Boring Like A Drill.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Wolf’s composition 100,000,000,000,000 Pieces for Clarinet and my anxiety over the use of multiples in my own work.

One of the few things I remember about Wittgenstein: “It is questionable if when he died he had ever come to any understanding of the number 2. Two what? Two things would have to be identical, which is absurd if identity has any meaning.”

Something else that sticks in my head: the criticism that the sole distinguishing, even redeeming, feature of the architecture of the World Trade Center towers was that there were two of them. This is where I start to worry about my own stuff. Do I make multiples of things because I think that each individual element is inadequate as a work of art or music in itself?

Write a short, dull, awkward chorale for piano and it’s no big deal. Preface it with the instruction to repeat it 840 times and you become a musical visionary. Make a small, nondescript object and (probably) no-one bothers with a second look. Turn out thousands of identical objects and fill the Turbine Hall and you pull 4.7 million visitors per year.

I will take as a given that I produce substandard music and art. Does this inadequacy at least partly reside in the reliance on duplication, repetition and scale to add the semblance of artistic distinctiveness? I suppose I would rather believe that I am using “the work” as mere material, a vehicle in which to convey the true artistic substance, which somehow emerges from the sense of difference, repetition, scale and duration.

There is a species of art whose meaning and effect is that it is. The use of multiples is one of the clearest ways of making this point: they raise the question of their own existence and leave the speculation to the audience, while the more fundamental dimensions of time and space do the real work on the darker recesses of consciousness.

As for making them, it’s best to plough ahead through the process as something that needs to be done, because the outcome cannot be imagined. This is why I’ve started work on writing out neat versions of 2000 Guitar Solos again.

Further re-reading (for self): Konrad Bayer, “The Mosaic through the Centuries”.

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79% of those interviewed agreed that Britain has become a ‘surveillance society’ (51% were unhappy with this).

YouGov / Daily Telegraph poll, 4 December 2006.

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I finally had a C-type print made from one of my photos. There was an old picture frame left by the previous tenants, which was doing nothing except housing a rather grubby Fidel Castro calendar for 1997. It had to go.

The trouble is that I’m so pleased with it I want to make another variation and get it printed, too.

This is going to mean finding another frame exactly the same shape and style, or starting all over with two matching frames. I spent months getting round to this and I still think I rushed it.

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Just a quick update to say that I AM THE PRESIDENT OF CAPITALISTS INC. now has a proper page of its own on the website. An update with the thrilling sequel to this historical non-re-enactment will be coming as soon as I get my hands on a decent slide scanner.

Also, you can now hear for yourself This Is All I Need, my contribution to the Interior Design: Music for the Bionic Ear project. This was the concert of new music made especially for listeners with cochlear implants, who can understand speech really well but have a hard time making sense out of music. People without technological augmentation can enjoy it just as much. I’ve gone into some detail about the project and the thinking behind the music.

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I’m off for the boat train to Belfast tomorrow for Sonorities 2013 at Queen’s University. I’ve prepared a new mix of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue to present at the Sonic Lab on Thursday, 25 April.

In the meantime, I’ve received a new toy in the mail, delivered in an oversized, passive-aggressive box with a warning label defying me to bend it.

I was so excited with my new mini recorder I left it out on the window while still plugged into the speakers and turned it up a little too loud. Please enjoy this video I made by accident.

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In a couple of weeks’ time I’ll be in Belfast for Sonorities 2013, presenting a new audiotheque mix of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue.

This is a piece which has been developing for over 15 years now. It started as a pair of field recordings, documenting walks through the city of Melbourne. These recordings were played simultaneously into a third space, Bill Fontana style, as a sound element in my first visual art exhibition. In turn, these sounds were used as raw material to be digitally manipulated, according to a set of instructions obtained from a new interpretation of the maps that determined the route of the original walks. This digitally-transformed version was used in a later exhibition.

I’ve presented later re-interpretations of this material, with subsequent additions and subtractions, but it’s been a number of years since I last worked with field recordings or audio documentation. I’m looking forward to the trip to Belfast as a starting point for resuming this activity.

The theme for Sonorities this year is “beyond soundscape”, so it seems like an appropriate venue for my approach to soundscape work. Third City: Walking on Red and Blue presents two types of artificiality, or synthesis, in its soundscape. The first is through the conflation of two locations into one; the second is through the intermingling of digitally-processed and unaltered sounds. On first hearing, the listener can distinguish certain ‘landmarks’ as belonging to one realm or the other, while other details remain disorientating or misleading.

A bit more about the history of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue is on the main web site. The new remix will be in the Sonic Lab, Queen’s University, Belfast on Thursday 25 April, starting at noon.

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I’ve spent a couple of rootless months while finding a new permanent home in London, hence the lack of updates to the blog and the website. Some major bits of news will be going up over the Easter break, both about my own work and other people’s stuff I’ve seen. In particular, I need to set down my experiences from a couple of weeks ago, when I had the privilege of meeting R. Andrew Lee and hearing him give a spellbinding performance of Dennis Johnson’s incredible piece November.

In the meantime please enjoy some more blurry photographs of Berlin.

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I was going to say ‘disinterestedly’ but that’s too self-aggrandising. ‘Distractedly’ is probably more apt. Write a sentence, pace around the house. Look up a reference, end up rereading half of Vainglory. As I think I’ve mentioned before, figuring out all the details is OK, but the execution is where I start to lose interest. Once I see it’s going to do what I hoped for, I get sidetracked again and start working on something else.

