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Breathing Rooms (Part II)

I think back to the experience I had at Karlsruhe, the summer before I went to Banff and met Matana and Mazz and Claire and Tyshawn Sorey. The conference, the ninth of a series of annual conferences on music and sonic art hosted by the Institut für Musikinformatik und Musikwissenschaft at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, was subtitled "At the Interface of Practice and Theory: Revisiting the Artistic Research Debate." The call for entries from which I learned about the conference described its intentions like this:

The theme of MuSA 2018 is 'At the Interface Between Practice and Theory: Revisiting the Artistic Research Debate'. The last decade has witnessed the establishment of artistic research in Music and Sonic Art as an original approach that brings together theory and practice. While much has been written about the integral role of artistic practice in this kind of research, much remains to be learned from exploring the multiple ways in which theory and practice can be brought to bear on each other. MuSA2018 aims to explore the interface between theory and practice in the context of artistic research.

 

I was giving a joint paper/performance with pianist and theorist Daphne Leong at a conference in Amsterdam entitled "Researching Performance, Performing Research," as well as at a second conference hosted by the Performance Studies Network in Oslo later that summer, and so I decided to extend my trip to include this earlier conference in Karlsruhe. In the process of this summer of conference-hopping, I learned about various institutions throughout Europe and the U.K. that had cropped up in response to government funding structures that required scholars in the humanities to justify their work in terms drawn from traditions of scientific research: the Orpheus Instituut in Belgium, the Norges Musikkhøgskole in Norway, and a number of institutions throughout the U.K. that focused on "practice-based research" such as the University of Leeds and Goldsmiths University. The U.K.-based scholar Baz Kershaw, who directed a five-year program "Practice as Research In Performance" (PARIP), describes the rise of "practice as research" in the early 2000s, reproducing a word-map created in 2006 by Swedish scholar Ylva Gislén depicting countries in which "research in the artistic realm" had begun to be institutionalized:

 

It's not hard to imagine a different caption for this word map, perhaps around Anglophone colonial powers. 

Since then, various forms of creative and critical practice have been given academic shelter around the world, including a number in the U.S. such as the center for Integrative Studies in Music at University of California, San Diego, the center for Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry at Harvard University, and the MIT Media Lab. But at the time, in 2018, despite being a scholar with a doctorate in violin performance and about thirty years of immersion in musical studies of some variety, these programs were new and deeply exciting to me. The presentations I witnessed in Karlsruhe, in particular, seemed to offer a path toward expressive fullness that reminded me of what it felt like to be excited and creatively inspired. In one presentation by Markus Noisternig, a researcher and Head of Artistic Research at the Sorbonne, we listened to a performance of Olga Neuwirth's Lost Highway. Noisternig linked this with a discussion of acoustics by the architect Renzo Piano: in a room without reverb, he quoted Piano as saying, "you feel that you are dying." We need reverb. For me, this conference was reverb, a sense of life, of resonant co-presence. The presentations spanned explorations of the expressive languages of dance notation (Timothy Schmele), sound art as micro-political intervention (Marcel Cobussen), a gorgeous paper called "Bowing the Stream" in which Bennett Hogg shared his experience floating a violin in moving water and allowing the water to activate the violin's voice like an Aeolian harp, and a beautiful exposition on physical modeling systems for engineering through a composition called "The Silver Key" by engineer and composer Rosalia Soría Luz. Though the conference was subtitled "Revisiting the Artistic Research Debate," the general consensus (perhaps by self-selection of presenters) seemed to be that we were past needing to debate about Artistic Research; what was more interesting was what could be said through its modalities.

I want to offer a flower for the people at that conference, and for everyone who has engaged in the hard work of making space for embodied and creative modalities in the structures that have been formed around capitalism and disciplinary isolation in the ongoing wake of colonialism as described by Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and on and on through the roots and blooms of this decolonial garden. Your work and presence gave me hope and life in a moment when I was deeply uncertain of my place in either musical performance or academia. 

 

And I want to invite a further opening and enriching of this space to acknowledge and center a vast body of work that I believe underlies much of this movement toward creative research methodologies, a body of work that is in many cases excluded or unrecognized because of unexamined colonial legacies that have shaped the development of these movements.

