100 METRONOMES

On 1 June, Copenhagen has a rare chance to experience György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962). The piece is better known as “the metronome piece”, and for a good reason: it is scored for 100 metronomes that are simply wound up and left to run down. The work, and a couple of related ones from the same period, is markedly different from the rest of the Hungarian composer’s oeuvre, and its eccentricity is usually explained with a reference to Fluxus. The score of the Poème symphonique was reproduced in the first issue of the Fluxus newspaper V TRE, which makes the connection an obvious one. The fact that it appeared there probably means that Fluxus’ spiritual father, George Maciunas, planned to include it in one of the Fluxus yearbooks that never appeared; most of the material he collected for publication in the yearbooks ended up being printed in V TRE and/or as a single edition.

As a work, the Poème symphonique fits the Fluxus repertoire very well: it is simple, funny and concrete, it is what Maciunas called “monostructural” – but it is too easy to explain its wackiness with a reference to Fluxus alone. Ligeti himself has tried very hard to make it an organic part of his oeuvre by relating it to later, more acceptably musical works (his String Quartet No. 2 from 1968, more specifically the pizzicato movement in it), and musicologists tend to connect it with the mechanical style the composer developed towards the end of the 1960s. The only possible conclusion is that there is not a single story to be told about the work, but that it is possible to tell at least two. One of them is based on continuities, the other on breaks. One of them is connected, via the idea of the oeuvre, to the ideals of high modernism, the other via the suggestion of radical alterity to the notion of the avant-garde.

The appearance of such easy binaries ought to make one stop and think again.

Fluxus was different, but it was not unique. The type of experimentation it is known for, is characteristic for its time, and although the artists associated with it were more radical than most, their interests were shared by others. At the time when Maciunas collected the score of the Poème symphonique, he was interested in what he called “concretism”, a tendency in art to let phenomena be themselves. What he saw, or rather, failed to see in an oddly perceptive way, was a tendency amongst artists to abandon form as an artistic category. Fluxus works, and many other works of the same period, can no longer be filed on the basis of outside characteristics, but have to be understood from the inside out, as process. They have, so to speak, made the leap from invertebrate to vertebrate, from external shell to backbone. This reference to evolution is misleading, because the leap they made marked the change from modernism into postmodernism, and therewith the abandonment of all evolutionary thinking. Works such as these exist in what Rosalind Krauss famously called the “post-media condition”. 

Eric Drott, who devoted a long article in The Journal of Musicology to the metronome piece and two other works of Ligeti’s that are commonly associated with Fluxus, concludes that the piece does not conform to the Fluxus standard, amongst other reasons because it criticises recognizable musical conventions. The way the score is formulated, for example – extremely verbose and overly specific , with lengthy instructions about how to procure 100 metronomes, how to make sure that they are returned to the right owner, etc.; you will find the full text here – is interpreted by Drott as an ironic commentary on the typical modernist score of the time, with the attached elaborate instructions to the performer. As such, it is a specifically musical work, but at the same time it is not. The score does not contain a single note, but consists of words alone, and is therefore accessible in a way that is entirely different from the classical musical score. It is part-music, part-written word, and entirely something different.  It ventures out in that mysterious no-man’s land between the established media that Dick Higgins called intermedia.

At one level, the level at which Maciunas connected with the work, it is a musical piece that makes no effort to hide the nature of the material it employs, namely, the ticking of 100 metronomes. At another level, the one at which scholars such as Drott understand it, it is a supramusical piece that critiques certain musical conventions. Both interpretations are perfectly valid, but they fail to notice the way the piece behaves. Certainly, one of the things it does is cause performances, like all musical scores, but it also changes the status of the score. Its title, Poème symphonique, places it at the crossroads of poetry and music, but actually it inhabits a previously unclaimed territory in between music and the written word. It is intermedial in nature, but what is even more important is that it experiments with the score as a means to an end and turns it into an end in itself. As much as the presentation of a certain body of sonic material and as much as a critique of certain musical conventions, it is a postmedial work that can just as easily be read as a text as it can be performed as a piece of music.

Oh well. Whatever it is, I look forward to hearing and seeing it on 1 June.

