so near...
Review
of 'Wish You Were Here'
Kelly
Large, with support from Static Gallery, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary
Art, 2002
Liverpool,
Sunday 23rd March 2003, 9pm. Tune into 87.9fm to see if there’s anything left.
Just some fuzz. More of a hiss than a low rumble. The last strains of Åke
Hodell’s Structures III (part 6) are long gone. 87.9fm is now an empty space,
one of thousands on the dial. Somewhere out there, maybe in some of the flats
opposite, someone is transmitting Morse signals. Six words a minute for
beginners, shifting up to thirty words a minute for the more experienced. Three
thousand miles east there’s a war going on and we’re not hearing any human
noises.
Wish
You Were Here was a twelve hour temporary restricted service radio station
project last November at 87.9fm, spread across four Sunday nights during The
Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. An incredibly ambitious and partly
successful project, initiated by artist Kelly Large with support from Static
Gallery, WYWH covered musings on communication, Morse Code, war, talking to
yourself and rambling.
Structured
thematically across four three-hour sets, the project began and ended with its
strongest sections – Is there anybody out there? and The real thing? It is no
coincidence that the work of Åke Hodell was included in these sections – three
major pieces from the sixties and seventies, exemplary examples of what audio
works on short-wave radio signals can achieve. Ear pressed to the speaker, then
withdrawn, mind buzzing with a series of images and implications, picturing the
creators tackling vast themes by piecing together sounds to say things that
could not be said in any other way.
WYWH
explored notions of the near and the far and when it worked at its best –
Hodell, Williams, the first half of Shaw & McNally, Cole & Larson or
the gaps between Large speaking and the music beginning – it created a special
place that was near the speaker yet far from a local transmission.
The
possibility that you are the only person listening to events such as WYWH adds
to the frisson. Listeners were not offered any means of communicating with the
programme makers (no phone number or e-mail) and as such the hope that
somewhere someone else was listening was given no outlet. A kind of cruel joke,
until one sees that the strong works required that closed door. Artists that
imbued their audio excerpts with such intensity that they could only have been
made for themselves or the very least one other. There was just them and you in
a lonely place.
Beginning
with an overly long and problematic piece from Paul Frank Lewthwaite (seventeen
minutes, same text repeated in four languages) the first evening settled down
with Hodell’s Orpheic Revelations. What to make of stumbling across barely
audible heavy breathing or incessant howling like an old Severed Heads track
(epilepsy?) once heard on John Peel? Is there anyone else out there hearing
this? Doesn’t matter. Wolves tear at Mozart. Did the creator create for just
the single listener? We are informed by narrator Mark that Orpheic Revelations
was “originally composed as a stage work” but even Mark doesn’t sound convinced
that anyone else is listening. Hodell sits comfortably with the contemporary
and commissioned works of WYWH and his inclusion was a commendable choice. It
introduced early on the possibility of telephonic one-to-one dialogues. Forget
the crowds. Even forget the possibilities of radio. There’s no room.
Steve
Williams comes into the room with a piece called ‘3 tales of near and far’.
Spoken words cut up, possibly taking odd phrases from songs and creating
dialogues inbetween, the way the mind can drift while the ear stays open. Or is
he tuning a radio? Playing with the remote control mute button. We hear a
Mancunian accent over some heavy dub and the speech becomes more disjointed
from the second hand lines. The whole thing sounds beautiful, crackling like
someone stuck inside an old piece of machinery. The sounds are near and far,
depth and lack of it. Have to press your ear nearer the speaker. Nic Cage in
Adaptation frantically flicking on and off his dictaphone. Heavy breathing.
Michael Stipe interviews the Happy Mondays backstage and gets arthouse. Chase
scene after chase scene. Williams earns the right to last for ten minutes.
Running up hills and down them. Inner city life type music. The crackling. Have
to decide what is pre-recorded and what is produced by your own tuner. Clever
and breath taking.
Atomic
Kitten are singing The tide is high. The sound quality is tinny. Artist Kelly
Large is asking a series of people to select one piece of music which is then
played by holding the microphone to the record player. Only on careful second
or third listening – a feat not possible during the live transmission – does
Large’s series offer something else. In the gap between her saying ‘we’ll play
it now’ and the music beginning, many of the interviewees keep talking, unaware
that the mike is picking it up. In these few short moments we hear people at
ease as the needle drops or the play button is pressed. Someone utters ‘My god,
that was horrible!’ Others lower their voice and add crucial details to the
story of why they chose the track ‘I’ve actually got two copies of Hotel
California you know, one was from my brother...’. Someone even asks what it’s
for (was it not explained?) and during ‘Tonight you’re mine’ a group of people
can be heard in the room singing along. Desert Island discs with the mike left
on, a strange space to be listening to on the airwaves, people peculiarly at
ease and something we’re not used to hearing.
Hodell,
Williams and those snippets inadvertently induced by Large created the
necessary audio depth to succeed as radio sounds. Too often other works,
particularly the unedited spoken transcripts, came across as naked and devoid
of the subtle professional filling in of silence. These artists transposed you
somewhere else, into that space between speaker and not-Liverpool. Yes, that
could have been achieved by releasing a CD of the same playlist and
distributing it citywide, but the sense of event, even the hope – then quashed
hope – of simultaneous experience would have been gone.
