Sean Ashton
Song Archive Project
Art Exchange Gallery, University of Essex
Residency April - May 2010
Exhibition 6 October - 7 November 2010
Since 2003 Yvonne Buchheim has approached people and asked them to sing the first song they can think of, to camera, wherever they happen to be. The ongoing Song Archive Project numbers over 800 songs from 6 countries, and forms the basis of works in various media. The latest, Before and After Present, made during Buchheim’s residency at the University of Essex, adds a further 100. These are shown on a central monitor in their entirety. Two other monitors, one either side, show what happened before and after the performance. On the left: the cagey consent, the mumbled rehearsals, the false starts, the embarrassed laughter, all the anxiety that fills what Buchheim calls ‘the silence before the song’. On the right: the exhalations of relief, the blank stares of indifference, the can-I-go-now sense of minor accomplishment. Both play as 8-minute loops to the central screen’s 90-minute opus. As the title implies, Buchheim is more interested in the behaviour surrounding the performances than the performances themselves, perhaps testing the theory that we reveal more on entering into/emerging from an experience than during it.
Ninety-five per cent of people refuse to sing – unsurprising given the directness of Buchheim’s approach. But the interruption of the participant’s routine is key to the work; important, too, is the wider effect of the interruption, as reality is forced to accommodate the unscheduled event. Although the impromptu performances contrast markedly with the numbing façades of campus life – with its many architectural compromises, its lobbies and loading bays, its humming vents, its ceiling tiles and whiteboards – they are indebted to its captive sociality, which not only provides the artist with her performers but delivers a regular supply of contingencies.
These contingencies are a social realist’s dream. My favourite moment was the student who performs alongside a painting of Che Guevara (possibly a college project). Before he can begin, a friend turns up and he invites her to join in. Lisa declines, but makes a telling off-camera contribution. ‘Your T-shirt’s atrocious!’ she snaps. ‘A girl picked it for me,’ he replies, ‘I was like, “Is this sexy?”’; ‘She was like, “No.”…’. What’s notable is not just the T-shirt’s design (a girl in a mini-skirt with a pit-bull in each hand) or the intriguing politics of its acquisition (Why did he buy it when she told him it wasn’t sexy? And who is ‘she’ to him…?), but the way it eclipses Che, who has been shoved behind a pot plant.
Elsewhere, a diner sits in a canteen with his Coke and tabloid, slightly mortified to be in shot, yet determined not to move, as a student sings in Hindi to rapturous off-camera applause. The in-shot diner doesn’t clap, as though unsure whether to class himself as participant or onlooker. When a lecturer performs in her office, with her baby in a papoose, we hear the child snoring after the song’s end, the little one having slept throughout the performance. Effectively, Before and After Present is a compendium of all the things that can happen when something else is supposed to be happening. Occasionally, the two form an ironic counterpoint, as with the English undergrad’s rendition of ‘Bare Necessities’. Performed against the backdrop of a climbing wall, the ethos of the song is undermined by the leisure activity, with its decadent expenditure of energy. Like the canteen diner, the climber in the background can’t decide whether to stop or continue her recreation. She is literally left dangling.
These incidents embed the singers into their various contexts; even the solitary performers seem like extensions of their environment, organic components of its institutional facture. As to the performances themselves, we speculate whether the chosen song provides a regular interior soundtrack to the performer’s life or whether it’s been dredged up from the past, the only thing they can remember the words to. ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey suggests the pungent contemporaneity of the student halls, while ‘Bare Necessities’ feels recalled from childhood. Other songs evoke a more distant past. Some could be national anthems. The western pop canon is of course well represented, but because Buchheim’s captions give no titles, only the academic faculty of the performer, we are left to form our own judgements about the cultural provenance of songs that we don’t recognise. All the songs are signs, emblems of character and culture, but the absence of any contextualisation forces us to devise our own pseudo-ethnographic lexicon. Each song accrues significance through its proximity to others: alongside its non-English counterparts, an English mathematics student’s performance of ‘Easy Lover’ in any empty seminar room feels like an authentic document of 21st century Caucasiana.