THE CONCERT THAT WAS TWICE THERE

In my last blog entry, I wrote about a concert that has left traces in the present and has failed to do so at the same time. In this new one, I would like to supplement it with a concert that is twice there.The concert in question is the sixth and last of the Fluxus Festival that was held in Nikolaj Kirke in Copenhagen and the Allé Scenen theatre in Frederiksberg in November 1962. The first concert of the festival, on 23 November 1962, attracted a lot of attention, but because the reviews were unanimously bad, almost all supporters started to distance themselves from it and the other concerts, except the one at Allé Scenen on 25 November 1962, were left unreviewed. I never expected to find a review of the last one.

But I did, or rather, Dorte Errebo, an archivist at the Rudersdal historical archive, did. Thank you once again, Dorte! She drew my attention to a review in Birkebavnen, the Birkerød Statsskole college magazine.  Thanks to it, I now know that John Cage’s Fontana Mix and Music for the Marrying Maiden, Richard Maxfield’s Cough Music, Radio Music, Steam, Pastoral Music and Night Music, George Brecht’s Three Yellow Events and Two Durations and Dick Higgins’ Requiem for Wagner, the Criminal Mayor were all performed according to plan. In a sense, that is news, because Fluxus festivals NEVER took place according to the programme; but then again, nearly all of these works are movies or tape works, so how difficult can it be to play them as planned?

Of course this is a bit unfair. Thanks to the review, I now know that Brecht’s Three Yellow Events (1. Yellow, 2. Yellow, 3. Yellow) were performed by holding up a transparent piece of yellow plastic in front of a projector lamp, and that is a valuable bit of information. And I also know that the crowd expected scandal and soon became bored, so when imagining the scene, one has to remember to add paper aeroplanes, folded from program sheets, flying through the air.

But by and large, and quite unlike the episode I wrote about in my last blog entry, I now have a duplicate of the programme I already had. In the case of the other concert, I found that the combination of affirmation of its reality and its denial made it a ghost, and therewith a social thing. Does the lack of in-betweenness here mean that the concert is not social? After all, what we have here is an ensemble, consisting of two pieces of documentary evidence that both point in the same direction and that can therefore unquestioningly be treated as stand-ins – supplements, in the Derridean sense – of a lost, original event.

Living with ghosts means never entirely living in the present. A haunted present is alive with remains of the past and outposts of the future. This situation was easily recognisable in the case of the present/absent concert: it had taken place under the rule of a rector who believed he had already witnessed the essentials of the concert in the past and therefore did not think he had a need for it in the present; for whom the concert in the past represented the shadow of the concert that was censored, reaching back in time.  The situation would have been similar in the case described above if the review had never shown up; but it has, so what does its appearance mean?

There is a sense in which the concert can be said to be “happening between two” (Derrida’s expression) after all: it happens in the lack of change between the announced program and the performed one. It becomes a ghost when the program as promise of a future-to-come (a-venir, another Derridean term) meets the program as a fulfilment of that promise, with the extreme likeness of the two as the thing that determines its half-life. After all, it was the fact that the works were mechanically reproduced (projected/played) that caused the audience to react. People expected to see their expectations reproduced (they craved scandal), but what it got instead was a reproduction of the work, without the possibility of the fulfilment or defeat of expectations. The sociality lies in the frustration this produces, a frustration that is repeated by me, the scholar: while I am happy to have my facts confirmed, I am also disappointed by the fact that a new piece of evidence does not, or hardly, lead to new insights.

GHOST OF A CONCERT



Rosa van der Meijden,
Three ghosts, 2009

 I saw a ghost the other day. Well, actually I did not. What I did was see nothing where I believed there would be something to see. Now one might argue that that is not all that surprising. After all, the same thing happens with half your socks, most of your biros and all the money you earn. But I came face to face with a ghost nonetheless.

I was visiting the library of the Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen to investigate a Fluxus concert called Concerto that took place there on 23 April 1963. It was organized by the conservatory’s study group on new music and featured, besides a programme of Fluxus pieces, a selection of happenings by the local Experimental School of Painting. I know it took place: not only was it discussed in the June 1963 issue of Danish Music Magazine, there also exists a typewritten programme. I have held it in my hands. And yet the conservatory’s archives do not contain a single scrap of evidence of its existence.

