Category: critical writing

Photos by Marsha Bradfield

Alison Knowles Workshop Report: Intermedia and the Archive

Talk given at Translated Acts 2, Southampton University, 08.06.09

On April 3rd and 4th I was one of 10(ish) artists and researchers invited to take part in a practice-based workshop with the ‘exemplar’ artist Alison Knowles. It was an opportunity that promised a healthy shot of dynamism into my working as a poet and text artist; granting the freedom to experiment away from didactics. Knowles’ diverse practice is a great influence to me through its commitment to the Fluxus experience and its occupying of modalities between sculpture, performance, poetry and music. She is currently exploring sound making and sculpture with performance, continuing to develop the potential of Intermedia.

The workshop took place over two days in the October Gallery, London in two different spaces. On the Friday we were in a grand conference room, discussing and sharing ideas, and on Saturday we took over the next door theatre space for our Fluxus concert (with multiple interventions outside in the park). Day one opened with a tutorial of sorts on the concerns of Alison Knowles’ practice, and the continuing Fluxus project. These were introduced to us via a list of meditative questions of of which I can remember were,
“is the work exemplative or definitive?”
“is there something of the artist’s temperament in the work?”
“do you agree with what the work, successful or not, is ultimately saying/doing?”

We were taken on a tour of the history of ‘Event Score’, looking at footage of their premières at the 1963 Fluxus Festival at Staatliche Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, and of recent re-stagings like the Tate Modern’s Long Weekend May 2008, where Knowles’ exemplary piece Make a Salad (a score consisting of that single proposition) was performed for an audience of 3000.

On day 2 we held our own Fluxus concert with every member of the group (including Alison) being both performer and audience. The concert was prepared and executed in the prescribed Fluxus style with a detailed order of proceedings, black n’ white clothing etc. and featured both re-stagings of original Alison Knowles Event Scores; ‘Shoes of your choice’; ‘Song of your choice’; ‘The Colour Red’, and short (capsule) performance pieces that some of us devised especially as homage or adaptations of Fluxus works; ‘Reading Gertrude Stein’ and ‘Photo of Your Choice’.

It was clear that every work shown during our concert was considered (by Alison) as much an extension of, a supplement to or as much a realisation of the scores as every enactment of them that has ever taken place. The vast index of scores devised and published by the Fluxus group is just one fragment of the living archive of their performances and re-performances; the printed ephemera can be considered the index while the continuing activations of the scores through their performances world-wide, is the expanding archive.It’s the Event Score; its functionality as works of art and as an archive that every artist is granted access to, that I want to focus on in relation to my work and contemporary poetic practice.

In terms of the artist’s temperament, every Knowles Event Score has an assured focus. Each one is an instruction for the process of researching an act, an object, or a concept from everyday reality. It removes the functionality of this act and reveals a poiesis. ‘Make a Salad’ takes a commonplace activity and reveals an aesthetic in the physical movements, sounds and colours of the production. ‘Shoes of Your Choice’ (in my reading) reveals the phenomenology in impromptu speech and description.

Alison Knowles stressed how important it is, when transposing everyday reality into artwork, to have and maintain focus. She said ‘know your ingredients’. You must have clearly defined parameters of investigation and let the results be guided by chance. Be aware of the act, revel in it, and notice what it is doing outside reality. Notice how it feeds back into reality and in what ways the transmission continues beyond the performance.

The Event Score de-familiarises an activity; it is an algorithm on making a salad, walking in the street, talking about your shoes, reading a book; in it’s reframing it weirds it. The algorithm, the affecting code, is to estrange the act from our understanding and re-codify it.

There is no artefact, only an act. It’s the identity of the act that is the focus for viewing, reading, and it is an unbreakable self-same product over 30 years later. It activates the ideal of making a salad and locates a point of Intermedia between everyday reality and art.

This original Fluxus notion of Intermedia and the resistance of artefact is what drives my work in speech and sound poetry. Intermedia is the Fluxus legacy of the interchange between multiple modes of production, often with the affect of relieving the authority from an ‘established’ media by internally and conceptually transposing it through another, thus engendering new practices. In the 1960s the Fluxus project de-stabilised the authority of painting and sculpture through a conceptual interchange with performance; the authority of classical music composition through an encounter with visual poetry and performance.

In my work I am trying to think about Intermedia from this starting point and apart from the institutionalised term. I would like my poetics to occupy sites of medium counterchange as a poetic act. And so in my research I ask the question;

How is Intermedia useful when thinking about the reveling-in-the-act-ness of an event score, and the revelling in the cross-over between functionality and de-familiarisation?

Is my voice-driven poetics a revelling in the cross-over between language and speech-sound? When I store and exchange sound or image texts through digital networks am I revelling in the cross-over between databasing and exposition?
In Benjamin’s terms Intermedia signals a functional transformation in the production of writing or art making. Mediums are re-functioned to channel artistic production – rather than save or package them. In my sound-poetry practice, an digital archive that’s intended to store sound files, or snippets of text – can becomes the facilitator of the creative act. The interface which is designed to interrogate the archive, is used to create an index-composition (howzat for an intermedia?) of texts and recordings, documentation and discourse. For the practitioner the processing, exhibiting, exchanging and archiving of works is all as much a part of the artistic production. The space of the archive internally and conceptually relates the practice and the criticism; the writer and reader; the data and the database.

I’m not an expert in New Media but I am interested in how this new relationship to the database feeds my poetics and also my reading of artists who have a history of creative archive practices. Sound artist Henri Chopin’s publishing enterprise was precisely this. His magazines Cinquième Saison and OU creatively indexed new and old works into an original system of poetics. And I have already mentioned the Fluxus ephemera and the compedium of Event Scores as being part of an creative archive.

The archive is not static nor permanent. Poetics can move through an internal or external system. In my work I engage in found, sourced or generated speech material by breaking it down into sound elements and de-familiarising myself to it. It follows Alison Knowles’ code for ‘sampling’ every-day life, and re-coding it as something alien. With outlined algorithmic parameters the poetry-object is an ideal model for re-enactments and re-versions to occur. The medium workshops the text into being just as the medium of a workshop (the Alison Knowles workshop!) both archives and generates texts.

An intermedia artist is active through technique not style – they are operating not informing, creating new apparatus for different kinds of production. The task, my task, is to re-function spaces and mediums for new artistic production. Perhaps the intermedia between art and everyday reality of Alison Knowles’s Event Scores is a way of protecting the act of intervening on the world as an artist; interventions like taking pictures of public buildings, and refusing imposed ‘speech-acts’ to qualify being present in the street or park. Liberties are more and more compromised.

My poetry is in the act, the saying doing and sound making; and then the storing, exchanging and showing. My ingredients are the sounds and the shape of everyday language; the toungue and the mouth, as is the translation and the workshopping between them.