Yvonne Buchheim and Iain Biggs
Conversation (to join)
Published in the Song Archive Project publication SAP (2011)
Iain Biggs
I want to suggest that this book might be understood as an invitation to join a conversation that I think is vital to your approach as an artist; one that makes your work unusually inclusive and outward looking. I use conversation because I think it’s a more accurate term than the word ‘discourse’ for the kinds of exchange between artists I find most valuable. By contrast good conversations are free formed, open-ended, multi-layered - as much about listening as speaking. They accommodate factual argument, gossip, intellectual speculation, analysis, beliefs and accounts of experience. I think your work is similarly open in the exchanges that are vital to its existence, not least because what you do is dependent on conversation and a willingness to listen. I suppose this emphasis on conversation is reinforced by the fact that the ideas behind the Song Archive Project originated with a conversation.
Yvonne Buchheim
Yes, a heated discussion that resulted from a request to sing a song in an Irish pub. I could only remember German Socialist marching tunes from my childhood in East Germany but I didn’t think they were appropriate for a sing-song; so in the end I chose a Russian folk song instead. Afterwards I was questioned about my identity due to my choice of song and that got me thinking about the relationship between our identity, and the songs we choose to sing.
Iain Biggs
In one sense, of course, the starting-point was that you were asked to make a work in response to Johann Gottfried Herder’s Volkslied?
Yvonne Buchheim
I proposed to the ACC gallery in Weimar to undertake a contemporary response to Herder’s song collection and theory from 1778/79. He suggests that the cultural identity of a people is reflected through their song traditions. The theory has to be understood within its historical context in the search for a German identity and is driven by the Romantic notion of folk or nation as a cultural rather than a political entity. I realized that the trouble with Herder’s song collection is the narrowness of his concept of a Volkslied (folk song). He claims ‘rarely does one find beautiful works everywhere and at all times’ and that there needs to be a sense of beauty in songs. He even talks about ‘the mob on the streets, who never sing or compose but only yell’. I oppose this view as I find it an exclusive definition of the role of song because it ignores many popular forms.
In response to this narrow definition I asked ordinary people on the streets of Weimar for a song of their choice. I did not impose any limits on the type of song, the lengths or quality of singing, as long as it was sung from memory and performed on the spot in front of a camera. Herder’s theories on identity and classifications became the starting point for a whole series of artworks under the umbrella of the Song Archive Project (SAP) where I juxtapose distrust in classification and authority with a belief in personal expression and independence.
Iain Biggs
The title of this book suggests an abbreviation of the Song Archive Project. Are there other meanings associated to SAP?
Yvonne Buchheim
The SAP title became playful and poignant in the process of making this book because of an attempt to reduce and distil to its very essence the Song Archive Project. Over the years the song collection has grown into a somewhat monstrous and anarchic quantity. Although I access the songs on a regular basis to edit works for exhibitions, I had never attempted to open this messy collection for research purposes. The process of turning it into an accessible archive was assisted by discussions with archivist Ellie Finch and by the design from Alex Rich; the Who What When Folders introduced a loose but coherent order. With this system I counted a total of 905 songs and made 96 available to the contributors who subsequently chose the 21 songs that feature at the beginning of the book and can be viewed online (song-archive.org).
Iain Biggs
When did the song collection turn into an archive and what is the relationship between this extensive song collection and your art works?
Yvonne Buchheim
The inception of the archive happened almost accidentally. As the collection grew with songs from different countries I realised the physical and conceptual potential of the archive. Each period of song recording is also a process of research into a specific place and community and interventions and public events are used to trigger exchange and dialogue. The individual songs from the Song Archive Project provide a source for site-specific video installations, exhibition and public events that allows me to look at a specific subject matter such as cultural and at times political themes. The potential of the SAP lies in the structure it provides to develop very different art works that are based on exchange and collaboration. My ambition is not to record as many songs as possible, but rather present those songs as catalysts for people. That’s where the archive becomes a living ‘thing’ rather than a closed or sealed archive.
Iain Biggs
Can you describe how do you go about approaching people to sing and what situations and places have you encountered so far?