After that, work progresses in infrequent dribs and drabs. Even trivial pieces can have a longer gestation period than Ulysses. There’s no sense of anticipation when a piece is nearing completion, either to hasten or delay the end. The work continues indifferently, in small increments until, quite unexpectedly, there’s no more to do. Like absent-mindedly munching on crisps until you dip your hand in one more time and realise you’ve finished the bag. You weren’t even all that hungry.

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This is the fourth version of this painting I’ve made and I’m starting to get the hang of it. The process is more efficient, I’m getting better control of the colour, and doing just enough to completely obscure the original cover art. I always wanted a series, to show up differences created by human fallibility and indiscriminate entropy.

The bottom right image above shows the “finished” painting, although it won’t be complete until it has been sufficiently “matured”. The first one I painted is starting to wear out nicely.

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“Would you like to join a society called Capitalists Inc.? (Just so no one would think we were Communists.) Anyone joining automatically becomes president. To join you must show you’ve destroyed at least one hundred records…”

— John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1949.

It’s John Cage’s 100th birthday today, and like everyone else I think I’m the only person who gets what Cage was really about and it just happens to align exactly with my own way of thinking.

I can’t remember if it was Cage himself or someone he was quoting who made the Sphinx-like statement that the opposite of every idea is another good idea. For all my infatuation with Cage’s music, I still like to take the kill-the-Buddha approach to his ideas and see what happens when they are deliberately opposed or misinterpreted.

I Am The President Of Capitalists Inc. was a performance and art exhibition I made in 2003. Its premise was to misunderstand Cage’s intellectual teasing quoted above and interpret it as a literal instruction for some sort of expressionist, confrontational, bourgeoisie-titillating aktion – all of which are opposed to Cage’s aesthetics.

To add insult to injury, my performance was conducted with the air of a re-enactment of a once-vital artistic statement which has since been embraced by the regime it once opposed and stripped of all subversive potency.

The golf club was a last minute idea, as I found it in a cupboard in a back room of the gallery. I now understand why golfers wear gloves.

Once all the records were smashed, I handed out business cards commemorating my new status. The room was left in that state for the rest of the exhibition: broken records, beer bottles and sundry detritus. A television was placed in the back corner playing the video of the performance, with the screen angled away so punters had to walk over the pile of rubbish to see what was going on.

During the exhibition some unexpected events took place in that room, but I’ll save that for another time, soon.

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I guess everyone has got a story in their head about how and why they came to hold their present aesthetic and cultural values. When Robert Hughes died last week it reminded me that my own formative experience was when I was a little kid and happened to see an early episode of The Shock of the New. I was sufficiently absorbed by it that my parents let me stay up late once each week to watch the rest of the series.

I’ve never owned a copy of the book or rewatched the series on video; in fact I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen the first episode or two. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the images and ideas from that show were imprinted in my memory, and formed the mould into which all my subsequent thinking about art have been poured.

Up until then, my understanding of art was no deeper than the popular caricature of High Culture. I wondered why every artist seemed to be dead. My folks had a Time-Life book of Great Artists I’d flip through, which had Picasso, Matisse and Chagall in it, but I couldn’t understand why their paintings were weird and kind of ugly. When Robert Hughes talked about Dada, I suddenly found a type of modern art where I “got” what they were saying about the world. It had a point which seemed clear but which couldn’t easily be put into words – and that’s how I learned what art was about.

Similar formative experiences came later in my mid-teens, but then I was on the lookout for equivalent models of modernity in music and literature. My parents had another series of books about artists which ended with Duchamp, so that became my supplement guidebook to what I’d seen on TV. In writing, I read a bit of Pound and Eliot in school and then searched out more for myself, finding Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, which opened up an entire alternative history of twentieth-century culture. Almost by coincidence, I got hold of Guy Davenport’s essays in The Geography of the Imagination, which set out a wider set of orientation points for modern writing and beyond. In one essay he observes that “all true education is unconscious seduction.”

I was looking around for “strange” music and picked up all sorts of odds and ends. The minimalists provided the most apparent style from outside the conventional tradition, but the real educational experience came from a series of radio programmes Edward Cowie made for the ABC, called Towards New Music. Later episodes focused on particular themes or composers, including one dedicated to John Cage and like-minded artists. At that time Cage was a person I’d heard of without really knowing anything about him other than that he seemed guaranteed to be fascinating. He was, and as a bonus Cowie played a few minutes of Paragraph 7 from Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning.

It was the first episodes, however, that got me hooked. Cowie attempted to start from first principles, discussing the nature and purpose of sound-making with an improvising orchestra of kindergarten kids, and critiquing how we are educated and socialised into a culture of music. It probably helped that Cowie is a painter as well as composer, allowing him to see a wider range of issues than the technical debates that clutter up too many histories of music.

However much I may have loved playing music, listening to it, reading or whatever, what truly caught up my imagination was these histories, showing how and why we had come to be doing what we do now, and how much more it is possible to do.

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So what happened to that painting?

I finally added a (the) second colour. It didn’t go so well. Remedial steps were needed.

A few extra coats and things were about as good as they’d ever be.

Now comes the final step. I’ll just stick this under here.

It’ll have to age for a while down there. I’m not sure how long, but at least a few weeks. In the meantime I’ve started another two paintings, same as before… only better!

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