The
second installment - Location Location – unfortunately did not manage to take
us anywhere, despite tackling the very topic of tuning into other people’s
experiences of elsewhere. And after a somewhat confused third edition - you’re
not from ‘round here are you? - too literal and unedited except for cole &
larson’s humble but effective ambient meanderings, the final evening was more
cryptically introduced as The real thing? Narrator Mark informed us to “be
aware that this evening you may hear things you don’t want to or that other
people don’t want you to”. Nice idea and The real thing? presented a valiant
attempt at exploring the “covert and invisible space of radio”.
Richard
Prince’s Doctor jokes (tell me everything), shared with Bob Gober, akin to
eavesdropping on two American taxi drivers outside your window. Sometimes these
same speakers pick up passing cab transmissions. Medium or environment again.
Hodell’s
Structures III from 1967 attempts to span both World Wars with all human
presence removed. What is left is a barrage of bullets like huge elastic snapping,
near and far, electrical signals fading in and out. Machine guns. No
commentary. Explosions. No breathing. Helicopters. No crying. Shoot-em ups
allowing annihilation but removing the screams.
Lewis,
Lowe and Robey’s whispers eavesdrops on someone at home tuned into Radio 1’s
start of the weekend and a Bingo scene complete with dubbed heavy breathing.
Rikke Benborg continues our access to the private drawing of breath, extracting
the inhalations before and after lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
Attempts at signs of life. McCormack + Gent’s Collaboration by committee could
have done with some such indicators of life. A deliberately deadpan discussion
on hypothetical artistic issues, it lacked the passion or interest in the
subject that has to be earned to be on our airwaves.
In
contrast, Becky Shaw’s chat with Stan McNally of The Liverpool Marine Radio
& Electronics Society exuded excitement and interest in the subject. It
helped that the subject of the interview – Morse Code – led to ten minutes of
audio double entendres. The piece should have been cut once the conversation
moved away from the issue of communication but as it unfolded, the true
potential of WYWH as an art project became apparent.
We
begin with a series of bleeps and blinking electronic pulses. McNally starts to
translate these abstract sounds into English for the listener. Someone out
there is tapping away and McNally paints a vivid picture of amateur Morse
Coders sitting at home sending audio signals at their own level or standard out
while astutely filling in key historical details of the medium’s development.
We learn that beginners can achieve around six words per minute and can build
up to thirty with practice. There are licences for slow-speed Morse. The
quality of the interview with all three voices (McNally is joined by a
colleague) sounds like it was recorded in an extremely small underground cabin.
All three voices retain similar levels. Huddled around the mike. Throughout the
discussion, feint pulses can be heard. McNally speaks of coded Morse, the
Japanese and Native American Indians’ versions, the theme tune to Inspector
Morse and with passion about the Wirral Amateur Radio Club. McNally and
colleague occasionally break into verbal Morse with each other, a Dada-esque presentation
over how to pronounce punctuation: da-da dedee da-da is a comma, da de-da da
diss is an oblique stroke.
Through
its twelve hours WYWH touched upon only three of the four major strands of
audio art: spoken word, field recordings and reworking of existing audio.
Spoken
word – interviews, stories or readings – relies as much on delivery, duration,
editing and audio quality as it does on the content. To this extent the works
by Lewthwaite, Voegelin, George Shaw, Gibson, Reilly & Reilly and Markowitsch
focussed on substance to the detriment of the medium through which they were
carried. The field recordings such as Ramsden’s glider lesson (soaring) or
cocosolidciti’s scalene series fared better with their depth and timbre as did
the examples of reworking existing audio – Furlong’s a short history of sound
or Autonomy Group number 7’s remix of the 1971 spotlight on the moog,
kaleidoscopic vibrations.
Where
WYWH fell short was the lack of voice as sound. With perhaps the exception of
Williams and McNally (unknowingly), the history of Burroughs, Schwitters and
Monk taking apart the human voice and restructuring new languages was not
reflected. The interview with McNally managed to be three things at once –
interview, field recording and voice as sound. In Hodell’s words, text sound
composition. It also contained key questions relating to WYWH as a whole – who
is listening, what are they anticipating, what language is appropriate, passion
or deadpan, relevance, local licence versus wide thinking and how to allow the
medium to enhance the subject.
Whether
these issues were raised intentionally is up for debate but it is the role of
the curator or programmer to have the overall vision. The difficulty with
thematically stranded output is that works are chosen to suit rather than to
create or suggest themes. WYWH was an audio art work for radio and as such
needed to respect that genre’s history to reach its full potential. The thread
of human breathing as indications of life in a non-contact medium was perhaps
unintentional. Similarly, the huge gulf in audio quality of selections
inadvertently echoed a desire to explore near and far. The possibility of
creating that space between the tuner and somewhere else and the foundations of
almost a century of artists playing with non-visual forms should have been the
platform for a fuller realisation. Wish You Were Here was at times an
extraordinary experience but most of the time it was way off the dial.