PhD Thesis - Folio of Compositions with Commentary

Chapter 5 Meme
by Robert Davidson

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With a group of artists representing visual arts, dance, drama and pop music, I founded a cross-artform collective entitled Meme [1] in 1997.  The group [2] collaborated on three projects over a period of sixteen months, each project taking its starting point from a revisiting of art movements of the 1960s.  Part of the approach was an embodiment of our concept of "derrière-garde" art - a nostalgic way of treating the avant-garde of the 1960s as heritage, from a fin de siecle perspective.  As a group of artists we attempted to re-enter the mental space which holds innovation as the primary concern, but with the irony that in today's intellectual climate, this very attitude is far from being innovative by sheer virtue of its age.  We were interested in the disposability of "cutting edge" art, and in questions of how the 1960s interest in formal innovation interacted with other concepts embraced in the period, such as planned obsolescence and consumerism.  We were also interested in reviving forgotten work that we saw as valuable, and in developing paths that often were left off in the rush for innovation.  Finally, we wished to reinterpret the ideas in a contemporary context.

Flux Concert, the first of the projects, took us into the territory of the Fluxus movement.  It was fortuitous that during our preparation the Queensland Art Gallery was planning a major exhibition of Fluxus works, placed in the gallery by the movement's biggest patron and collector, Francesco Conz.  The exhibition, Francesco Conz and the Intermedia Avant-Garde [3] , brought several central members of the movement to Brisbane [4] , and ignited a general fad for all things Fluxus.  In addition to a performance at the exhibition with my ensemble Topology, I produced with Meme a sold-out evening performance [5] that included classic Fluxus works and a number of original works.  Formal concert dress (tails, black evening gowns) signalled that we were treating Fluxus works as we would treat a Beethoven symphony. [6]

In Machines, Processes, Transmissions, we turned our attention to the early minimalist body of work, particularly process art.  Taking the form of an art exhibition with integrated performances, [7] the project used a curious mixture of old and new technology.   Technology shares with "cutting edge" art the strong possibility of obsolescence.  The nostalgic use of record players, reel-to-reel tape recorders, super-8 film, old X-ray machines, audiocassette players and thirty-year-old hi-fi systems is analogous to the use of thirty-year-old ideas as raw material.  Running through the work are themes of decay, cyclical degradation, feedback loops, mutation and evolution through strict, mechanical process, but with glitches in the technology opening up windows of surprise and transformation.

The Situationists provided the starting point for the third project, Situation and Place, [8] which was a series of performances and installations in the Brisbane CBD, [9] exploring the urban environment as the source of pervasive aesthetic experience.

My own works in the three projects have interesting links to the notated compositions included in the folio.  Each work tends to limit itself to a small number of ideas in order to explore them rigorously, in a similar approach to that of works such as David, Spin and Peel.  I prepared myself for the Flux Concert by immersing myself in Fluxus literature, added to many years of acquaintance with the work, and wrote in what I imagined to be a Fluxus tradition.  Since my own language has been greatly assisted by the traditions of minimalism, it was beneficial to trace the roots of that movement back to Fluxus.

The Flux Concert works take the form of prose instructions for performance, in the manner of early works of the Fluxus movement.  Each of the works involves gradual, rigorous transformations of material and a tendency to throw attention on aspects of physical endurance or challenge.  The latter focus came about from contemplating the popular attraction of spectator sports, and concluding that audience awareness of a performer's physical challenge results in a gripping performance.

In Study no. 1, the prose is as follows:

Play a loud electric guitar with a hacksaw.  The piece ends when the strings have all broken.

The resulting sound in performance is a highly abrasive, grating sound, heavily amplifying the sound of the saw meeting the steel strings - it is a sound I find highly attractive for its raw physicality.  The sound abruptly changes when each string breaks; the piece is a study in timbral change in six sections (one for each string).

Similarly timbre-focussed (when considered from a sound aspect) is Wind Sonata:

Insert a balloon into the lowest joint of a clarinet.  Play the lowest pitch, thereby inflating the balloon until it bursts.