The concert should have drawn attention to itself. The program mentions such classics as Alison Knowles’ Child Art Piece, Benjamin Patterson’s Pond and György Ligeti’s Trois Bagatelles. Surely, an evening that featured a child on stage ought to attract attention? And what about a work that has the performers croak questions, answers and exclamations with a mechanical hopalong frog as conductor, should that not leave its traces in the archives? Or what about a piece that consists of three movements and only one note? In 1963? Nevertheless, I found a gaping hole where the concert should have been. All the other concerts in the same series are listed in the Royal Conservatory’s yearbooks, but of the Concerto, not a trace.

The Concerto, it appears, has both taken place and not taken place. It “happens between two”, as Jacques Derrida puts it in the Exordium to Specters of Marx (1993) - and things that happen between two “can only maintain [themselves] with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost”. The Concerto can only maintain its bizarre existence between having taken place and not having taken place if it speaks to and expresses its own ghost.

That may seem an impossible task, but there is a temporal twist to this ghost business that may make it possible after all. As Derrida writes, there is no being-with, and thus no socius, without a being-with-ghosts; ghosting is an eminently social thing. And not only do we live with the ghosts of past generations, we live with those of generations to come as well. The living present, writes Derrida, is “non-contemporaneous with itself”: it moves towards the future, but the future moves towards it as well. This means that, if the present comes from the future, the future must precede it – it must in a sense be “already and irrevocably past”.

Back to the Concerto. In a commentary in Danish Music Magazine, the rector of the Royal Conservatory, Knudåge Riisager, wrote that he had “already witnessed the samples presented here for half a dozen years ago in Paris and other places”. The concert he attended in Paris was a ghost of the Concerto, and the Concerto a ghost of the earlier Parisian concert. The Parisian concert ghosts the future Concerto and the Concerto ghosts the past Parisian concert.

Between them, the programme of the Concerto that I have held in my hand in New York and the evidence of its existence that was so conspicuously absent from the archive in Copenhagen speak with and about the ghost of the concert.  There can be no doubt that it was Riisager’s experience of the concert as not-present – of his own Parisian experiences as future – that caused its disappearance from the Conservatory’s archives. Riisager made the event a social one. He may have wanted to protect others from what he saw as superfluous, but in actual fact he turned a mere piece of archived paper into something that can be addressed, in the double sense of the word: something that can be engaged in conversation and something that can be the subject of conversation – while at the same time not being there at all. Not a mere thing, but a ghost.

PHOTO DOCUMENTATION AND THE SUPPLEMENT

Three weeks ago, I posted an entry about Hugo Ball’s “Karawane” and the multimedia spectacle that can be created out of a printed version of the poem, designed by the Berlin Dadaists, a diary entry in which Ball describes a poetry reading and a photograph of him in a “cubist” outfit. More specifically, I wrote about my own (and many others’) apparent need for authenticity, which makes us combine the three pieces to recreate a lost originary event and pointed out that they could also, and much more productively, be combined to make a statement about Ball’s and the Berlin Dadaists’ interest in language. The latter means contrasting the pieces of evidence instead of turning them into the harmonious whole we apparently so deeply crave, but here I spoke out in favour of surprise instead of regularity.

The argument made me think more about documentation, and especially about the use of photographic images as documentation. More specifically, I was reminded of Amelia Jones’ book Body Art, Performing the Subject, in which documentary photographs are described in terms of the Derridean supplement. It is the supplement that is the subject of this blog entry, so read on if you are interested in supplements - or if you want to know why I have red spots in my face on this week's photograph.

But instead of moving directly on to Derrida, I want to make a detour past a performance by Stanley Brouwn at Galerie Patio in Neu-Isenburg, just outside Frankfurt, on 13 February 1964. Although the performance is hardly ever discussed in any detail in the literature on 1960s performance art, it is quite well documented: the Archiv Sohm in Stuttgart keeps a whole series of photographs of it. To the scholar, finding something like that is like striking gold – but I also vividly remember the many hours I spent after that first glorious moment, trying to piece the fragmentary evidence together to form something resembling a narrative. My efforts are especially relevant for the argument I want to present here because Brouwn’s performance was so bizarre – the events it consists of offer no help whatsoever to those who want to reconstruct the bits as a continuous narrative – and because the documentation so readily and naturally made me try to reconstruct the original event.

