Postcards Home
In a series of short notes, three South African artists living abroad and working predominantly with sound, share some of their techniques and experiences by discussing their current sound art projects. James Beckett plays the streets of Istanbul; Frances Goodman prepares dinner for three in Antwerp and Mark Schreiber muses on the relationship of audio and architecture in London.
A postcard from Istanbul
by James Beckett
It has been bit of an odd time here for me as of late. I have been shuffling my stuff around trying to find an abode with no great success. I'm still in Amsterdam, preparing a series of songs, plays on traditional Turkish music, which I will recite on the streets of Istanbul this coming week.
The idea is to pose as an Austrian tourist who ran astray, and in the process developed a huge love of the local culture, absorbed as much as his small brain could hold and coughed it back up. For this deed I will purchase a bass guitar and small amplifier. Assets indeed. My working alias is 'Badjanak', which translates roughly as, 'we have some relation as we go out with woman from the same family'.
Earlier on, I met a great music historian by the name of John Heijmans. He's a bit obsessive on the topic of the 'Intonarumori' of Futurist Russollo. At the beginning of this year he asked me to join him to run a workshop in Xiamen, China, based on a few of the guiding principles of the noise intoners.
This was quite an odd encounter, being purveyors of an 80-year-old rumble in the collective Italian stomach to students of the fastest growing economy in the world. Quite fitting really - vast construction and industry coupled with reckless environmental control amounting to a near fascist expansion, kind of calls for the detailed cherry of a celebration of machinery.
Heijmans has offered me the facilities at his university to build an experiment in collaboration with a mathematician and a few programmers. I will obtain a set of pacemakers and a live model of the traffic networks of Holland from a hospital and a control centre respectively.
Both systems work on a feedback mechanism in order to regulate, one blood, and the other traffic. The idea is to take information gathered from one and use it as input for the other. In traffic this should lead to the flooding of a city grid and on that of the pacemaker, the synthesis of rush hour in the blood pressure of a human. I should be able to extract sound from this process at different stages although this is secondary. There should be some interesting patterns emerging during such collapse.
Other than the usual garb I have recently changed my CV to mention that I was born in Zimbabwe and as a result am greeted with less skepticism. People have stopped asking about flame-throwing cars in bid for a blank. Never mind the ANC, what on earth is the MDC?
James Beckett is a South African artist currently living and working in Amsterdam, Holland.
A postcard from Antwerp
by Frances Goodman
'...She started making a veil, embroidered with silk and tiny pearls. I would find her bent over it in the small hours of the night, squinting at the mass of frothy white, yellowed in the poor light. She would mutter to herself, and I could hear the words "perfect" and "happy", and "oh what a day"...'
'...I wander round the apartment calculating again and again what should be multiplied and what added. Mad mathematics in my head...'
'...I remember how her hair would blow across her face and catch on the wetness of her lipstick and she would pull the wayward strands back behind her ear, only to have the wind blow it free again...'
The sound piece I am currently working on is called Table for Three, a four-track sound artwork. The first track plays over speakers in the space itself. The sounds are those of three people eating a meal together in a restaurant. The listener will hear the clatter of crockery, the conversations and the background noises of the restaurant itself.
In the centre of the space is a table with the remnants of a meal on it - a full ashtray, knives and forks, used napkins etc. The sounds in the space, as well as the abandoned table, give a feeling of emptiness. There are three sets of headphones in the space, one at each seat of the table; the listener will have to sit down to put them on. When the headphones are on the listener will be able to hear the thoughts of one of the absent people at the table. The thoughts do not necessarily relate to the meal itself, they are internal thoughts, narrative in nature.
One of the pervading themes of the different monologues is the slip between the expectations of others, and one's own desires and dreams. All three characters in the work are confronted with a moment of choice, a choice that (they believe) will affect their position as women within the confines of society.
The monologues are constructed in a personal and intimate way, yet they all only give a snippet of an experience, one interpretation of a set of events. There is a certain ambiguity in the piece as a whole - it never becomes clear whether the different women are thinking about each other, if their meeting triggers their thoughts, or how complicit they are in the events of each other's lives.
One's interpretation will also depend on how much time is given to the piece. Each set of headphones only holds the thoughts of one of the women, so to listen to only one set will give one point of view. And yet, if one listens to all three, the situation will still never be fully explained and resolved. The sum of the parts does not necessarily equal the whole.
Frances Goodman is a South African artist currently living and working in Antwerp, Belgium. Her recent installation'David', is reviewed in our current issue by James Sey.
A postcard from London
by Mark Schreiber
It is 32 feet from my ex-factory apartment door to the street, not to mention another 25 steps downward. This movement towards the outside world includes the 'non-residential feel' of our winding passageway that is at times plunged in to sudden, windowless dark as light bulbs and electricity fail, leading to a dependency on touch. The soft hissing, humming sound of a ventilator re-assures me that I have reached my door. My tactile senses are challenged further when matching the keys with their corresponding keyholes.
As I position the microphone on my bedroom window ledge to face our grassy courtyard, I am met with the sounds of:
1. Creaking washing line
2. Birdsong
3. Aeroplane flights in regular intervals
4. Muffled voices from open windows
5. Loner bees
6. Drills
7. Saws
8. Hammers
9. Shouting
10. Radio reception drowning all of the above
I have been nine years abroad now with no idea when, if ever, I am to return. For the time being I intend to further my research at Middlesex University, where I have just completed their Sonic Arts course.
That was what brought me over from Berlin to London three years ago and my work now mainly focuses on the relationship between sound and factors that influence its character. These are architectural and spatial concerns, as well as social contexts that provide for a reasonably varied source of reading material.
Practically, this may be explored through live performances such as at the South London Gallery on the July 16 this year. Processed recordings of the surroundings were used in the hour-long collaboration with Lee Gamble, in a greenhouse, forming part of Peter Coffin's 'Beating About The Bush' installation.
It was with my recent installation entitled 'Two Cells Connect' that I had the opportunity to make a reference both to the history of the building and to the problem posed when a space is made inaccessible to the general public. With the demise of the Old Truman Brewery business, and its new role as gallery, a courtyard area now stands silent to the workers' feet - its doors locked.
The architectural theorist, Bernard Tschumi, refers to a building structure as containing a recurring state of separation making up a whole that, within this state, is in an eternal mode of instability - 'variation and transformation'. One can also argue that architecture, as a system of planning and design, is made up of laws that govern its being.
In the installation, slightly abstracted sounds of bottles are triggered by and interspersed with live sounds captured by microphone from inside the building. Thus the past and present are brought together and these sounds can be heard via an open window.
This allows not only for a visual view of the space, but also an acoustic one in that, in such a way, one may enter into this place aurally. Perhaps by 'accessing' such a forbidden and mysterious place aurally, the experience may be accompanied by an unconscious sense of 'guilt'. A possible relationship with the Law thus unfolds as we negotiate our way through spaces.
Mark Schreiber is a South African artist currently living and working in London.