Yvonne Buchheim
I approach people in all kinds of public places with the request for a song. Most people decline but over the course of the conversation I attempt to draw from each person a spontaneous performance in front of a camera. The sudden interruption of everyday scenes is crucial and reveals not only startled reactions but unexpected communication. Around 1 in 15 people agree to sing on the spot in this unexpected way with no time for preparation or rehearsal. Also I never suggest a particular song and surprisingly, very few people choose the same song and the collection includes all kinds of musical genres including pop, rock, indie, rap, punk, death metal as well as lullabies, children songs, advertisement jingles and surprising made up tunes. I have recorded songs in six different countries: Weimar (2003), Cork (2005), Strasbourg (2006), Newtown and the Banw valley in Wales (2007), Nashville (2006) and Tehran (2005). I have also recorded in several locations in England over the years including: a journey from Southampton to Sunderland (2007) and the University of Essex in Colchester (2010). With each location comes a set of differences that has more to do with the particularities of place rather than nation.
Iain Biggs
What goes through our heads when we are asked to sing out of the blue in front of a camera? The SAP recordings seem to capture a shift of focus from what people sing to how they sing it?
Yvonne Buchheim
I initially began with a focus on identity in the work entitled Herder’s Legacy; songs recorded in front of a white neutral background to eliminate any reference to place, for example, in songs no 24, 152 and 302. Paradoxically, this reduction and focus on the singer led to the shift from what to how people sing and the presence of the camera impacts on the performance in several ways. The camera gaze appears to offer an insight into how humans behave, how we deal with personal challenge, expectation and disappointment in oneself. For example, during a 2006 exhibition at the Cheekwood Museum of the Art in Nashville the audience was invited to perform themselves on a temporary stage while well known song quotes were projected onto a screen. This installation was intended to tempt the viewer into a performance, which was recorded and screened via live link into a different part of the museum. A potential performer must imagine oneself performing the song before doing it. Thereby they create an image, a Fremdbild (a sense of how one is seen by others) before deciding to take on this personal challenge. The gap, between the standards for behaviour we expect of ourselves and our actual behaviour is why, for many people, the simple request to sing triggers a complex set of difficulties. The singers from song numbers 500 and 558 don’t seem to struggle with this disparity.
Iain Biggs
For me there’s a central question about interaction and participation through your work, about the shift in the role of the audience. Do you think that all SAP exhibitions and public events have some element of rousing a ‘passive’ audience into active participation?
Yvonne Buchheim
Many of my concerns link back to the Situationist International group with their interventions into mass media and advertising. I am interested in blurring the distinction between the passerby and the observer in public space by turning the shopkeeper into a singer and encouraging the theatre audience member to become a stage performer. By shifting habits and presuppositions we can experience another self, imagine our other possible selves. When witnessing someone performing a song we identify with the singer’s feelings of joy, excitement, difficulty or failure. We relate to their emotional expression in a very visceral, immediate way. Becoming active in this way stimulates people and normal conventions can be revealed or broken (song no 404).
Iain Biggs
Looking through the archive I was particularly struck by the characteristics that two performances of the same song, for instance Over the Rainbow from Wales (song no 554) and Nashville (song no 503) have and don’t have in common. The two women who sing may be about the same age, but what they project as individual members of two very different ‘regional’ cultures – if that’s the right term - seems to me very different in terms of what I’d call cultural confidence, to name just one characteristic. Is this the type of aspect of the performances you want the viewer to reflect on?
Yvonne Buchheim
I am intrigued by how confidence and embarrassment are completely subjective emotional states of mind, it has, in fact, nothing to do with the actual (in)ability to sing. Often one starts off very unsure of themselves, slightly irritated by the unusual request of singing unprepared in front of a camera then gains confidence throughout the song, only to feel embarrassed by forgotten song lyrics a few seconds later.
Iain Biggs
With Stagefright, your recent series of public events that combines performance and lectures encourages responses from people in different ways. Although the emphasis seems to be similar to earlier SAP works, with Stagefright you seem to be raising questions about issues around embarrassment and our capacity for deception in our social interactions?