The series begins with a photograph of Brouwn in front of the gallery entrance, peeling potatoes and throwing them into a pan filled with water; as is made clear by a puddle of water on the floor, hard. The next one shows him in front of the garage wearing skis. On the third photograph, he is inside the gallery, next to a lady who appears to be knitting. On the fourth one, the string has twisted itself around Brouwn’s face and stomach. He has a fork and spoon in his hands and looks as if he is being pulled forward. On the fifth photograph, the string has disappeared again, but Brouwn still holds the fork and the spoon. He eats a small clump of rice off a piece of fabric, perhaps a pillow. Next, he is shown holding a balloon and what appears to be a pair of scissors; he just might have cut a piece off the balloon and then closed it again, but the photograph is too unclear to be certain.

Next comes a series that appears to depict stages of the same action; to my surprise, I found them reproduced on duam85’s photo stream on Photobucket (click here – and I would be very grateful if someone could tell me who duam85 is and/or why he or she has reproduced that particular picture). The first one shows Brouwn standing in a corner next to a chair on a pedestal of concrete blocks. He balances a stick to which a pair of high heeled shoes is attached, on his feet and holds a large transparent plastic bag in his hands. On the next one, he is sitting down on the chair with the plastic bag pulled down over his body and the shoe-stick balanced across one foot. On the third one, he is standing up, still balancing the stick but holding the plastic bag in his hands. The final shot shows the chair on its concrete pedestal, now bearing books and flowers. In front of the chair, a box is placed. There are holes in the lid, in one of which a flower has been stuck.

The next two photographs also seem to depict a sequence. The first one shows Brouwn putting a tape recorder in a plastic bag and closing it by means of a belt. On the next one, he holds the bag up, so that we can see that a microphone is hanging out of it. The last group of photographs show Brouwn stretched out on the floor, busying himself with a magnifying glass, a caliper, an egg and a notebook. On the first one, he takes the magnifying glass out of a bag. On the next ones, he studies the egg, measures it, and writes the number 4,3 down in the notebook. The last photograph shows him still holding the egg, but now writing something on a sheet of paper.

After a lot of patient research, I now know more or less how the performance was constructed - but I am not going to tell you (ha ha!). The only thing I will reveal here is that the latter group of photographs illustrates the construction of a measured object. According to the announcement, the exhibition that the performance was the opening event of featured “BROUWNaction – BROUWNdemonstration – this way BROUWN – sealed objects – measured objects – BROUWNfilm – BROUWN eats a movie – coca cola statues – BROUWNcocktail – BROUWNmusic – BROUWNbooks”. But the fact that part of the action can be isolated already illustrates that what we are dealing here is not a continuous performance, which makes it all the more important to take a look at the reasons why one should want to combine the pictures to tell a coherent story anyway. At which point we turn to Derrida.

Derrida develops his theory of the supplement in chapter 2 of the second part of the Grammatology. He does so with the help of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s fetish for the spoken word and his enthusiasm about being a writer. Despite the fact that he bases his argument on an opposition between speech and writing, it is easy to translate it to the world of performances and photographs. Right at the beginning of the chapter he claims that “writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself”… and automatically, the scholar in the archive is transformed into the wizard’s apprentice (beardless, pimpled) who reads out a spell when the wizard is out, not knowing what he is doing and unaware of the consequences.

What the spell does is turn writing into a supplement for the spoken word. Such a supplement is a surplus, “a plenitude enriching another plenitude”, but it fills a void as well: “if it represents and makes an image”, he writes, “it is by the anterior default of a presence”. Actually, presence does not need a supplement. It is self-sufficient and therewith irreplaceable. The substitute cannot be equal to it, neither in substance nor in quality; but even though it is always alien and inferior, it gives an experience of presence (of speech, the real thing) anyway, because that is the way the supplement is experienced. The substitute offers itself to the individual as presence, but that presence “is the substitutive symbol of another presence”.

Here, the image of the wizard’s apprentice suddenly changes. The text suddenly begins to deal with masturbation, prostitutes and the Ideal Woman. Derrida introduces the terms auto-affection and hetero-affection, and suddenly one begins to wonder where the wizard apprentice got his pimples. The substitute, Derrida argues, offers direct satisfaction, but also absolute deferral of the moment of satisfaction. It satisfies, but only because one accepts it as substitute for the real thing and one therewith gives up all hope of ever becoming acquainted with the real thing. In fact, the thing-itself, the original presence, does not exist outside the play of substitution. There has to be a substitute before the idea of “presence”, of a thing-itself, can be thought at all. The result is that any feeling of presence we may have is a chimaera.

