly contriibuted to the interest that they have held for modern artists. They are, indeed, icons of the twentieth century, representing the pop stars that are worshipped. This is particularly true for the current generation of young artists so overtly influenced by the media.
At the beginning of the century, too, there was a considerable interest in records, if not fetishization of them. As early as 1925, artists developed an interest in records as objects, In 1922, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy advocated the use of phonograph records for purposes of production as well as reproduction. By this he meant that rather than simply using records to transcribe audio material from the 'real' world, they be manipulated manually to produce original as well as mimetic sounds. The following year, Moholy-Nagy elaborated on this proposal suggesting that conventional records be examined to determine went types of grooves make what types of sounds so that a phonetic groove-script alphabet could be established:
Since the grooves on the mechanically produced record are microscopic in size, we shall first have to devise a method for reducing by technological means down to the normal size of a present-day record any large-scale groove-script record that can be conveniently worked by hand. It would be desirable to make a photograph of a present-day (reproductive) record and to make a photo-cliché or photo-engraving of the photograph by zincographical or galvanoplastical process. Should such a record prove to be just more or less playable, the basis for subsequent work along these lines will be established.
By 1963, Czechoslovakian artist Milan Knizak had realized direct manipulation of records, but not quite as Moholy-Nagy had intended. Knizak created his Destroyed Music series by altering popular records: scratching, burning, cutting, gluing and applying adhesive tape to them. Some scratches created endless loops, with the stylis remaining stuck in one damaged groove. Other objects were reassembled from broken pieces of several different records. Knizak considers this work to be musical composition. They were intended to be played.
The idea of damaging records was manifested in a number of other works at this time, and continues today. New York artist Christian Marclay employs some of these same techniques to create his altered discs, but with more specific intention in terms of the resulting sound. In his performances, Marclay spins up to eight altered records simultaneously on individual turntables. He composes with several piles of records that he prepares and sorts in advance, thus knowing from what pile to select a disc for a desired effect at any time during the performance. The individual records are notated with stickers that identify specific passages and are sometimes applied to create loops. He drops the needle on to the record after the first of two stickers and when it hits the second it jumps back to the first and repeats. Sometimes the records are played at non-standard speeds. Into other records, he drills additional centre holes (off-axis), creating a wobbly effect. His Record Without a Cover is a recording of one of these performances. The studio performance is pressed onto one side of the disc. On the other, embossed lettering instructs the owner not to store the record in a protective sleeve. The scratches that result from handling enhance the quality of the sound and make each copy unique.
Marclay also makes unique objects, cutting intricate patterns out of several records with a jeweller's saw, he then glues the different pieces back together to construct a collaged disc, His Dialogue LP with Two Profiles, for example, fuses two profiles of faces cut from black vinyl spoken word discs onto an orange musical disc. As the record spins, music plays until the needle pops at the splice and a voice speaks when the needle passes over the black vinyl figure. The cycle then repeats, resulting in a conversation between the two figures. Other pieces use geometric designs and discs with different content. The splices in all of these records create pops that become rhythmic elements of the total piece.
San Fransisco performer Boyd Rice comes out of the punk movement of the late 1970s. Since 1977 he has released several altered recordings. Early pieces were made on tape, splicing pieces of different recordings together. One consists of every recording of Lesley Gore singing the word 'cry.' Later records utilized off-axis holes and instructed the listener to play 'at any speed.' Still other records include several sound-tracks of endless loops pressed deliberately into the record that endlessly repeat short sound effects. Listeners are encouraged to listen to these closed grooves as songs.
Boston composer Roger Miller (not the country and western singer) emerged from the new wave band, Mission of Burma. His Pop Record is an acetate pressing (used for test pressings of commercial records and not a stable enough process to withstand more than a few plays before deteriorating) on which he assembled the scratchy sounds from in-between songs of his favourite records. As the record of these 'pops' is played, new pops are quickly created. A protective cover becomes irrelevant because playing it actually destroys it. It is certainly not a pop record in the generally held sense of that term. As extreme as Miller's brand of pop seems to us today, it has its precedence in Marinetti's use of radio static in 1933.
The ideas in the air at the beginning of the century are still very much present in the work of many contemporary artists. Perfomance artists still use records to preserve their work. Pop artists have realized and extended the notion of concrete composition that Marinetti and his contemporaries began. In the streets of Baku, the cabarets of Zurich and Berlin and the auditoriums of Paris and Milan, artists of the early twentieth century turned music, as it had once been known, on its head. Speech became abstract and music became concrete. And today a generation of art students has seized that once sacred and magical phonograph record and profaned it to the point that the line between the fine art and popular practice of record-making is as tenuous as the grooves of Miller's record.
---------------------------------------------------
Kevin Concannon recently completed his PhD in Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, USA, where he teaches courses including History of Twentieth-Century Performace Art. This text was originaly published in Sound By Artists, ed. Dan Lander and Micah Lexier, Art Metropole, Toronto, and Walter Phillips Art Gallery, Alberta, 1990. It subsequently appeared, in slightly revised form, in UKS—Forum of Contemporary Art, No 1/2 (1999). Minor revisions have been made for this publication as well.
