Douglas Gordon’s TV Installation at SFMOMA (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The title to Douglas Gordon‘s exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now — could mistakenly give the impression that it’s a single compression, a montage, of elements of various moving-image works by various creators from the past five years.

In fact, the works in question are all Gordon’s own, and they’re displayed (as shown, above, in an image from the sfmoma.org website’s exhibition page), not as a constant stream but as an installation, a darkened and nearly silent room full of monitors of varying sizes, some equipped with headphones.

Of course, a sizable percentage of Gordon’s work is built from elements of pre-existing films, like the one where he sets two copies of the famous “You talkin’ to me” scene from Taxi Driver beside each other as mirror images, so it appears that Robert De Niro (as Travis Bickle) is talking to himself, not that he wasn’t already.

But Gordon’s film memory reaches much further back than 1992, deep into the film noir of the 1940s. And the audio part of the audio-visual pairing plays a substantial role in his work, which is why much of his productivity overlaps with sound art. Music and sound are often on his mind, as many of the works in the exhibit evidence, the following in particular. Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now runs Saturday, October 27, 2007, through Sunday, February 24, 2008.

  • “Feature Film” (1999): This is, for me, having just visited SFMOMA this holiday weekend, the highlight of the Douglas Gordon show. The soundtrack to the piece is Bernard Herrmann’s score to the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo, but the image is not of the film itself. It’s a carefully edited series of close-ups of the hands and face of James Conlon as he conducts the score — thus, we hear the music that accompanies tensions with which we are all familiar, but the images are entirely removed from any sense of horror. That the Conlon clips match the familiar music so well further removes the score from its original context. The work finds a strong corollary in Manon de Boer’s Bartók video, “Perfect Sound” (2006), currently at P.S.1 in Queens, and which I wrote about earlier this week (disquiet.com). In “Perfect Sound,” we hear a violinist playing a Bartók piece, but only the video clip of the performance divulges that the recording was, in fact, stitched together from several run-throughs. Much video art takes the sound component for granted. Both “Feature Film” and “Perfect Sound” take it as their subject.
  • “Bootleg (Big Mouth)” (1995): This consists of slowed-down concert footage of the Smiths, silent. It complements Gordon’s “Feature Film” by focusing the audience on half of the original; pop stars rendered mute often look like they’re in intense pain.
  • “Bootleg (Cramped)” (1996): Slowed-down concert footage of the Cramps, silent.
  • “Bootleg (Stoned)” (1996): Slowed-down concert footage of the Rolling Stones, silent.
  • “24 hour Psycho” (1993): Gordon has slowed down the 110-minute film until it takes a little over 24 hours to play in full. It brings to mind Andy Warhol’s 1964 eight-hour film Empire State Building (footage of which serves as raw material for another Gordon work on display here), and also recent slowed-down performance pieces, such as Leif Inge’s “9 Beet Stretch,” which stretches Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 until it takes a full day to hear in its entirety.
  • “Douglas Gordon Sings ‘The Best of Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground’ (for Bas Jan Ader)'” (1993) — similar to the Phil Collins’s work “The World Won’t Listen” (2005), in which people in Turkey are heard singing along with recordings of the Smiths, a parallel emphasized by the “Bootleg (Big Mouth)” mentioned above. The Bas Jan Ader of the title is an early Dutch conceptual artist.
  • “Remote Viewing 13.05.94 (Horror Movie)” (1995): The background of a brief scene from the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven has been separated from its original context and set on loop. The image is of a row boat afloat in a river; the sound is reportedly of radio static. For some reason, despite the role of sound in this piece, the monitor at SFMOMA was not equipped with headphones.