What is more, the supplements follow each other in an “infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, of originary perception”. The thing-itself is beyond reach, and acceptance of the play of substitution seems the only option left. But then it comes: “it happens”, Derrida writes, “that [supplementarity] describes the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution, the articulation of desire and of language, the logic of all conceptual oppositions. (…) It tells us in a text what a text is, it tells us in writing what writing is”. His conclusion is, that in this game of substitution, sometimes, something can be known after all, namely, the game of substitution itself.

Along the road to insight, the wizard’s apprentice has sullied the original and finally removed it altogether and has exposed himself to great moral peril during the process (but that’s quite OK in the end, because after all it is only himself he violates). Derrida’s argument is a truly postmodern story of enlightenment: insight can only be attained via and in obscurity. What I like about the Brouwn photographs is, that they physically illustrate the progression of Derrida’s text. The first sequence has so many lacunas that it automatically steers the imagination towards the original and its absence, thus creating the idea of an original in the mind. The next sequence actually has a certain narrative logic, even though the meaning of the narrative remains obscures, so one is confirmed in one’s idea that there actually is a story behind it all and that one actually can reconstruct the presumed original event by means of the photographic evidence. Already here, one begins to auto-satisfy oneself, because after having used the photographs as proof of the existence of an original, they are now combined with the idea of the original to convince oneself that one can actually gain access to the work – which at the end of the day allows us to see what we have been doing to ourselves. Not that we necessarily do so, but should we want to do so, we could. We could actually see what we are holding in our hands, what we have been thinking of and where it has led us.

At which point I would like to make a brief final remark. Apart from referring to Derrida, Amelia Jones also mentions Rosalind Krauss. More specifically, she points out that Krauss mentions both performance and photography as examples of indexicality. Maybe their relationship is different from the one between Derrida’s speech and text, maybe it is the same but of a different order, but in any case, looking at the photographs can tell us something about our relationship with indexical signs and therewith about our relationship with works of performance art as well. Once again, Brouwn’s work is extremely illustrative: it will never reveal itself as one continuous narrative because it never was one. In his early performances, Brouwn combined a lot of shorter monostructural actions, reminiscent of the Fluxus event, although unscripted, to form a more complex whole. The frustration one experiences when looking at the photographs reproduces the frustration that was no doubt experienced by those who actually witnessed the performance, just as our efforts to create a coherent whole out of the disjointed mess we are presented with, reproduces theirs. In a sense, the photographs are a satisfyingly appropriate way of approaching the performance, despite their supplementary character.

Incidentally, should you want to read more about Brouwn and the archive (and should you be able to read Danish), I recently had an article published about that very subject in the magazine Peripeti (no. 14, autumn 2010, pp. 31-38)

KEEP ON TRUCKIN' - AN ASIDE

I just read about Move for Life, a project organised by Littmann Kulturprojekte in Basel for the annual ArtParis fair (this year from 31 March – 3 April). An announcement on e-flux describes Move for Life as an attempt “to create a dialogue between art and the public through major societal issues… using lorries!” (I have always been suspicious of exclamation marks; they propel a sentence forwards at great speed, only to make them stop abruptly at the punch line. I am much more in favour of Alcanter de Brahm’s point d’ironie (irony point, a small, elevated, backward-facing question mark) or Hervé Bazin’s point de doute (point of doubt, a kind of z or Greek zeta over a dot), because they make you stop and think instead of accept the point unconditionally. But this is an aside inside the aside.)

Move for Life wants to enter into a dialogue about issues such as “poverty, aids, violence, racism and environmental destruction” and to that end, it uses artworks created by “internationally renowned artists” (the announcement mentions Ben Vautier, Daniele Buetti, Damien Deroubaix, Jochen Gerz, Isabel Muñoz, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Titchner and Atelier Van Lieshout ). The works mean to “speak to each and every one of us”. The Rauschenberg lorry, for example, is decorated with a typical Rauschenberg silkscreen constellation with the word “OZONE” written across it. Images of the lorries are to be found on the Move for Life website.