Like Before and After Present, Split the Lark explores the hypothetical boundary between performance and everyday life. The piece evolved from observing the paternoster lift in the university library: a stationary camera was trained on the cubicle’s open face, recording the behaviour of the occupants as they travelled to the floors above and below. ‘Even though some pretended not to have seen the camera,’ says Buchheim, ‘they knew they were being filmed and acted or actively non-acted, and they knew that I, behind the camera, knew that they knew.’ Buchheim assembled a cast of students and asked them to simulate these responses, and to improvise other gestures that exaggerated or contrasted with this ‘natural’ behaviour. Filmed over the course of a single day, these actions were then combined with the initial footage showing the general users of the lift. The final five-minute video thus integrates choreographed with non-choreographed movements. But that is not the half of it: a third behavioural element is introduced by participants who deviated from Buchheim’s instructions, striking vaudevillian poses as they trundle past the camera (some bearing props that have surely not been approved by the artist). And perhaps there is a fourth element: we may speculate that these ‘hams’ were emulated by other passing opportunists, who, seeing that something was afoot, instinctively promoted themselves from general users of the lift to fully committed performers. I can’t be sure, but I suspect Buchheim’s lens has documented a mixture of non-actors, actors and those who wish to get in on the act.
The camera, as Susan Sontag famously remarked, changes what it sees, engendering a natural situationism. What does it show us in this instance? We see three lifts – the same lift filmed at different times – alongside one another, the middle lift ascending as the adjacent ones go down. The lifts move continuously in a single direction, serving up one person after another, like a series of restaurant meals in a dumb waiter. As the piece unfolds, the gestures become increasingly contrived and self-conscious: a couple snog ostentatiously; a man goes past painting a picture; someone empties a stone from his shoe; a woman in a fedora does her make-up; someone dressed as John McEnroe strums his tennis racket like a guitar; two women wearing hijabs ‘shun’ the lens, giggling to one another as they disappear from view. One performer has brought his own camera, which he turns on his audience in a flamboyant parody of a photographer.
Despite these theatricalities – whose cumulative effect is reminiscent of a variety show – it is not always easy to distinguish the ‘natural’ behaviour from the choreographed behaviour. Not all the gestures performed by the ‘actors’ are theatrical, and some of those performed by the non-actors could be mistaken for choreographed gestures. Moreover, Buchheim has edited the piece so that the same protagonists appear concurrently in adjacent lifts, a ‘theatrical’ self sometimes juxtaposed with a non-theatrical self, or two theatrical selves appearing together: on a second viewing, we notice that the man snogging and the man carrying a miniature table tennis bat are the same man; and at the end, the women in hijabs appear to ‘re-enact’ their earlier gesture.
When she first observed the occupants of the lift, Buchheim was interested in the point at which ‘being’ turns into ‘acting’. The camera, both passive witness and active stimulus, positions itself on this cusp, recouping existing actions as readymade performances, engendering new ones, and documenting those that she choreographed in advance. In the introduction to his 1995 book Happenings and Other Acts, Michael Kirby distinguishes between matrixed and non-matrixed performance. Non-matrixed performance is that which occurs ‘in the same time-place as the spectators’, while matrixed performance occurs in an imaginary time-place. Thus, an athlete in a stadium performs in our current time-place, whereas the actor playing Hamlet performs in the time-place of mediaeval Denmark. At first sight, Buchheim’s more adventurous performers impose imaginary or ‘matrixed’ time-places on the non-matrixed time-place of the paternoster lift. But the fact that we have no idea where any of this is taking place – context is deliberately withheld, and for all we know the lift might be a prop made to move through editing – makes it difficult to apply Kirby’s matrixial schema: we realise that our ability to do so, our ability to imagine an alternative time-place, is dependent on there being an actual identifiable time-place with which to contrast it. With Split the Lark, the identity of this time-place is ambiguous, and must be deduced through the character and behaviour of the protagonists.
Generally speaking, human behaviour fluctuates between performative and non-performative modes. At their most extreme, these are characterised by states of exhibition and inanition. If exhibition is what we feel when someone hands us a karaoke mike, then inanition is what we feel at bus stops and queues for the cash point – and especially in lifts. As the doors close, there is a sense of corporeal abeyance, a suspension of the body’s utile instincts, and we become aware of ourselves in a way that we don’t in other contexts – an awareness that is sometimes expressed as a series of ‘empty’ gestures. Thanks to the open face of the paternoster, Buchheim is able to see all this, to observe from an objective viewpoint what would otherwise be concealed. Her response as an artist, however, is to do more than invert inanition into exhibition; by introducing another performative axis – or, rather, allowing something patently theatrical to happen of its own accord – she provides a yardstick against which to measure its character. The result, as with the songs in Before and After Present, is not just an interruption or subversion of what’s already happening, but an extension of its non-matrixed character into the performative event.