Yvonne Buchheim
Stagefright developed out of a whole series of previous public events, all attempting to turn the audience into performers. It’s been a real challenge and at times it seemed disastrous, for example when attempting to transfer the concept of an Irish pub night into a German tavern because improvised sing-songs are rather rare in my hometown Weimar. Although the event was advertised in the local media and lots of people came to the event, they were too inhibited to sing in public – for hours it looked like a complete failure!
In contrast the concept of Stagefright is much more constructed through ‘tips on how to overcome stage fright’ whereby the audience learns odd facts about singing and human behaviour before being tempted on stage for a spontaneous solo performance. It combines elements of performance, video screening, lecture and audience participation through fictional practical exercises. This is not as serious as it sounds: at one point the whole theatre audience grunts, howls and neighs in an attempt to create an animal orchestra.
Iain Biggs
How have the collaboration for this book benefitted your art practice? What inspires the material for the lecture component of Stagefright?
Yvonne Buchheim
A lot of the knowledge and theories in the Stagefright lectures stems from the collaborations in this book. In order to find contributors to the book I looked at research on the periphery of my own interests and offered the SAP as a starting point for dialogue. I was curious as to where art meets behavioral psychology, neurology, philosophy, fiction and art criticism. I was intrigued by how each contributor viewed the same songs but extracted different information from it and created a context through their own research field. In Stagefright I pass on some of these insights and I add questions about how we live our lives and deal with normative conventions. The request to sing a song publicly turns into a catalyst to engage people and reflect on their own views.
Iain Biggs
How would you characterise the role of the camera in your work, both in relation to yourself as the artist/facilitator and for your participants? I ask because you have infrequently stepped out from behind the camera in front. What changes when you yourself become a performer and in this way part of the archive?
Yvonne Buchheim
As a non-singer, I leave my safety zone by stepping out in front of the camera, and put myself in a vulnerable position where anything can happen. I attempt to sing and I am faced with issues of failure and loss of control. I understand singing in public as a personal challenge and am confronted with my own insecurities. I am intrigued by the shift that one undergoes in knowing the camera is switched on. The 3-channel video piece ‘Before and After Presence’ uses footage of this transition. It also shows how lyrics provide the basic standard by which most people judge their performance and when one forgets, suddenly the structure of the song falls apart. People deal with this situation very differently.
Another attempt to identify the role of the camera happened during my residency at the University of Essex. This remarkable counter-modernist purpose built campus outside Colchester houses one of the few still operating paternoster lifts in the library building. I was intrigued by how the open cubicles can become like a stage set that one cannot escape from if a camera was placed in a very visible position directly in front. By introducing very small shifts from the everyday, for example standing slightly awkwardly or bringing an unusual object into the lift, a spontaneous play unfolds: amateur actors following a loose script to merge with unknowing fellow lift companions. Sometimes bystanders will become amused observers, some even compelled to document the scenario on their mobile phone.
Iain Biggs
Could you explain what the political dimension of the SAP are?
Yvonne Buchheim
In most places political issues surfaced in some form or other: in Strasbourg, Cork and Weimar history became apparent through the chosen songs and in Wales the use of language often seemed a political decision informed by a strong sense of identity.
In a very different way in Iran the simple request to record songs became inadvertently contentious due to the restricting law on female public singing. The fact that I was recording the song on camera and therefore could show it to a mixed audience turned the performance into a prohibited act and only a few women were prepared to take the risk and defy the ban. It made me very aware of my own country’s history and my position as a woman in a foreign country and I consequently decided to perform a German folk song Meine Gedanken sind frei (My Thoughts Are Free) in public places in Tehran. This particular old German song with roots in the 13th century was banned both during the German Revolution in 1848/49 and the Third Reich.
Iain Biggs
SAP is moving into a new phase with this book, finding another way to be an ‘open’ research field rather than a closed ‘archive’. How does this change the way you intend to work in future and how do you envisage its users engaging with it?
Yvonne Buchheim
Well, I guess making the book has given me the analogy to the sap taken by a forester: I intend to scrape back the bark, drill a small hole, wait a while, collect the sap and turn it into a whole range of surprising objects that people can enjoy and interact with. In other words, I intend to keep my work open for exchange and collaboration and envisage that this book and the interconnected Stagefright performances bring the SAP to a wider audience and act as a catalyst for new ideas and projects.