The project attracted my attention because Knud Pedersen, whose latest book I discussed a week ago, has developed a project involving lorries, or rather, beer vans, as well. It was called “Faxe Drives With Art” (Faxe is a Danish brewery and soft drinks producer) and took place in August 1965. The idea was simple: the vans, Pedersen reasoned, drove all across the country every day with their cargo of beer and lemonade anyway, so they might as well carry a work of art, so that everybody could see it, free of charge. The image at the top is of a poster showing Fluxus associate Arthur Køpcke’s contribution to the project. It is reproduced on the website of Pedersen’s Copenhagen Fluxus Archive.  But the project was by no means Fluxus-only: Bjørn Nørgaard and Per Kirkeby, for example, who were both associated with the rival Eks-skolen (Experimental School of Painting), participated as well. The project was not designed to (re)present a certain group, style or school. It embraced no specific cause, but only reflected Pedersen’s own ideas.

A comparison with Move for Life is revealing. Pedersen’s role in the Faxe project is very similar to that of Littmann Kulturprojekte, namely, purely organisational. In fact, all of Pedersen’s projects from the 1960s were of an organisational nature; it was not until the 1970s that he began to manifest himself as an artist. But there are important differences as well. First of all, the Faxe project has no ulterior motive; its aim is directly related to the means it employs, namely, art. In Move for Life, by contrast, art is used to draw attention to other issues. Moreover, while the message of the Faxe project lies in its internal structure, the message of Move for Life is external to the art and its carrier(s).

The differences bring to mind Nicolas Bourriaud’s claim, in Esthétique relationelle (1998), that the “relational” art of the 1990s had left grand scale revolutionary avant-garde utopianism behind and merely wanted to create “micro-utopias”. For this type of art, getting people to think about issues such as pollution and poverty for just a little while is enough. Pedersen, on the other hand, wanted to abolish, not so much art, as all the institutions that insert themselves between art and its audience and make art an elitist enterprise. His is a grand scale revolutionary-utopian project, but it is much more specific than “relational” art as well. It wants to combat art mediation by mediating art in an alternative way, while relational art makes use of pretty much any type of relationship.

Bourriaud’s argument is annoyingly specific; the only art he really discusses is that of the 1990s, to the result that history appears to play no role in his argument. Underneath the surface, however, one can discern a sneaking kind of artistic Darwinism: the miniaturisation of the relational aestheticists’ micro-utopias is better than the avant-garde’s clunky utopianism and therefore represents a step forwards. His Esthétique relationelle develops a post-historic argument that is typical of the period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath. What is much more useful, now, 15 years later, is to focus on another aspect of Pedersen’s project, namely the alliance it forges between art and commerce. It is an extremely practical one (“those vans have to drive anyway”), but a rational one as well (“art wants to get out and meet the people and consumer goods want to be notice”). As such, it is the opposite of Move for Life, which is not practical and not rational. It may be able to strike up a dialogue, but not thanks to the lorries or the art. Pedersen’s project makes a case for systemic elegance and conceptual rigour that is still worth stopping up and thinking about today.

KARAWANE

In a sense, this blog entry is a continuation of the one on Knud Pedersen (see under January), so if you have not read that, you may want to do so first. What I want to write about here is something that annoys me – not massively, but just slightly. And one of the main reasons why it annoys me is the very fact that it annoys me. It is a matter that I could have addressed in many different ways, but I have opted for a relatively safe way, namely a historical one. None of the protagonists are with us any longer.

The annoying thing is actually an assemblage of three things: a very well-known photograph of Zürich Dadaist Hugo Ball dressed in a Cubist costume, a printed version of his poem “Karawane” and a diary entry from 23 June 1916, reprinted in Ball’s book Flight out of time, in which he describes a performance. You will find the photograph on the Dada Companion website (top right hand corner) and the poem on Wikipedia.  The diary entry does not appear to have been reproduced on the internet, so I will summarise it instead. Ball writes that he has invented something he calls “poems without words” or “sound poems” and that he has performed some of them. He then describes the outfit he had made for the occasion (a collection of cardboard tubes and other constructions, more or less similar to the ones shown in the photograph), and finally he moves on to the performance itself.  He writes that he “began slowly and solemnly”, but that “the stresses became heavier” until “his voice had no choice but to take on the ancient

The three bits of documentation can - and often are - be combined to form a kind of multimedia Dada show. Word (the poem), image (the photograph) and the spoken word (Ball's diary entry) come together to create a multisensory image of “Hugo Ball performing ‘Karawane’ at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916". But there are some problems. First of all, the diary entry actually quotes one of the poems he recited, and it is not “Karawane”,but another one called “Gadji beri bimba” (you can read the poem here). It mentions an “Elefantenkarawane”, but there are trumpeting elephants in “Gadji beri bimba” as well (“elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata”). The only other title Ball quotes is “Labadas Gesang an die Wolken”, and that is not the one either – so we simply do not know whether Ball actually performed “Karawane” that night. It is very likely, but we cannot be certain.

