Oct. 23, 2020
I’ve recently come across several beautiful projects relating to time and duration that I’d like to share.
Jerome Ellis is a young composer living in Brooklyn. This segment of the radio program This American Life is about a performance he did at the annual marathon at St. Mark’s Church in NYC, a 10-hour event that includes many writers and artists reading or performing their work for 2 - 3 minutes. But having been invited to participate, Ellis realized he couldn’t possibly comply with the time limitation. He speaks with a pronounced stutter, which typically manifests as long silences. He decided to read a statement that would normally take about two minutes to read, but in fact went far over the allotted time. It’s a courageous performance, and I’m grateful to be made aware of the relationship between time and speech in this way – something I typically take for granted. You can listen to Jerome’s music here.
I also recently read about a series of durational performances by Bill T. Jones and dancers at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Our Labyrinth is a collaboration with the Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei. The premise is extremely simple: each dancer, accompanied by a solo musician, uses a broom to sweep a pile of rice around the floor for 90 minutes, at which point they are replaced by another dancer. That’s all there is to it. And yet, there is so much more to it… The dancers are dancing with the rice, and also drawing with it. Most of all, they are being with it. From the NY Times piece linked above:
After his first rehearsal, [dancer David] Thomson realized that sweeping the rice for 90 minutes was like any meditative practice. “You’ve got to realize where you are, and then let that go and be with it,” he said. “You’re just with yourself and with the rice and it’s not about making beautiful floor designs. I wasn’t even aware of the designs I was making. I was just dealing with moving the rice and my body in relationship to it.” The strange part was how that relationship changed. “There was one moment, which was deeply moving, where I was gently moving this rice,” he said. “I saw all of these grains, and they became people.”
In the first video below, the vocalist is Holland Andrews (aka Like A Villain), an amazing composer who used to live in Portland. We booked Holland to play in the Seattle Improvised Music Festival last year, but that show was cancelled due to the great Snowpocalypse of 2019. Holland came up later in the year to do a solo show at the Chapel and it was one of the most memorable performances I’ve presented in recent years. Again, it was very simple: just a microphone and a few electronic effects boxes. There were maybe less than ten people in the audience, but I think we were all completely stunned. I felt like I was witnessing someone doing what they were truly put on Earth to do. Shortly after that, Holland moved to Brooklyn. Expect to hear more from this remarkable person.
A couple of weeks ago I watched the film My Octopus Teacher (streaming on Netflix). Craig Foster is a South African documentary filmmaker and free diver. While struggling with depression, he devoted himself to diving in the same patch of kelp forest every day for a year. During that time he became intimate not only with the place, but with the creatures who live there, and especially with a particular octopus. The young director Pippa Ehrlich has made a lovely film about Foster’s experience, and I won’t spoil it by saying too much more. But it resonated with me in part because of my own Hereings project, during which I spent a year visiting and listening to a particular piece of land in New Mexico. I didn’t have quite the same experience of inter-species communion as Foster, but taking the time to become very intimate with that place was transformative and drastically altered my perception of it.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the recent passing of composer, saxophonist/flutist, and visual artist Jon Gibson (NY Times obituary here). Although perhaps best known as a performer of music by others – as a key member of the Philip Glass Ensemble as well as with other so-called minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young – his own work has been quite important to me. Like those other composers, his music was very much about gradual change over time. He’s a great example of one of those artists who never became “big", yet quietly persisted in doing important and influential work over many years.
I presented Jon in Albuquerque in a duo with Harold Budd back in 2000, and remember him as being very kind and unassuming, a pleasure to work with. I hadn’t been in touch with him since then, but was glad to know he continued to create new work and gain well-deserved respect for it. He was quite beloved and many people I know and admire will miss him.
UPDATE Oct. 25, 2020:
The day after I posted this, I saw The World Before Your Feet, which was recently recommended by my friend Michael Huntsberger. It’s a documentary about Matthew Green, who decided to quit his job as a civil engineer and walk across the United States. He then decided to walk every street in all five boroughs of New York City – over 9000 miles, including alleys, bridges, piers, boardwalks, and even cemeteries. In the process he met a lot of people, took a lot of photos, learned a lot of obscure history, and became incredibly intimate with the metropolis. (Documented on his blog.) That project is the focus of this film.
Not surprisingly, the main question people asked about this undertaking was, “Why?” His answer is fairly prosaic: Basically, he got tired of his desk job and thought it would be an interesting thing to do. I’m willing to accept that at face value, but I can’t help regarding his undertaking as a work of art. He never once uses the A-word to describe it, and seems unlikely to have ever considered it as such; he comes across as being deeply nerdy, perhaps, but not at all arty. To me, however, the fact that he does not frame his activity as art does not make it any less an expression of creativity.
The intentional blurring of art and life has a long history, and there are no shortage of artistic precedents for what Green has done. Most obviously, Richard Long’s walks come to mind, as well as the dérive of the Lettrists and Situationists, and the long duration performance works of Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, among others. A not-so-distant cousin would be the soundwalks that have become a staple of the acoustic ecology movement, and in turn given birth to a wealth of place- and time-based sound/music works, including some of my own. There are also a number of nature writers whose work takes a similar approach. So in relation to all of that, I consider Green to be a kind of outsider artist and kindred spirit.
Like My Octopus Teacher, what appeals to me so strongly in Green’s work is his dedication of large amounts of his time in order to become truly intimate with place – to not only walk all of those streets, but to pay close, loving attention to all the subtle details and really see where he is. Filmmaker Jeremy Workman’s documentary begins at a time long after Green had begun the walk and ends before he finished, so there is no build-up or “victorious ending” scene. We do get some insights into Green’s own past and how he lives day-to-day (very thriftily), but the film is less about his persona and more about experiencing the City through his eyes, at a slow pace, drawn in by his curiosity and sense of wonderment.