Conversation (to join)
Published in the Song Archive Project publication SAP (2011)
Iain Biggs
I want to suggest that this book might be understood as an invitation to join a conversation that I think is vital to your approach as an artist; one that makes your work unusually inclusive and outward looking. I use conversation because I think it’s a more accurate term than the word ‘discourse’ for the kinds of exchange between artists I find most valuable. By contrast good conversations are free formed, open-ended, multi-layered - as much about listening as speaking. They accommodate factual argument, gossip, intellectual speculation, analysis, beliefs and accounts of experience. I think your work is similarly open in the exchanges that are vital to its existence, not least because what you do is dependent on conversation and a willingness to listen. I suppose this emphasis on conversation is reinforced by the fact that the ideas behind the Song Archive Project originated with a conversation.
Yvonne Buchheim
Yes, a heated discussion that resulted from a request to sing a song in an Irish pub. I could only remember German Socialist marching tunes from my childhood in East Germany but I didn’t think they were appropriate for a sing-song; so in the end I chose a Russian folk song instead. Afterwards I was questioned about my identity due to my choice of song and that got me thinking about the relationship between our identity, and the songs we choose to sing.
Iain Biggs
In one sense, of course, the starting-point was that you were asked to make a work in response to Johann Gottfried Herder’s Volkslied?
Yvonne Buchheim
I proposed to the ACC gallery in Weimar to undertake a contemporary response to Herder’s song collection and theory from 1778/79. He suggests that the cultural identity of a people is reflected through their song traditions. The theory has to be understood within its historical context in the search for a German identity and is driven by the Romantic notion of folk or nation as a cultural rather than a political entity. I realized that the trouble with Herder’s song collection is the narrowness of his concept of a Volkslied (folk song). He claims ‘rarely does one find beautiful works everywhere and at all times’ and that there needs to be a sense of beauty in songs. He even talks about ‘the mob on the streets, who never sing or compose but only yell’. I oppose this view as I find it an exclusive definition of the role of song because it ignores many popular forms.
In response to this narrow definition I asked ordinary people on the streets of Weimar for a song of their choice. I did not impose any limits on the type of song, the lengths or quality of singing, as long as it was sung from memory and performed on the spot in front of a camera. Herder’s theories on identity and classifications became the starting point for a whole series of artworks under the umbrella of the Song Archive Project (SAP) where I juxtapose distrust in classification and authority with a belief in personal expression and independence.
Iain Biggs
The title of this book suggests an abbreviation of the Song Archive Project. Are there other meanings associated to SAP?
Yvonne Buchheim
The SAP title became playful and poignant in the process of making this book because of an attempt to reduce and distil to its very essence the Song Archive Project. Over the years the song collection has grown into a somewhat monstrous and anarchic quantity. Although I access the songs on a regular basis to edit works for exhibitions, I had never attempted to open this messy collection for research purposes. The process of turning it into an accessible archive was assisted by discussions with archivist Ellie Finch and by the design from Alex Rich; the Who What When Folders introduced a loose but coherent order. With this system I counted a total of 905 songs and made 96 available to the contributors who subsequently chose the 21 songs that feature at the beginning of the book and can be viewed online (song-archive.org).
Iain Biggs
When did the song collection turn into an archive and what is the relationship between this extensive song collection and your art works?
Yvonne Buchheim
The inception of the archive happened almost accidentally. As the collection grew with songs from different countries I realised the physical and conceptual potential of the archive. Each period of song recording is also a process of research into a specific place and community and interventions and public events are used to trigger exchange and dialogue. The individual songs from the Song Archive Project provide a source for site-specific video installations, exhibition and public events that allows me to look at a specific subject matter such as cultural and at times political themes. The potential of the SAP lies in the structure it provides to develop very different art works that are based on exchange and collaboration. My ambition is not to record as many songs as possible, but rather present those songs as catalysts for people. That’s where the archive becomes a living ‘thing’ rather than a closed or sealed archive.
Iain Biggs
Can you describe how do you go about approaching people to sing and what situations and places have you encountered so far?