Secondly, the specific version of “Karawane” that is usually reprinted together with the photograph and/or the diary entry is the one from the Dada Almanach, published in Berlin in 1920, i.e. four years later and 850 kilometers away. According to Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, the distinctive typography is by Richard Hülsenbeck, who moved from Zürich to Berlin in 1917 and ended up creating an alternative Dada headquarters there. In fact, the use of different type faces is rare in the publications of the Zurich Dadaists, but highly characteristic of the Berlin Dadaists. Especially Hausmann did so extensively . The Berlin Dadaists even made a collage that combined the photograph of Ball with a Berlin-style rendition of the poem, albeit not the one that is usually reproduced these days (just to make things easier). The collage was intended for publication in Dadaco, the “Dadaist hand atlas” that never saw the light of day. The combination of the photograph and the poem, then, seems to have been a German fabrication, a piece of internal Dada politics, and not the original document we would like it to be.

If I used some time and energy on the matter, I am sure I could find out who fabricated it, when and why, but I will not. Because it is at exactly this point that I get annoyed. I get annoyed at the ease with which people heap fragments together in order to create the suggestion of a coherent whole and I get annoyed at myself for getting annoyed because it is a sign that I am no better.

Perhaps I should try to be surprised instead. In an essay called “Presence” (in History and Theory no. 45, February 2006), Dutch historian and philosopher Eelco Runia makes a plea for surprise, and it is a convincing one. History, Runia claims, is all about avoiding surprises. It seeks patterns, either in history itself or in metahistory (the writing of history). “What looks like the royal road to the past”, he writes, “never takes you anywhere but to places within sight of your point of departure”; but “exploring the present might have you, somewhere, someplace, tumbling into depths you didn’t suspect were there”. More specifically, Runia wants the historian to look for “metonymies”, “displaced words”, words that connect different contexts, “holes through which the past touches the present”. Viewing Ball’s caravan as a metonymy means watching the elephants march from the past into the present and from the present into the past, both at the same time.

One very good reason for doing so is that it represents a break with the oh-so-appealing idea that texts and photographs can turn us into eye witnesses of something that happened 95 years ago. More specifically for the assemblage discussed here, it means that we can turn our attention away from the factual information contained in Ball's diary entry and towards his opening line, where he announces that "I have invented a new genre of poems, Verse ohne Worte or Lautgedichte, in which the balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence". Instead of connecting it to the photograph and the printed version of the poem, which makes authenticity the central subject of discussion, it can then be connected to the Dada Manifesto that Ball read out just a week earlier: "I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. (...) I don’t want words that other people have invented. (...) I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. (...) The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance". In such a context, authenticity could never be an issue. Language and its limits, on the other hand, could. 

ANTI-ART AND REALITY

Just before Christmas, Knud Pedersen presented his latest book,  “Kunsten ud til folket og hjem til kunsten igen, et testamente” (“Art to the people and back home to art again, a testament”). Flatteringly, he dedicated a chapter to me. And now you, the reader, will probably expect me to tell you in a few words who Knud Pedersen is, and that is no easy task. Explained very briefly, Knud Pedersen has since the early 1950s worked to make art available to everyone, first by means of Byens billede (The Picture of the City), an easel on a street corner where a new painting is put on display every month or so (the easel is still in use and is now to be found on Nikolaj Kirke Plads in Copenhagen), and from 1957 onwards via Kunstbiblioteket (The Art Library), where one could rent a work of art “for the price of a packet of cigarettes a week”.  Throughout his long career, Pedersen has devised many more ways of getting art out to the people, for example by displaying it on the side of beer vans and by renting it out in jukeboxes. His most recent idea is ArtScreen: annoyed by the fact that he could only rent out paintings and small sculptures, art forms that make up a rapidly decreasing percentage of the total amount of art produced, he decided to offer digital access to art – in any form and shape – at the now-standard price of 57 crowns per month. If you are interested, you will find more information about it on the ArtScreen website.