NOTES:
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' (1936) in Illuminations, edited and translated with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Benjamin briefly discusses phonograph records in this context and even writes about Marinetti and the Futurist aesthetic in his epilogue. While he does not discuss Marinetti's sound works, or any specific works, he characterizes Fururist work as fascist. 'All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.'
Many original recordings of Marinetti are in the Historical Recordings Collection at Yale University's Sterling Library. Some of Marinetti’s papers are also at Yale in the Beinecke Library. (The Getty Research Institute also has a selection of Marinetti’s papers.) His sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb, which was recorded in 1924 and again in 1935, is included in several recorded anthologies. The two major sources for the material are: Futurism (1978), EMI Italiana, Milan, 3 C 065-17982/A; and Musica Futurista (1980), Cramps Records Collana Multhipla, 5206 308/2, edited by Daniele Lombardi. (Since the original completion of this essay, several compact disc anthologies have been issued. Among the best are: Futurism and Dada Reviewed (1988), Sub Rosa, SUBCD012-19 and Futura Poesia Sonora (1989), Cramps Records/Milano, CRSCD 091-095.)
F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata. 'La Radia,’ in Teoria e Invenzione Futurista (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1968) pp. 176-180. Translated by Barbara Poggi and Douglas Kahn.
The translations of the sintesi are from the liner notes of Musica Futurista.
In a telephone conversation on 28 March 1988, Kirby also suggested that regardless of radio conventions of the time, Marinetti's political clout might have permitted him the indulgence of broadcasting these pieces. I have not personally been able to determine whether these pieces were ever broadcast or not. In Michael Kirby and Victoria Nes Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986) the matter is left unclear. It is, however, one of the few texts that deal with Futurist radio at all.
I have not been able to locate any primary sources to support the claim that Schwitters used this dubbing process. The information comes front Everett C. Frost’s 'Why Sound Art Works,' The Drama Review, volume 31, number 4 (T116), Winter 1987, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 109-124. Klaus Schöning’s talk was given at the International Congress on the Evolution of Broadcasting, October 1986, at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. Klaus Schöning remarked that Kurt Schwitters was the first to experiment with such manipulations—even before there was audiotape. In the days when recordings were made on wax cylinders, Schwitters dubbed the recording onto film and edited the film into an audio collage.
Quoted in Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1987), p. 151.
David Byrne,'Notes for On The Wall/On the Air M.I.T.' (1984), provided to the author for the exhibition On the Wall/On The Air: Artists Make Noise, Hayden Corridor Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, December 15, 1984 - January 27, 1985. Excerpts of this statement were originally published in the exhibition brochure (Committee on the Visual Arts, 1984).
Laurie Anderson liner notes for Airwaves (New York: One Ten Records, 1977).
Though the Beatles have always maintained that their cryptic message on 'Revolution Number 9' was unintentional, supposedly hidden messages were 'revealed' in dozens of popular records by disc jockeys across the globe soon after. Thus the idea of backward messages (to which Anderson's idea is formally related) had been in the air for a decade. In 1985, they received major attention again when Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Centre attempted to impose censorship on records that contained 'satanic messages.'
Janet Kardon, 'Laurie Anderson: A Synthesistic Journey' in Laurie Anderson: Works from 1969-1983, catalogue (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1983), p. 18.
Bill Furlong, introduction to ‘Live to Air: artists’ sound works,’ Audio Arts Magazine, Volume 5, No’s 3 & 4, London, 1982.
Linda Frye Burnham, liner notes for High Performance: The Record (Los Angeles: High Performance Records, 1983).
This differs in intention from Cage’s 4’33". Cage has stated that the ambient noise of the concert hall was part of this work. Klein intended a total silence—a void.
Sound sculptors such as Harry Partch, Harry Bertoia, and Jean Tinguely have released their own recordings. Others appear on anthologies. Conceptual artists on record include Lawrence Weiner, Bernar Venet, and Jan Dibbets. For further information on these and other recordings see Germano Celant’s The Record As Artwork: From Futurism to Conceptual Art, exhibition catalogue (Fort Worth: The Firt Worth Museum of Art, 1977).
Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By her Bachelors, Even, Erratum Musical is a system for creating a composition. It is described by Petr Kotik in the liner notes of Multhipla Record's The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp (1976):
It requires:
1. a funnel
2. a toy train with open cars (without locomotive)
3. ball, to be put into the funnel
Each ball bears a number which represents one note on a chosen instrument. The balls fall through the funnel into the cars as they pass underneath. Then, the balls are taken out of the cars and the numbers are transformed into notes (each number representing one note).
This and other comments attributed to Borofsky are from a telephone interview in July 1986. Two Dogs in Your Helmut was originally scheduled to be released at that time.
Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, ‘Production—Reproduction,’ DeStijl, number 7, 1922, pp. 97-101. Translated and reprinted in Krisztina Passuth’s Maholy-Nagy (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985).
Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, ‘New Form in Music: Potentialities of the Phonograph,’ Der Sturm, number 14, Berlin, July 1923. Translated and reprinted in Krisztina Passuth’s Maholy-Nagy (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985).
-Kevin Concannon/ www.localmotives.com/hoved/tema/nr_2/cut.html
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