 

Lucy Cotter, in the introduction to her beautiful collection Reclaiming Artistic Research, speaks directly to the ways in which, even under the umbrella of so-called Artistic Research, traditional (scientistic, objectivist) ways of knowing remain the measure of a work’s critical contribution. After a playfully formatted opening, she switches to a more traditional paragraph form:

 

I feel under pressure to get on with talking to you about artistic research and I am using standard writing conventions again to hurry things along. But I am aware that all these structural choices reflect assumptions about how art relates to other forms of knowledge. They declare the status of the visual and the material relative to the linguistic and demonstrate how under-acknowledged hierarchies suppress other registers of knowledge, both material and sensory. In fact, the apparent unimportance of these things brings us to the core of a power struggle within much of the discourse surrounding artistic research until now. Namely, that academic-led protocols often drown out art’s sensibilities, even on those occasions when academic and other non-artistic institutions claim to be interested in art’s potential to research or create knowledge in other ways. (10)

 

I want to pause here, because in my academic pace of reading—one practiced in order to get through the reams of articles assigned to me or considered necessary in order to achieve expertise for the next submitted article—I would have (I did) read that preceding paragraph too quickly to notice its many nooks and crannies. I feel under pressure, Cotter writes, to hurry things along.

 

So I take a detour, back into the Zoom room hosted by Petra Kuppers. Light a candle here. Breathe with me. Here, again, are Lucy Cotter’s words, interwoven with how they reflect in my slower gaze:

 

I feel under pressure to get on with talking to you about artistic research and I am using standard writing conventions again to hurry things along. But I am aware that all these structural choices reflect assumptions about how art relates to other forms of knowledge.

 

Structural choices reflect assumptions, assumptions about

the value of art

relative to 

other forms of knowledge.

 

They declare the status of the visual and the material relative to the linguistic and demonstrate how under-acknowledged hierarchies suppress other registers of knowledge, both material and sensory.

 

When a hierarchy (words over sounds/images/bodies) is unacknowledged,

when an unstable ground is portrayed as solid,

 

people (things, ideas) disappear.

In fact, the apparent unimportance of these things brings us to the core of a power struggle within much of the discourse surrounding artistic research until now. Namely, that academic-led protocols often drown out art’s sensibilities, even on those occasions when academic and other non-artistic institutions claim to be interested in art’s potential to research or create knowledge in other ways.

 

Where do they (people, things, arts, ideas) go for shelter when they disappear?

 

The paradox here is that art’s epistemologies open up precisely at the site of representation. They open up through attention to form, through play and through the ability and desire to question the terms of the discourse, rather than provide supplementary knowledge. (10-11)

 

If you are made to speak in a language that disappears you, what do you become to survive?


When I read this by the light of my candle, what I hear is how hierarchies seem matter-of-course to those who have been raised within and empowered by them: things like needing a written dissertation text to give critical weight to an embodied performance, or assumptions that art can be separated from the critical and contextual space in which it develops. I think of Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin albums: each one a chapter written in sound, a historical archive and a theoretical critique and an embodied experience and a call to collective resistance of White Supremacist, patriarchal oppression, all wrapped into an experience that conveys deep, capacious love.

 

Coin Coin Chapter One:

Gens de Couleur Libres

Coin Coin Chapter Two:

Mississippi Moonchile

Coin Coin Chapter Three:

River Run Thee

Coin Coin Chapter Four:

Memphis

Coin Coin Chapter Five:

In the Garden

 

This is text.

This is theory.

This is an archive.

This is music.

This is activism.

This is scholarship.

This is none of the above.

This is all of the above.

 

I pause, take a breath.

It’s almost too easy to say that Matana’s album is all of these things. What I really want to say is that everything—every text, every instance of expression, is also all of these things (art, theory, engagement), whether it acknowledges it or not. Like whiteness, academic text is a color. [cite re: whiteness]

 

Every text has a form, a contour and a texture and a context that affects how it is received, and that impacts its recipient differently depending on where they are coming from.

 

Theodor Adorno’s writing reproduced in a PDF is different from the same words printed in a book is different from the same words on sheets of silk clothes-pinned to a rope and backlit by the sun.

 

Likewise: every artistic form speaks, theorizes, means and does something, though that speech or action is always deeply relational. This is why for me, when I played for or listened to Harumi, my violin felt liberatory, and when I brought it into the context of bubble tea with fff, it felt constricting.