Quote of the Week: Throbbing Matmos

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From Matmos member Drew Daniel‘s book-length study of the Throbbing Gristle album 20 Jazz Funk Greats, as excerpted on the blog/website of its publisher, 33 1/3, 33third.blogspot.com. He is describing the song “Still Walking”:

It is dominated by a drum machine pattern snarled into a textural traffic jam by Chris Carter’s Gristle-izer. The rhythm evokes a martial polka, but doubles back upon itself at odd times, suggesting dancefloor mutiny, or ischemic distress. The pronounced flanging makes the snare runs cast metallic, distorted, shadows across the beat. Reinforcing this sense of processing run amok, numerous elements in the mix are run through constant panning, modeling the titular walk as a nervous, side-to-side hopscotch across the stereo field. Inside this pattern-prison, Cosey’s guitar-through-processing and Gen’s violin-through-processing surface as the sonic main characters still walking through the halls of flanged rhythm in search of escape.

According to amazon.com, the book is due out December 15.

The Heavy Metal Music of Traffic

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Despite having walked by this poem engraved in polished stone hundreds upon hundreds of times, I never read it until recently, and therefore had never noticed its reference to the musical quality of traffic noise.

It appears facing Mission Street in San Francisco, between 3rd Street and 4th Street, right near the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The text is described as a “Group Poem in Honor of Yerba Buena Gardens.” That public park sits directly behind the stone wall. The poem is credited to “TODCO Creative Writing Class, 1992.” TODCO is the Tenants and Owners Development Corporation.

Bill Fontana Sound Art Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Other Minds foundation continues to upload to archive.org, the Internet Archive, an incredible recorded history of contemporary music, most recent among the uploads an interview, along with musical examples, with Bill Fontana, one of the original sound artists. The sounds in the pieces he discusses were sourced from, among other natural and man-made resources, the Danube and a selection of songbirds.

Says Fontana, “What I’ve been interested in with sound recording is as much the way a photographer might try to render visual form with a camera, I’ve been trying to notate or render musical form with a tape recorder.”

The interview dates from 1990 and was conducted by OM head Charles Amirkhanian for the KPFA radio station (MP3). More info at archive.org and Fontana’s homepage, resoundings.org.

Hansen and Rubin’s “Moveable Type” at New York Times (NYC)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Heading across Manhattan via Times Square on Tuesday earlier this week, I took a shortcut through the brand new building that houses the New York Times, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. According to the building’s website (yes, the building has a website: newyorktimesbuilding.com), it had officially opened for business just the day before.

In one hallway-like space of the Times’s public lobby there has been installed a multimedia spectacle by statistician Mark Hansen and artist Ben Rubin, the same duo who created the work “Listening Post,”which has gotten several mentions here (disquiet.com). Like “Listening Post,”this piece plucks data live from the Internet and displays it (thanks to a variety of artful algorithms) on a suspended, panoramic grid of small LED-style displays.

Whereas “Post”was a single grid, this new work consists of two facing grids, one on each wall; and whereas the former pulled information from the Internet at large, the latter restricts itself to time-sensitive material from the New York Times itself. The Times-commissioned piece is titled “Moveable Type,”after an earlier revolution in information technology.

As I approached “Moveable Type”from the east side of the corridor, it seemed that it had stopped mid-process. On the far side of the corridor I saw Rubin, who explained apologetically that the piece had been put on pause that afternoon to allow for some photography. While the photographer set up his equipment, Rubin introduced me to Hansen. He also explained some details about both “Post”and “Type.”In addition to the small but visible speakers in both works, there are tiny speakers embedded in the rear of each individual screen — and it is those speakers, not the screens themselves, that emit the little clicking sound that accompanies any change in what text is displayed.

Those sonic punctuations are an essential part of how the flow of data in “Listening Post”is impressed upon the work’s audience. Since “Type”was on pause, I couldn’t listen to the piece myself. I did ask Rubin if it’s the case, as a recent story in the Times seemed to state (nytimes.com), that the sounds in “Moveable Type”were limited to ones that suggested a vast pool of typewriters. I asked because part of the appeal of “Listening Post” is its melodic component, an entirely hummable underlay of synthetic tones. I wondered if the public setting of “Moveable Type” might have required — or even introduced the idea of — reducing the aural component.

First he clarified that despite evident structural similarities between the two works, “Post”and “Type”are significantly different from each other. He then explained that there are, in fact, additional, if subtle, other sound elements in “Type.”I hope to visit again in the near future.