Song Archive Project
Art Exchange Gallery, University of Essex
Residency April - May 2010
Exhibition 6 October - 7 November 2010
Since 2003 Yvonne Buchheim has approached people and asked them to sing the first song they can think of, to camera, wherever they happen to be. The ongoing Song Archive Project numbers over 800 songs from 6 countries, and forms the basis of works in various media. The latest, Before and After Present, made during Buchheim’s residency at the University of Essex, adds a further 100. These are shown on a central monitor in their entirety. Two other monitors, one either side, show what happened before and after the performance. On the left: the cagey consent, the mumbled rehearsals, the false starts, the embarrassed laughter, all the anxiety that fills what Buchheim calls ‘the silence before the song’. On the right: the exhalations of relief, the blank stares of indifference, the can-I-go-now sense of minor accomplishment. Both play as 8-minute loops to the central screen’s 90-minute opus. As the title implies, Buchheim is more interested in the behaviour surrounding the performances than the performances themselves, perhaps testing the theory that we reveal more on entering into/emerging from an experience than during it.
Ninety-five per cent of people refuse to sing – unsurprising given the directness of Buchheim’s approach. But the interruption of the participant’s routine is key to the work; important, too, is the wider effect of the interruption, as reality is forced to accommodate the unscheduled event. Although the impromptu performances contrast markedly with the numbing façades of campus life – with its many architectural compromises, its lobbies and loading bays, its humming vents, its ceiling tiles and whiteboards – they are indebted to its captive sociality, which not only provides the artist with her performers but delivers a regular supply of contingencies.
These contingencies are a social realist’s dream. My favourite moment was the student who performs alongside a painting of Che Guevara (possibly a college project). Before he can begin, a friend turns up and he invites her to join in. Lisa declines, but makes a telling off-camera contribution. ‘Your T-shirt’s atrocious!’ she snaps. ‘A girl picked it for me,’ he replies, ‘I was like, “Is this sexy?”’; ‘She was like, “No.”…’. What’s notable is not just the T-shirt’s design (a girl in a mini-skirt with a pit-bull in each hand) or the intriguing politics of its acquisition (Why did he buy it when she told him it wasn’t sexy? And who is ‘she’ to him…?), but the way it eclipses Che, who has been shoved behind a pot plant.
Elsewhere, a diner sits in a canteen with his Coke and tabloid, slightly mortified to be in shot, yet determined not to move, as a student sings in Hindi to rapturous off-camera applause. The in-shot diner doesn’t clap, as though unsure whether to class himself as participant or onlooker. When a lecturer performs in her office, with her baby in a papoose, we hear the child snoring after the song’s end, the little one having slept throughout the performance. Effectively, Before and After Present is a compendium of all the things that can happen when something else is supposed to be happening. Occasionally, the two form an ironic counterpoint, as with the English undergrad’s rendition of ‘Bare Necessities’. Performed against the backdrop of a climbing wall, the ethos of the song is undermined by the leisure activity, with its decadent expenditure of energy. Like the canteen diner, the climber in the background can’t decide whether to stop or continue her recreation. She is literally left dangling.
These incidents embed the singers into their various contexts; even the solitary performers seem like extensions of their environment, organic components of its institutional facture. As to the performances themselves, we speculate whether the chosen song provides a regular interior soundtrack to the performer’s life or whether it’s been dredged up from the past, the only thing they can remember the words to. ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey suggests the pungent contemporaneity of the student halls, while ‘Bare Necessities’ feels recalled from childhood. Other songs evoke a more distant past. Some could be national anthems. The western pop canon is of course well represented, but because Buchheim’s captions give no titles, only the academic faculty of the performer, we are left to form our own judgements about the cultural provenance of songs that we don’t recognise. All the songs are signs, emblems of character and culture, but the absence of any contextualisation forces us to devise our own pseudo-ethnographic lexicon. Each song accrues significance through its proximity to others: alongside its non-English counterparts, an English mathematics student’s performance of ‘Easy Lover’ in any empty seminar room feels like an authentic document of 21st century Caucasiana.
