Bicycles, charcoal, art installations…
I’ve started to notice a pattern emerging in the kind of (cultural) things I like. This past year, in particular, I’ve got much more into live art (the good stuff, at least) and experimental music. I went to the National Review of Live Art and Kill Your Timid Notion festivals for the first time, and wished I’d done it years ago (I’ve been a semi-regular attendee at Instal, KYTN’s Glasgow-based cousin, over the years, but never before made the trip to Dundee). Last week I went to Brighton to take part in an interactive theatre show called Rider Spoke by Blast Theory, which involved riding a bicycle around the Brighton suburbs recording and listening to stories.
Meanwhile, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the networks of treasure hunters that are springing up on the internet, burying artefacts in secret places all over the world for others to find; by the anonymous confessions on Postsecret; by odd little anthropological museums like Found Magazine; and by psychogeography and urban gaming. Not all of it is for me, but in every case I love that people are doing it, get very excited by it, and seek out stuff like this at every opportunity.
I think I know why this is. I am, more and more, into experiencing things that don’t fall into well-established categories of creativity - things that can’t be easily pigeonholed, defined or even described, that find new places to play between genres and between media. I like going to things where I have no idea what to expect, what will be expected of me, or even what is an appropriate way to behave. And there are a lot of people out there like me, judging by the size of the audience who huddled alongside me at KYTN this year to watch a half hour performance in which two people used sound waves to explode tiny pieces of charcoal. Or judging by the amount of people who want to spend an hour of their time cycling around a dull part of Brighton talking to themselves.
I have a particular perspective on this. When not making music I write about the arts for a living, have been doing so for a long time now, and am a bit fed up of it. Every day I am assaulted by so much cultural information - about new bands, new films, new books, new plays - that there is very little that feels in any way new to me. My job is to collect and categorise, something I frequently find myself doing on autopilot. Anything that throws a spanner into those works - anything that doesn’t fit easily into a category - catches my attention and jolts me out of my boredom.
I don’t think you have to be a media type to feel this way though. Culture is so easily accessible now, the amount of it so overwhelming, that it has become far too tempting to hurriedly categorise things, just to try and keep on top of it all. Faced with all the stuff out there, the temptation is just to browse through it all like a listings editor without properly engaging with any of it. Visiting an art website, after all, will lead you to ten other art websites, finding a band on MySpace will lead you to ten more, and before you know it you’ve not looked at or listened to any of it properly, you’re just ticking things off a list, instantly uploading cultural information into your brain like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. I interviewed Bill Drummond recently for the Scotsman, and found myself sympathising with his belief that recorded music as an art form is dead - when everyone is recording music, all the time, and it’s all there to hear by everybody, it ultimately becomes worthless. What is special, or rare, or precious, about any of it? Where’s the incentive to spend any time with it, to make it your own?
In a climate like this, there’s something oddly appealing about experiences you simply can’t skim through in a passive hurried way; things that you have to spend some time with simply to understand what they are exactly; things that can’t be accessed immediately on the internet, at least not in full; things that can’t easily be described, edited down, and therefore diminished; things that have to exist entirely on their own terms to make any sense at all. What is Rider Spoke? I could describe it, but it wouldn’t be particularly helpful. You just have to experience it for yourself. What is Kill Your Timid Notion? No description of it will do it justice. You can’t bluff and pretend you know about it, in order to feel more ‘cultured’ than you are. If you’ve never been, the bluff would be obvious immediately. You just need to go.
A few weeks ago, as thoughts like these buzzed through my head, Laura and I built an installation for Arches Live, an experimental theatre festival in Glasgow. We did it anonymously, partly because we’d not done anything quite like this before and were nervous about it, but mostly because we wanted people to come to it without preconceptions of any kind. Not that either of us are that well known, but if we’d had our names on it then at least a few people would have thought, ‘oh it’s that woman from Highway Diner’ or, ‘oh it’s that bloke from Swimmer One’. Ultimately, we wanted people to walk into the room knowing nothing about it at all, other than what was in the blurb in the brochure, which was deliberately cryptic to the point of actually being misleading.
This is, I think, an exciting way to present something. It forces the audience to think about it for themselves, rather then defer to received opinions. It forces you, like I said, to spend time with it - if only to work out what it is, exactly, that you’re looking at. Is it a piece of art? Theatre? Music? All of these? None of them? And should any decision you make about what it is influence the way you react to it?
Our installation consisted all of the above, while also being none of the above. It was, at its simplest, a room that told two people’s stories simultaneously, each story helping to make sense of the other. You could stand in the middle of the room and listen to both stories at the same time, and get a rough sense of what was going on and how they were connected, or you could sit in the corners and listen to each one in turn, and get a fuller picture. Put together, the two stories told one bigger story, about how two people fell madly in love, how one of them then died, and how - in one interpretation, at least - grief drove the other to a kind of madness.
Helping to tell this story was some music, which may have been made by the characters in the two stories, or not. There were also beautiful things to look at - hundreds of stones, hanging from fishing lines, and lit up to look like star systems, or waves in the ocean, or whatever else you wanted them to be, and artefacts from the lives of the two characters, spread out on the floor and in boxes, which people could sift through. Photos, poems, trinkets, etc. And there was a computer, which visitors to the installation could use to browse a website which may, or may not, be a figment of the grief-stricken character’s imagination.
I sneaked in a few times, pretending to be an audience member, just to watch how people reacted to it, and it was fascinating. People would spend quite a long time in there, sitting, walking, moving from one part of the room to another, trying to make sense of it all. Occasionally you’d spot someone making a sudden connection, and unexpectedly striding from one side of the room to the other to see if they’d got it right.
We worried about the anonymity of it a lot - would anyone bother to come to an anonymously created installation with a cryptic brochure blurb? But I’m glad we stuck to our guns. I’ve always found ‘publicising’ things a miserable experience (which may help explain why more people haven’t heard of Swimmer One) and, in the end, about 100 people came to see it over the two evenings that it was open, which I’m told is a fairly good turnout for any installation (never mind one made anonymously), with a bar next door that people could very easily spend all evening in instead.
The installation will have a life beyond the festival, via the website (which really exists) and odd little encounters with audience members, out in the world. These will connect back to the story being told in the installation and, in a sense, will tell the story again from a different angle. At the festival about 30 people signed up for these encounters, all without knowing what they were signing up for. I was delighted that they did this - a lovely show of trust in what we’re doing.
I’d like to make more things like this. Perhaps this approach will soon extend to the music I/we make too. I read about a musician once who didn’t release anything he’d made, instead leaving CDs around the countryside for people to find. Whether anyone actually did or not I don’t know, but it was a beautiful idea. Perhaps only a tiny number of people would find it and actually play it. But if one of those people loved the music, imagine how special it would be to them? This anonymously created thing that they’d just stumbled upon, and which moved them to tears, that was theirs and theirs alone amongst the bland, repetitive babble of the world.
Andrew