 

 

The idea of a work of art that can transcend its context is a specifically 19th-century European idea [cite Goehr?]. In order for it to be perceived as transcendent, it depends on the invisible-izing of the people, the materials, the food, the labor, the funding, the shelter that makes the illusion possible. [cite Dylan Robinson, Christopher Small] This invisible-izing can be temporary, a sleight of hand bound up in the playfulness of a wider context of support, but often the practice of disappearance solidifies into unacknowledged erasure, something that has deep and painful consequences. I think of walking out of the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, past the people bent double at the entrance to the 16th St. Mission BART stop, overhearing snatches of conversation from bejeweled operagoers about the transcendence of music.

 

This doesn’t mean that illusions are bad, that losing oneself in a story or a performance is wrong. What I mean is a combination of what I learned from Mazz Swift and Lucy Cotter: that when the real impact of hierarchical power structures is unacknowledged or unnoticed by those wielding that power, they cause injury to those who are disempowered by those structures.

 

I trace my finger over the structures that support me in this moment, breathe with Petra Kuppers into the complexity of this precarious balance point.

 

[flower for Anna Tsing]

 

I’ve circled a text by anthropologist Anna Tsing since the early days of the pandemic. It’s called The Mushroom at the End of the World, subtitled “On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,” and the cover features a beautifully chunky and translucent watercolor sketch of a matsutake mushroom, a species of mushroom that grows in environmentally disturbed areas like clearcut forests. “When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945,” Tsing writes, “it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom” (p. 3, citing footnote 3). In this book, Tsing follows the mushroom as a teacher on living amidst precarity.

 

We hear about precarity in the news every day. People lose their jobs or get angry because they never had them. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific islands. But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what ‘drops out’ from the system. What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek? (20)

 

How to live with this condition of precarity? How to live in it? Tsing offers a strategy drawn from her experience with the patchy communities of people who make their livings at the blurry edges of mainstream capitalist systems, finding and selling the matsutake mushrooms in the forests of settler-occupied Oregon. “Our first step is to bring back curiosity,” she writes (6). “It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations” (19).

 

Noticing; a window to imagining. I think of two gestures, two embodied texts, equally impactful to my (musical) journey.

 

The first I encounter comes from Harumi. I’m in her teaching studio at the University of Colorado, some weeks before leaving to go to the Lucerne Festival, where I will be playing the solo part of the Berg violin concerto in rehearsals with the orchestra, before Anne-Sophie Mutter’s arrival. I have been preparing with laser focus. At some point in the lesson, Harumi stops me, and with her hands makes a gesture around her eyes like opening blinders, a widening and softening of awareness. There’s laughter in the gesture, and it stays with me in the intensity of the rehearsals when I’m in Lucerne, creating space for presence, curiosity, noticing.

 

The second I encounter in the work of Pauline Oliveros, a composer who I can’t believe I never heard of before coming to Stanford. Her Sonic Meditations were a foundation of our fff rehearsals and my Tiny Studio Salons, and an inspiration for my text scores. Here are the first words in the published version of this collection:

Music is a welcome by-product of this activity.

 

Oliveros has a drawing that she used frequently as a guide to attention, a circle with a dot in the center of it.

 

She describes the dot as inward attention, and the circle as attention all round. [find where she talks about this and cite]. I’m sure there’s humor in this gesture too; wouldn’t someone who sent postcards of herself in drag with the caption “Beethoven was a Lesbian” have delighted in the sober meditative attention of countless accolytes staring at a line drawing of a boob? I corral my mind back to the drawing, to the gesture it signifies. There’s space in it for breath, laughter, contraction, expansion.

intro sonic meditations.png
circledot.jpeg
Gislen map PAR.jpg
Baz Kershaw, "Practice as Research through Performance," in Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, eds., Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 104-125.
Lucy Cotter, Reclaiming Artistic Research (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2019). 

(A second edition will be available in mid-April 2024: https://www.reclaimingartisticresearch.com/)

Matana Roberts, Coin Coin Chapters 1-5 (Montreal: Constellation Records, 2010-2024), accessed March 1, 2024,  https://cstrecords.com/pages/matana-roberts?shpxid=e7e333a1-852f-4e8e-bf7c-d000d431fb93 

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 1974).

© 2024 by Michiko Theurer. Powered and secured by Wix

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