Anyway, Knud Pedersen has written this book and he signals that it is his last one. Not only does he call it a “testament”, but he also suggests that he has come full circle: art out to the people and back home again.  In the chapter dedicated to me, he describes a work of art he once made (I do not know the year, and to try and find out would be extremely problematic in the given context – see below). It consisted of two panels, the first one of which bore the instruction “Phone a taxi. When it arrives at Den Frie [the exhibition hall in Copenhagen where it was on display, PvdM], invite the driver to come inside and ask him to choose the work from the exhibition that he likes best. Move it from its place in the exhibition to the other panel with the legend ‘the chosen work’”. The other panel, predictably, read “The chosen work”. Pedersen did not make the panels himself and never even visited the exhibition. When the show ended, he arranged for the panels to be sent to the German artist Jochen Gerz, who buried it in the Jardin des poètes in Paris. Pedersen, therefore, never actually saw the work himself.

As Pedersen points out himself, what motivates the work is a rejection of the concept of the “work” of art, the idea that it needs to be physically produced and the idea that one needs an artist to produce a work of art. All this is perfectly normal for the time; it is my guess that the work was made sometime during the 1970s. As usual, the sting is in the tail. The concluding sentences of the chapter are: “As far as I can recall, this project has never been discussed by myself or others. Maybe it has never taken place”. And there he has me. How does an art historian, an academic, deal with this story? Of course one could travel to Paris and dig up the work, but to desecrate its grave in such a way would be to destroy both Gerz’s  and Pedersen’s work. One could also take an easier way out and merely dig out the catalogue of the exhibition, but then, one would only find secondary evidence of its existence. Anyway, the panels are not the work. They can be recreated. The exhibition, on the other hand, cannot, so the work cannot be recreated either. The work only exists in the story, and the story is told by someone who never actually witnessed the work. This is enough to make any art historian nervous.

My worries remind me of a passage from Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulations” (1983): “It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary”, it says, “of proving truth by scandal, proving the law by transgression, proving work by the strike, proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution, (….) – without counting: (…) proving art by anti-art (…). Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form”. What is especially worrying about the passage is the context. Baudrillard arrives at his statement via a discussion of the Philippine government’s decision, in April 1972, to create a reserve for the Tasaday, a people that were claimed to have lived in isolation since the Stone Age, and to close it for all visitors. The episode is now widely considered to be a hoax, but Baudrillard did not know that. What was at stake for him was the fact that in making further ethnological research impossible, ethnology (read: science) made a “simulated sacrifice in order to save its reality principle”.

What is at stake here is no longer the question of whether a particular work of anti-art was actually made, but whether it can be a subject of art historical investigation. I cannot have direct experience of the work, but the rules of the academic game demand that I produce physical evidence, preferably in a shape that looks acceptably archival: a document, a photograph, something that can be preserved and filed. Transposing the story of the Tasaday to Pedersen’s story, I can either discuss anti-art in an art context, thereby “civilizing” it, or I can explicitly refrain from speaking about it and so help to preserve a totally fictitious idea of a “savage” art. Either way, I give reality to an idea of art, rather than to the work. Art history as an academic discipline may seem to demand of me that I prove the reality of the work, but what I actually end up proving the reality of a theoretical construct called “art”. You will not find a single molecule of art in the entire universe, so any attempt to prove its existence must be disingenuous. Academia would give me ample opportunity to hide behind the image of the solid researcher who has order in his empirical material, but I would still be doing something else than what I claimed to be doing.

How to avoid this? An obvious answer is to refrain from referring to the Stone Age. The Tasaday were there, around 1970, and ethnologists spoke to them, but they had nothing to do with the Stone Age. By drawing in the Stone Age, people made it impossible for themselves to see what the Tasaday were. In art historical terms, this means forgetting about history. It means forcing myself to stop seeing Pedersen as a witness of something that happened some 35 years ago and to start seeing him as someone who is telling me a story, now, in the present. That  is an effort it is important to make, because one of the things I am currently discussing with Pedersen is the 50^th anniversary of the first European Fluxus festivals in 2012. Admittedly, it also means that I have to think about myself quite a lot, and that always makes for rather tedious, introverted, introspective, egotistical texts, but I guess we will all have to live with that. One of the ways of complying with Pedersen’s testament, and I think a good one, would be to stop thinking of this 50^th anniversary as a direct line back to an originary event and to start thinking of it as an event in the present – as a story that is told now, rather than documentation of an event that took place back then.