Like Before and After Present, Split the Lark explores the hypothetical boundary between performance and everyday life. The piece evolved from observing the paternoster lift in the university library: a stationary camera was trained on the cubicle’s open face, recording the behaviour of the occupants as they travelled to the floors above and below. ‘Even though some pretended not to have seen the camera,’ says Buchheim, ‘they knew they were being filmed and acted or actively non-acted, and they knew that I, behind the camera, knew that they knew.’ Buchheim assembled a cast of students and asked them to simulate these responses, and to improvise other gestures that exaggerated or contrasted with this ‘natural’ behaviour. Filmed over the course of a single day, these actions were then combined with the initial footage showing the general users of the lift. The final five-minute video thus integrates choreographed with non-choreographed movements. But that is not the half of it: a third behavioural element is introduced by participants who deviated from Buchheim’s instructions, striking vaudevillian poses as they trundle past the camera (some bearing props that have surely not been approved by the artist). And perhaps there is a fourth element: we may speculate that these ‘hams’ were emulated by other passing opportunists, who, seeing that something was afoot, instinctively promoted themselves from general users of the lift to fully committed performers. I can’t be sure, but I suspect Buchheim’s lens has documented a mixture of non-actors, actors and those who wish to get in on the act.
The camera, as Susan Sontag famously remarked, changes what it sees, engendering a natural situationism. What does it show us in this instance? We see three lifts – the same lift filmed at different times – alongside one another, the middle lift ascending as the adjacent ones go down. The lifts move continuously in a single direction, serving up one person after another, like a series of restaurant meals in a dumb waiter. As the piece unfolds, the gestures become increasingly contrived and self-conscious: a couple snog ostentatiously; a man goes past painting a picture; someone empties a stone from his shoe; a woman in a fedora does her make-up; someone dressed as John McEnroe strums his tennis racket like a guitar; two women wearing hijabs ‘shun’ the lens, giggling to one another as they disappear from view. One performer has brought his own camera, which he turns on his audience in a flamboyant parody of a photographer.
Despite these theatricalities – whose cumulative effect is reminiscent of a variety show – it is not always easy to distinguish the ‘natural’ behaviour from the choreographed behaviour. Not all the gestures performed by the ‘actors’ are theatrical, and some of those performed by the non-actors could be mistaken for choreographed gestures. Moreover, Buchheim has edited the piece so that the same protagonists appear concurrently in adjacent lifts, a ‘theatrical’ self sometimes juxtaposed with a non-theatrical self, or two theatrical selves appearing together: on a second viewing, we notice that the man snogging and the man carrying a miniature table tennis bat are the same man; and at the end, the women in hijabs appear to ‘re-enact’ their earlier gesture.
When she first observed the occupants of the lift, Buchheim was interested in the point at which ‘being’ turns into ‘acting’. The camera, both passive witness and active stimulus, positions itself on this cusp, recouping existing actions as readymade performances, engendering new ones, and documenting those that she choreographed in advance. In the introduction to his 1995 book Happenings and Other Acts, Michael Kirby distinguishes between matrixed and non-matrixed performance. Non-matrixed performance is that which occurs ‘in the same time-place as the spectators’, while matrixed performance occurs in an imaginary time-place. Thus, an athlete in a stadium performs in our current time-place, whereas the actor playing Hamlet performs in the time-place of mediaeval Denmark. At first sight, Buchheim’s more adventurous performers impose imaginary or ‘matrixed’ time-places on the non-matrixed time-place of the paternoster lift. But the fact that we have no idea where any of this is taking place – context is deliberately withheld, and for all we know the lift might be a prop made to move through editing – makes it difficult to apply Kirby’s matrixial schema: we realise that our ability to do so, our ability to imagine an alternative time-place, is dependent on there being an actual identifiable time-place with which to contrast it. With Split the Lark, the identity of this time-place is ambiguous, and must be deduced through the character and behaviour of the protagonists.
Generally speaking, human behaviour fluctuates between performative and non-performative modes. At their most extreme, these are characterised by states of exhibition and inanition. If exhibition is what we feel when someone hands us a karaoke mike, then inanition is what we feel at bus stops and queues for the cash point – and especially in lifts. As the doors close, there is a sense of corporeal abeyance, a suspension of the body’s utile instincts, and we become aware of ourselves in a way that we don’t in other contexts – an awareness that is sometimes expressed as a series of ‘empty’ gestures. Thanks to the open face of the paternoster, Buchheim is able to see all this, to observe from an objective viewpoint what would otherwise be concealed. Her response as an artist, however, is to do more than invert inanition into exhibition; by introducing another performative axis – or, rather, allowing something patently theatrical to happen of its own accord – she provides a yardstick against which to measure its character. The result, as with the songs in Before and After Present, is not just an interruption or subversion of what’s already happening, but an extension of its non-matrixed character into the performative event.
