Insight on feedback by Robert J. Shiller:
even when feedback mechanisms are straightforward, they can produce very strange outcomes, not predictable very far into the future, as the modern mathematics of chaos theory can attest.
He’s writing not about sound but about economic data, in his New York Times piece “An Echo Chamber of Boom and Bust” (nytimes.com, August 29, 2009).
The Christian Marclay installation currently at the MOCA in Los Angeles is 16 generic, black monitors set in a circle; each monitor on a pedestal; each pedestal a tall, stark white box. On each monitor, one of 16 different videos displays human hands in white gloves investigating different objects, and the audio for each video is a likewise pristine, no-background-noise document of the object — as it is shaken, or rubbed against something, or banged.
Many of these are common household items, like a travel toothbrush (see image below), its little clear case knocked and brushed, making tiny noises as a result. There’s also a bright green hanging house plant, its leaves ever so slightly rustling. Some of the items are inherently musical, like a spinning noisemaker, and a child’s xylophone. Some or associatively so, like a sealed copy of a Yoko Ono vinyl LP, its plastic covering emanating that once common soft-yet-proscriptive flutter.
If the individual investigations are routinized and hermetic, the overall effect — should one stand in the center of the speakers — is of some catalog cacophony. It brought to mind, more than anything else, the installation in late 2007 and early 2008 at PS1 in Queens, New York, of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a 15-hour film that was divided into 14 parts, each shown in a separate makeshift room, the rooms standalone (almost outhouse-like) structures set in a circle. In each room, you could watch an individual segment, or you could stand in the center of the rooms (an interesting variation on the more common “center of the room”), and be immersed in the sonic simultaneity.
As one friend who visited the Marclay exhibit with me two weekends back put it, the collection of videos look like alien surveillance of domestic life on this planet. The piece is titled “Shake Rattle and Roll (Fluxmix)” (2004).
More at moca.org (the Grand Avenue MOCA), where it is part of the exhibit Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, which is scheduled to run from July 12 through October 19.
“Once you plug in the microphone, it’s all electronic music.” That’s something Bill Bruford once said. Bruford was one of the first musicians I ever interviewed, and he said it to me. I was in college at the time, and he was touring with Earthworks, his then fairly new and plugged-in jazz ensemble that had world-music flourishes, an interest in minimalist patterning, and a solid sense of swing. Around then, the emergence of Wynton Marsalis and his staunch if inspired jazz traditionalism had drawn a firm line in the sand, and that line appeared ’round about when Miles Davis had first plugged in.
I was doing a radio show at WYBC when Bruford came through town, and I had been watching the jazz culture war unfold in the liner notes to the record albums that arrived weekly at the station, like missives from the front line (it was especially informative to watch Stanley Crouch go from maverick of the avant-garde to defender of the faith). I had asked Bruford, during the interview, what it meant to play jazz with electric instruments, but mostly what I wanted to do was talk about his work with the band King Crimson, in which he’d been a drummer on some of their best albums, notably Discipline. Drop the swing for the moment, and it’s clear that the work achieved by him and his rhythm-section partner in King Crimson, Tony Levin (on bass and Chapman stick), was clearly the root from which Earthworks was beginning to grow.
Over at the Crimson-and-related website dgmlive.com, a studio recording (circa 1982) has been posted of an early take on what, as the entry notes, would become “Waiting Man,” the track that closed the first side of Discipline‘s follow-up, Beat (this was the age of the vinyl LP). It’s an intricate, pattern-rich jam featuring just Bruford and Levin (none of the dual guitars of their Crimson partners, Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp, the early live-looping progenitor). And it’s very much an adoption of minimalism by a rock ensemble (MP3), just as the Who had done with Terry Riley decades earlier, and Tortoise would do with Steve Reich a decade later.
The DGMLive site only keeps those MP3s posted briefly, so get it while you can. It’s brief, but it’s a splendid snapshot of a formative in-studio work-in-progress.
There’s currently a video installation at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue that is impossibly long. In purely practical terms, it is too long to watch in one sitting. Why? At 10 hours and 13 minutes, the video’s running time is simply longer than the museum, better known as MOCA, is open for on any given day of the week. The video cannot be watched in one setting, even if you have the Zen patience and intestinal fortitude required to sit still for close to half a day (unless, of course, a la the late film director John Hughes’s underrated Some Kind of Wonderful, you consider breaking into museums after hours).
The work is “Beijing: Chang’an Boulevard” (2004), by prolific Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. It is a single video monitor showing 10-plus hours of footage of street corners. The scenes (see photo above, which shows a sample image as displayed currently at MOCA) are each extended mundane shots: slowly moving images of everyday settings, meandering individuals set side by side with arrays of motorcycles, the occasional car passing by, life passing by.
Both combined and separately, the audio and video in “Beijing: Chang’an Boulevard” document the everyday — an everyday that for many visitors to MOCA, including me two weeks ago, is utterly foreign and eye-glazing-overly familiar. The audio is an intentional field recording of the quotidian, and the resulting soundtrack is a mix of common automobile rattlings and exotic mechanical parallels — at least as exotic as an unfamiliar motorcycle or utility vehicle can be.
The soundtrack also provides an unintended score to a neighboring piece, Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi‘s “Hotbed (LA)” (2007), which is shown in the same room. It’s a large grid of stacks of 8.5″x11″ pieces of white paper, the topmost of which is a carefully cut abstract architectural construct, one that, in its proximity to the Weiwei’s urban soundscape, is granted even greater real-city verisimilitude than it might have had otherwise. Turn your head from the Weiwei and toward the Maggi, and the sounds of urban life can easily be transposed to the stark, Tron/THX-1138-like spaces of Maggi’s stark, white geometry. (The Maggi piece previously appeared in the MOCA show Poetics of the Handmade in 2007. There’s an image of it at moca.org.)
For more on the Weiwei piece, check out two articles by the Los Angeles Times’s David Ng, one from 2007, when “Chang’an Boulevard” was part of the exhibit Chinese Video: Chord Changes in the Megalopolis at the Morono Kiang Gallery in L.A. (latimes.com), and one from earlier this year (latimes.com). In an interview with Ng, Weiwei confesses that he himself falls short of the demands of the video’s length: “I don’t care if people watch it all the way through. I can’t even watch it after I’ve edited it. I don’t make videos for galleries or museums. Not even for people to look at. I make it for the dignity of the work itself.”
The Weiwei and the Maggi pieces are both part of the current MOCA exhibit Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, which is scheduled to run from July 12 through October 19. More at moca.org.
