'I don't have to prove that I am creative!
'I don't have to prove that I am creative!
All my pictures are confused
And now I'm going to take me to you.'
Talking Heads- Artists Only
Its linguistic permutations play my mind like music. Scanning down, I think of Delia Derbyshire's recordings of ghostly voices discussing horrid dreams as they stumble through glum electronic fog. If I scan across I think of the dizzying incantations of Einstein On The Beach based on the fractured, shape-shifting language of an autistic man.
Remembering Einstein On The Beach means remembering Philip Glass, an old friend of Nauman's- they used to make music together. I remember the cover of the CD: a scary neon tube buzzing with Lynchian nastiness; crackling with the secret life of machines. As I flick around the one hundred statements, I remember the drifting, drugkissed drones of Spiritualized's '200 Bars' and how a tired girl's voice forces them forward, counting 'one, two, three, four' like a frightened child tiptoeing towards Mister Wolf or like an analgesic, slow-motion remix of Glass' choir, who recite digits with amphetamaniac intensity. I see language with the chugging rhythm of a hospital respirator; language with sinister intensity. I think of the shaking German girl in Paths of Glory who gradually silences American soldiers, I think of cattle, war poetry, the words of Wittgenstein, the motorik beat of Neu!, the hellish pulse of industry, tyranny, and what music would look like as a manipulated light source. I think 'One Hundred Live And Die' comes closest to articulating real 'metal machine music' and does this, paradoxically, without making a single sound.
What can we make out of this other Nauman work, Self-Portrait As A Fountain?
Now all that neon has worn off. Here we have a skinny young aesthete. He's presenting himself in a role, as a thing, a fountain, an object which swollen organs of the art world fall upon as meaningful. So here is R. Mutt playing around through Bruce Nauman, a ready-made man producing a recirculated stream of piss? Nope, no way. I cross that out. But Duchamp's contemporaries, the Futurists, who adored speed, metal fusing with flesh, industrial rhythm and fascism, loved noise, too. Luigi Russolo built 'noise machines' which he incorporated into dissonant musical scores. He coined and developed the idea of the 'Art of Noise' in a manifesto. Paul Morley names his anonymous electronic music collective after this text in the 1980s and Nauman later transforms language into pure sound and denatures it into noise with his late installation Raw Materials.
The aesthete spits water playfully, nude, like a figure in Dionysian revelry. As he self-consciously performs a cover version of Duchamp's great work, I wonder about post-punk and its desire to deconstruct, play around with signification, meaning and convention. What's exciting about the piece is how it distorts representation and shuns interpretation. I can force this frozen Nauman through loads of archetypes and there's still a lurking sense of aporia: meaning is blocked and I can't say why. He's a classical figure in Dionysian revelry; or an actual fountain from a terrifying future... a man with metal veins, with a transformed system of pipes; he's a rich postmodern boy constructed and conversant in metalanguage, repeating gender theory, addicted to the sensorily-disordered sex practiced in the toilets of weirdly Dionysian discos. He makes me think of Momus' playful, literate pop. I want to place puns and parentheses around the image, around everything, like a good deconstructionist and accept the inherent failure in my attempts to interrogate its meaning. When I ask the young man questions he spits in my face.
As an interlude, here is Sadie Benning ravenously consuming critical theory in a confined space.
Her films exist on this invisible wavelength in minute static-scarred pieces so we'll have to abandon her video work for the information which orbits it and its key subject, Benning herself. The snatches of her films I've seen are full of self-loathing, fear, despair and a litany of other miserable nouns. It's easy to parallel Benning's adolescent confessional/diaristic impulse with the unceasing self-recording of outsider musicians like Jandek and Daniel Johnston. Much as they record on Dictaphones (or used to anyway), Benning expresses herself with her own lo-fi technology: the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera. These studies of isolation, dominated by deterioration, find sonic analogues in the nihilism of groups like Flipper or the doomsaying of the GZA; the same self-awareness and removal from the masculine in the work of The Slits (where compulsory heterosexuality is the consequence of capatalism, 'just another marketing ploy.') The riot-grrl lineage persists in Benning's own group, Le Tigre with their songs about Minimalist praxis, John Cassavetes ('genius? misogynist?') and ecstatic, electroclash breviaries of feminism.
Nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. 'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire. 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Then I'll turn the last gasp of focus onto Nam June Paik's Electronic Television and the work of Tim Hecker. I will try to say things simply. I will try to finish quickly. I'm aware as I write of very difficult and confusing noises. I'm also aware of the failure of one of my speakers. My music has lost one dimension: it is flatter, more like an image than ever before.
What I like about Tim Hecker's work (and I don't really think this is an original thing to say) is how it sounds old and new. I like that this is a familiar sensation which other people have. How the white noise crashes, how everything ends, in delirious shortwave, conjures old video footage of the solar system, Brothers Quay ballets and again, slightly Lynchian sensations. Who is Hecker, the listener wonders, working away in the digital wilderness? There he is on television in Canada, deliberately destroying records, stabbing equipment until it malfunctions, just like Christian Marclay used to. And Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus group, had the same desire to deform modern technology and mangle electronic devices. In listening to Hecker we hear the decline of civilization playing out; we move towards the zero... everything eventually shuts down. This is not a particularly Fluxist thing to think. The tenets of play are observed but Hecker's work is not short or comic. He is the ghost in the machine. He sounds like a fridge buzzing on a multiple-substance comedown.
This narcotic bliss he supplies us with is very Fluxist, though. The movement demanded change and progression. This is what Hecker does, his work represents a break in ambient music and minimalism: it doesn't create the sonic environment but repeats it. The sound of Hecker is understood ineffably, hypnagogically, like car alarms, like language down a bad phone, we all recognise the sounds of machines, of industry, of malfunctioning equipment, because these things litter our lives and lurk in our heads. Hecker is performing a kind of mimesis. He is, if you like, electronic television.
I'm asking art and music questions. They always resist, never want to answer. They speak together, sit together in contorted mirrors, joining hands. Here are two sisters on conflicting medications, each mishearing the other's thoughts.
'One Hundred Live And Die' and 'Self-Portrait As A Fountain' by Bruce Nauman, photograph of Sadie Benning by Monique Jean and 'Living Inside' by Sadie Benning and 'Electronic Television' by Nam June Paik. No copyright infringement intended.
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