Yvonne Buchheim
I approach people in all kinds of public places with the request for a song. Most people decline but over the course of the conversation I attempt to draw from each person a spontaneous performance in front of a camera. The sudden interruption of everyday scenes is crucial and reveals not only startled reactions but unexpected communication. Around 1 in 15 people agree to sing on the spot in this unexpected way with no time for preparation or rehearsal. Also I never suggest a particular song and surprisingly, very few people choose the same song and the collection includes all kinds of musical genres including pop, rock, indie, rap, punk, death metal as well as lullabies, children songs, advertisement jingles and surprising made up tunes. I have recorded songs in six different countries: Weimar (2003), Cork (2005), Strasbourg (2006), Newtown and the Banw valley in Wales (2007), Nashville (2006) and Tehran (2005). I have also recorded in several locations in England over the years including: a journey from Southampton to Sunderland (2007) and the University of Essex in Colchester (2010). With each location comes a set of differences that has more to do with the particularities of place rather than nation.
Iain Biggs
What goes through our heads when we are asked to sing out of the blue in front of a camera? The SAP recordings seem to capture a shift of focus from what people sing to how they sing it?
Yvonne Buchheim
I initially began with a focus on identity in the work entitled Herder’s Legacy; songs recorded in front of a white neutral background to eliminate any reference to place, for example, in songs no 24, 152 and 302. Paradoxically, this reduction and focus on the singer led to the shift from what to how people sing and the presence of the camera impacts on the performance in several ways. The camera gaze appears to offer an insight into how humans behave, how we deal with personal challenge, expectation and disappointment in oneself. For example, during a 2006 exhibition at the Cheekwood Museum of the Art in Nashville the audience was invited to perform themselves on a temporary stage while well known song quotes were projected onto a screen. This installation was intended to tempt the viewer into a performance, which was recorded and screened via live link into a different part of the museum. A potential performer must imagine oneself performing the song before doing it. Thereby they create an image, a Fremdbild (a sense of how one is seen by others) before deciding to take on this personal challenge. The gap, between the standards for behaviour we expect of ourselves and our actual behaviour is why, for many people, the simple request to sing triggers a complex set of difficulties. The singers from song numbers 500 and 558 don’t seem to struggle with this disparity.
Iain Biggs
For me there’s a central question about interaction and participation through your work, about the shift in the role of the audience. Do you think that all SAP exhibitions and public events have some element of rousing a ‘passive’ audience into active participation?
Yvonne Buchheim
Many of my concerns link back to the Situationist International group with their interventions into mass media and advertising. I am interested in blurring the distinction between the passerby and the observer in public space by turning the shopkeeper into a singer and encouraging the theatre audience member to become a stage performer. By shifting habits and presuppositions we can experience another self, imagine our other possible selves. When witnessing someone performing a song we identify with the singer’s feelings of joy, excitement, difficulty or failure. We relate to their emotional expression in a very visceral, immediate way. Becoming active in this way stimulates people and normal conventions can be revealed or broken (song no 404).
Iain Biggs
Looking through the archive I was particularly struck by the characteristics that two performances of the same song, for instance Over the Rainbow from Wales (song no 554) and Nashville (song no 503) have and don’t have in common. The two women who sing may be about the same age, but what they project as individual members of two very different ‘regional’ cultures – if that’s the right term - seems to me very different in terms of what I’d call cultural confidence, to name just one characteristic. Is this the type of aspect of the performances you want the viewer to reflect on?
Yvonne Buchheim
I am intrigued by how confidence and embarrassment are completely subjective emotional states of mind, it has, in fact, nothing to do with the actual (in)ability to sing. Often one starts off very unsure of themselves, slightly irritated by the unusual request of singing unprepared in front of a camera then gains confidence throughout the song, only to feel embarrassed by forgotten song lyrics a few seconds later.
Iain Biggs
With Stagefright, your recent series of public events that combines performance and lectures encourages responses from people in different ways. Although the emphasis seems to be similar to earlier SAP works, with Stagefright you seem to be raising questions about issues around embarrassment and our capacity for deception in our social interactions?