Figure 5-1 Wind Sonata performed by Robert Davidson, Flux Concert

The low-pitched drone starts clearly and boldly, but becomes increasingly strained as the performer's lung capacity is challenged, and the air pressure from the inflated balloon pushes air back into the instrument.  The tone quality is also markedly affected by the changing size of the balloon, which acts as an acoustic resonator with a widely varying spectral profile.  The performer's obvious struggle against increasingly difficult constraints is very effective dramatically, as is the eventual resolution (both timbrally and physically) when the balloon loudly bursts.  Clearly an exercise in intermedia, the work displays properties of sculpture, theatre, poetry, music and sport without being obviously restricted to any of these media. 

Theatricality is essential to Sonata, which is another study in gradual change:

A violinist and pianist perform Dvorak's Humoresque.  Using bandages, gaffer tape and rope, two other performers gradually bind the fingers, hands, limbs and eyes of the violinist and pianist, eventually tying their bodies to the instruments.  Throughout this process, the violinist and pianist continue the Humoresque as accurately as they can.

When listened to as music, the sound is transformed, via gradual "degradation" of intonation, tone quality and rhythmic accuracy, from conventionally beautiful violin and piano playing to harsh scratching and bumping sounds.  In performances by Topology, the violinist and pianist are women and the agents of bondage are men, charging the performance with obvious sexual-politics commentary.

A number of other works, including Study no. 2 and Study no. 3, concern themselves with physical challenge.

A percussionist plays a difficult piece using vibraphone and xylophone.  Two other performers gradually move the two instruments apart while the percussionist attempts to perform the piece as accurately as possible.

 A pianist attaches metre-long sticks to her fingers and attempts to play a difficult piece using the ends of the sticks in place of her fingertips to play the keys.

In Cycle, I turned to the attractive time and sound structure of a washing machine's full washing cycle.  For a performance of Cycle, a washing machine is brought on stage.  As it washes the socks of most audience members, musicians play phrases they hear in the gently repetitive, always changing sounds of the machine.  At evenly-spaced intervals, the machine suddenly changes its sound as it abruptly moves into the next stage of its washing cycle.  The combination of gradual and abrupt change is, to my ears, very pleasing.  The performance highlights and "frames" this unintentional musical structure, and uses it as a basis for highly disciplined listening and playing, taking from Fluxus the enjoyment of focused, concentrated action.

In Machines, Processes, Transmissions, the emphasis was on similar attitudes towards process, and on attempts to freeze time.  Thus a polyrhythmic ratio is captured in a "timeless" sculptural form in 2:3:5:7:11, which consists of a bicycle wheel, mounted on a wall. [10]   Upon the wheel are mounted small bolts, arranged on the rim in the prime-number ratios described in the title, and differentiated from each other by slight changes in the bolts' height.  One bolt represents the "downbeat" of the cycle, where all of the subdivisions meet.  Opposite this bolt is another bolt, dividing the circle into two.  Two other bolts complete a division into three, and so on with divisions of five, seven and eleven.  A small metal tongue is placed on the mounting so that each bolt produces a clicking sound when the wheel is spun, realising the ratio in sound and time.  The resulting sound is a palindromic rhythmic pattern, and also (theoretically) a very low-pitched five-note chord drawn from the harmonic series.

Figure 5-2 2:3:5:7:11

Figure 5-3 Underlying chord of 2:3:5:7:11

The concept of sound and time being frozen in a physical form is also embraced in Still Life, a rearrangement of Jon Hassell's 1969 work Map [11] .  In Still Life, a portable cassette player is mounted on a pedestal; the machine has been altered so that its playback head is extended on a long wire out of its normal position.  On neighbouring pedestals sit three framed boards upon which have been glued numerous lengths of audiocassette tape, covering 30 cm square, and resembling monochrome paintings.  Each "picture" is composed of different types of recordings - on one is a series of "breakbeats", [12] on another is sustained instrumental pitches, and on a third is speech.  The three represent rhythm, pitch and text as three basic components of music; they also represent the sorts of recordings that I found to be effective for performance with the hand-held playback head.  A large range of sounds are possible with different playing techniques, which include playing "with the grain", or along the tape lengths in their original direction, playing "across the grain", playing backwards, in circles and in a range of other shapes, and playing with different speeds of movement.  These approaches were combined in several performances during the exhibition.

Figure 5-4 Still Life

Figure 5-5 Still Life showing playing technique

 Time is altered in a different way in Running Down, in which two loops, one of audiotape and one of film, are in constant transformation.  Both loops are assembled to run through geometrically placed skewers in the wall, and both continually deteriorate by passing over a small piece of sandpaper, resulting in small changes with every repetition.  Over the period of one and a half weeks, the film [13] becomes so heavily scratched that the projection consists of vertical lines slowly moving from side to side with streaks of colour.  The audiotape, originally a high quality recording of a seven-second excerpt from the first movement of Brahms' Piano Trio in A minor, is greatly stretched and dulled over the period, ending as vague tremulant underwater sounds.  Both loops use "period" instruments - obsolete reel-to-reel equipment, a super eight projector, and a suitably dated pair of loudspeakers with a fake-wood-panel amplifier.  As well as carrying out a process of decay, the work draws attention to the fallibility of technology, and demonstrates a fascination for film and tape as physical embodiments of frozen time.

Figure 5-6 Running Down 

A bug in the operating system of the Ensoniq ASR-10 digital sampler is the basis for another work in the exhibition: Memory.  A randomly selected group of sampled recordings of speech, musical passages and single sounds are placed into the sampler's memory.  In addition, a number of preset parametric processes [14] are set up; the whole is then subjected to near-random processing due to the bug. [15]   John Cage's gamut technique is in operation - the limited memory constrains the available sounds to a handful, and the malfunction generates aleatoric processes.

The range of different sounds produced by the varying loudspeakers of cheap portable cassette players provided the impetus for another work, Boombox Etudes, in which several dozen machines are arranged, as are the instruments of an orchestra, according to tone colour.  Each machine plays a copy of the same cassette, [16] but differences in tape speed, tone colour and spatial location create a rich, multidimensional sound.  The sound moves through space as different tape speeds cause identical sounds to pass from one machine to another.

A similar approach was used in one of my untitled pieces for Situation and Place. Twenty cassette players were used, each with a copy of the cassette I prepared for the event, which took place by a large staircase at the back of shops in a dark alleyway.  As the machines were quite widely spread, there are many single, percussive sounds on the cassette to make clear the spatial movement of sound.  I found that a slow glissando also had a curiously spatial effect and resulted in a rich, orchestral sound; it also was an apt accompaniment as a dancer slowly ascended the staircase.

This work is one of many within Situation and Place in which a site is identified as creating strong unitary ambiences (whether intentionally or not), and is highlighted, "framed", and presented to the audience.  Another of my works in this category was the opening event for the two performances at the City Plaza Rotunda.  This site is acoustically striking in that its dome focuses and resonates the sounds made beneath it, creating strong echoes, reverberance and resonant frequencies.  The strongest resonant frequency was used as a fundamental pitch for a number of instruments constructed from the materials used to construct the neighbouring buildings: steel reinforcement rods, PVC water pipes, pieces of timber, and the metal of the railings surrounding the dome. [17]   I chose the instruments for their materials as well as for their appeal to me as producers of extraordinary, beautiful sounds, which in effect articulated and amplified the acoustic space.  Each of the instruments was played in independently regular pulses by performers walking in concentric circles, highlighting the shape of the site, and representing the cyclical, polyrhythmic nature of the music.

Another focus of Situation and Place was the creation of emotional environments related to the Situationist idea of psychogeography.  With this purpose in mind, we rented a number of rooms in a dilapidated hotel building to use for installations.  My room was entitled Tittytainment [18] and was completely filled with pink balloons, with a constant recorded sound of my two-month-old daughter breastfeeding.  Upon entering the room, an observer would become completely surrounded by balloons, changing her perception of light and sound.  Allusions are made in the work to the experience of the womb and of early infancy, surrounded by the comfort of a mothers' nourishing breasts, but also blind to the outside world.

The works I created for the three Meme events tended to be focused on a handful of clear ideas, logically realised.  They proved to be useful studies - stepping stones - to arrive at techniques and approaches I would use in my more conventionally notated works to follow.

Figure 5-7 Situation and Place opening event, Robert Davidson and Tamsin McGuin performing

[8] There are four key Situationist concepts at the core of Situation and Place:

· unitary urbanism: the theory of the combined use of arts and technical skills for the integral construction of dynamic urban ambiences;

· constructed situation: a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary ambience and a game of events;

· psychogeography: the study of the specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals;

· the dérive: an experimental technique of transient passage through varied ambiences.

© 2003 Robert Davidson