Yvonne Buchheim
Stagefright developed out of a whole series of previous public events, all attempting to turn the audience into performers. It’s been a real challenge and at times it seemed disastrous, for example when attempting to transfer the concept of an Irish pub night into a German tavern because improvised sing-songs are rather rare in my hometown Weimar. Although the event was advertised in the local media and lots of people came to the event, they were too inhibited to sing in public – for hours it looked like a complete failure!
In contrast the concept of Stagefright is much more constructed through ‘tips on how to overcome stage fright’ whereby the audience learns odd facts about singing and human behaviour before being tempted on stage for a spontaneous solo performance. It combines elements of performance, video screening, lecture and audience participation through fictional practical exercises. This is not as serious as it sounds: at one point the whole theatre audience grunts, howls and neighs in an attempt to create an animal orchestra.
Iain Biggs
How have the collaboration for this book benefitted your art practice? What inspires the material for the lecture component of Stagefright?
Yvonne Buchheim
A lot of the knowledge and theories in the Stagefright lectures stems from the collaborations in this book. In order to find contributors to the book I looked at research on the periphery of my own interests and offered the SAP as a starting point for dialogue. I was curious as to where art meets behavioral psychology, neurology, philosophy, fiction and art criticism. I was intrigued by how each contributor viewed the same songs but extracted different information from it and created a context through their own research field. In Stagefright I pass on some of these insights and I add questions about how we live our lives and deal with normative conventions. The request to sing a song publicly turns into a catalyst to engage people and reflect on their own views.
Iain Biggs
How would you characterise the role of the camera in your work, both in relation to yourself as the artist/facilitator and for your participants? I ask because you have infrequently stepped out from behind the camera in front. What changes when you yourself become a performer and in this way part of the archive?
Yvonne Buchheim
As a non-singer, I leave my safety zone by stepping out in front of the camera, and put myself in a vulnerable position where anything can happen. I attempt to sing and I am faced with issues of failure and loss of control. I understand singing in public as a personal challenge and am confronted with my own insecurities. I am intrigued by the shift that one undergoes in knowing the camera is switched on. The 3-channel video piece ‘Before and After Presence’ uses footage of this transition. It also shows how lyrics provide the basic standard by which most people judge their performance and when one forgets, suddenly the structure of the song falls apart. People deal with this situation very differently.
Another attempt to identify the role of the camera happened during my residency at the University of Essex. This remarkable counter-modernist purpose built campus outside Colchester houses one of the few still operating paternoster lifts in the library building. I was intrigued by how the open cubicles can become like a stage set that one cannot escape from if a camera was placed in a very visible position directly in front. By introducing very small shifts from the everyday, for example standing slightly awkwardly or bringing an unusual object into the lift, a spontaneous play unfolds: amateur actors following a loose script to merge with unknowing fellow lift companions. Sometimes bystanders will become amused observers, some even compelled to document the scenario on their mobile phone.
Iain Biggs
Could you explain what the political dimension of the SAP are?
Yvonne Buchheim
In most places political issues surfaced in some form or other: in Strasbourg, Cork and Weimar history became apparent through the chosen songs and in Wales the use of language often seemed a political decision informed by a strong sense of identity.
In a very different way in Iran the simple request to record songs became inadvertently contentious due to the restricting law on female public singing. The fact that I was recording the song on camera and therefore could show it to a mixed audience turned the performance into a prohibited act and only a few women were prepared to take the risk and defy the ban. It made me very aware of my own country’s history and my position as a woman in a foreign country and I consequently decided to perform a German folk song Meine Gedanken sind frei (My Thoughts Are Free) in public places in Tehran. This particular old German song with roots in the 13th century was banned both during the German Revolution in 1848/49 and the Third Reich.
Iain Biggs
SAP is moving into a new phase with this book, finding another way to be an ‘open’ research field rather than a closed ‘archive’. How does this change the way you intend to work in future and how do you envisage its users engaging with it?
Yvonne Buchheim
Well, I guess making the book has given me the analogy to the sap taken by a forester: I intend to scrape back the bark, drill a small hole, wait a while, collect the sap and turn it into a whole range of surprising objects that people can enjoy and interact with. In other words, I intend to keep my work open for exchange and collaboration and envisage that this book and the interconnected Stagefright performances bring the SAP to a wider audience and act as a catalyst for new ideas and projects.
