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            pdftitle={Eight retrofuturist scenarios for sound/performance art in pandemic times},
            pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, 4-2020},
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\title{Eight retrofuturist scenarios for sound/performance art in pandemic
times}
\author{Florian Cramer, 4-2020}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\hypertarget{arseny-avraamov-symphony-of-factory-sirens-baku-1922}{%
\section{\texorpdfstring{1) Arseny Avraamov, \emph{Symphony of Factory
Sirens}, Baku
1922}{1) Arseny Avraamov, Symphony of Factory Sirens, Baku 1922}}\label{arseny-avraamov-symphony-of-factory-sirens-baku-1922}}

Two years after the Spanish flu pandemic, this was a seminal, and
monumental, piece of noise music and public sound art, exactly 80 years
before DE PLAYER began its own program ``Public Sound'' in another
harbor city. The instruments of the Baku symphony included ship
foghorns, artillery canons, the machine guns of several infantry
regiments, airplanes, twenty-five steam locomotive whistles and the
sirens of all factories in the city, bands and choirs. Today, this
symphony could be reenacted as a social distancing mass spectacle:
listeners would be able to enjoy it without leaving their homes, or by
keeping the epidemiologically advised safe distance of 1.5 meters from
each other in the streets.

Inventing sound art as \emph{proletkult}, the \emph{Symphony of Factory
Sirens} breaks with bourgeois aesthetics and its parameters of good
taste. At the same time, it could have been criticized by fellow
Marxists like Adorno and Debord as paving the way for the society of the
spectacle. After 1990, the \emph{Symphony of Factory Sirens} would have
been a ``creative city'' spectacle designed to attract tourists and the
``creative class'' to the post-industrial chic of places like Rotterdam.
In pandemic times, after the end of the art world as we know it, the end
of tourism and of outsourced industrial production, the symphony would
be for the domestic population again (if only to keep it entertained
during unemployment).

Art performances for pandemic times are now mostly being imagined as
Internet streaming events for isolated home listeners. Symphonies of
factory sirens (or, in the Netherlands, the air strike alert sirens that
are being test-run every first Monday of a month all over the country)
demonstrate the alternative: mass events scaled up to monumental
proportions, using every available sound-making machine, so that no
listener will be able to escape from the spectacle.

Will spaces like DE PLAYER thus only have the choice between (a)
reinventing themselves as boutique Internet streaming services or (b)
scaling up to mass event proportions, with literally no space for
anything in between?

\hypertarget{gertrude-stein-if-i-told-him-a-completed-portrait-of-picasso-1923}{%
\section{\texorpdfstring{2) Gertrude Stein, \emph{If I Told Him, A
Completed Portrait of Picasso}
(1923)}{2) Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923)}}\label{gertrude-stein-if-i-told-him-a-completed-portrait-of-picasso-1923}}

Gertrude Stein ran her apartment in Paris as an early domestic
artist-run space, anticipating DE PLAYER's beginnings in Annemiek
Engbers' and Peter Fengler's house in the early 2000s. At the height of
the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1,200 people died in Paris each week. In those
years, and the aftermath of World War I, Stein phrased the famous term
of the ``lost generation'' which she had picked up and adapted from her
French car mechanic (and which Richard Hell turned into the ``blank
generation'' for punk culture in 1977).

\emph{If I Told Him} is a seminal early-20th century sound and
language-experimental poem, written in 1923 and recorded by Stein in
1934. It became a point of departure for later sound poets including
Gerhard Rühm and Monika Lichtenfeld, Hans Clavin, GJ de Rook, Sten
Hanson, ARF ARF, Marc Matter and Duncan Harrison who performed in and
published with DE PLAYER. To quote Duncan Harrison from his 2018
performance in Rotterdam, ``sound poetry is embarrassing''.
Embarrassment can only happen with other people present; it is the
stronger the closer the proximity. In that sense, embarrassment is a
contagion, and social distancing a way of avoiding embarrassment. What
can sound poetry, what can performative art still be without
opportunities for embarrassment?

Stein's \emph{Portrait of Picasso}, a gift-in-return to Picasso's
portrait of Stein from 1906, reinvents language as multi-layered,
modulated, multi-perspective sounds and meanings, congenial to cubism's
reinvention of painting. As a portrait, Stein's poem gets simultaneously
closer to and farther away from Picasso than a conventional prose text
would have; it radicalizes both intimacy and distance. Ultimately, it
performs language as a self-replicating, mutating virus (decades before
William S. Burroughs literally called language a virus).

In an interview on the Covid-19 pandemic, Dutch virologist Marion
Koopmans defined viruses as follows: ``A virus is a kind of shipping
package with a single purpose: to protect a piece of genetic material,
and transport it from a to b. {[}\ldots{}{]} The only purpose of that
genetic material is to make new virus copies. It's the perfect parasite.
Outside a body, a virus can't do anything but stay intact.''\footnote{Translated
  from Bohlmeijer, Lex. ``Viroloog Marion Koopmans beantwoordt de
  prangendste vragen over corona, de Nederlandse aanpak en wat je nu kan
  doen.'' \emph{De Correspondent}, 19 Mar.~2020. decorrespondent.nl,
  https://decorrespondent.nl/11051/viroloog-marion-koopmans-beantwoordt-de-prangendste-vragen-over-corona-de-nederlandse-aanpak-en-wat-je-nu-kan-doen/779015402352-a0fedac2
  .}

Stein's poem newly imagines the spoken word as a viral shipping package
and poetry as genetic material that has mutated from modern visual art.
DE PLAYER got infected by both strands, sound and art, and mixed them to
infect people. Would Stein ever have been able to write her ``Portrait''
if the Spanish flu had kept her and Alice Toklas quarantined in her
Paris apartment till 1922? Or is it just that, a portrait crafted from
radical distancing?

\hypertarget{george-brecht-drip-music-1959-62}{%
\section{\texorpdfstring{3) George Brecht, \emph{Drip Music}
(1959-62)}{3) George Brecht, Drip Music (1959-62)}}\label{george-brecht-drip-music-1959-62}}

``For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an
empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.
Second version: Dripping.''

This early Fluxus piece, printed as a score on a cheap business card, is
the perfect sound art piece to be performed at home in solitary
confinement, as long as tap water is still running. Years ago, Goodiepal
(see entry \#7) suggested to consider the water pipe system an
artificial intelligence. Brecht's \emph{Drip Music} thus should be
re-read as an early piece of mass-reproducible ``media art''.

Performance and reproduction media have been at the core of DE PLAYER,
mostly visibly, audibly and tangibly in its self-published,
experimentally cut vinyl. These records are performative media, in the
literal sense of media that do perform by virtue of their physical
material qualities.

Does the next \emph{Layer} need to be published as tap water?

\hypertarget{la-monte-young-composition-10-1960-to-bob-morris}{%
\section{\texorpdfstring{4) La Monte Young, \emph{Composition \#10 1960
to Bob
Morris}}{4) La Monte Young, Composition \#10 1960 to Bob Morris}}\label{la-monte-young-composition-10-1960-to-bob-morris}}

``Draw a straight line and follow it'': today, a recipe for disaster, no
matter whether one performs it at home in isolation or outdoors in
violation of distancing rules. In the current situation, the piece
raises the question: Who has the power to draw lines? Where, in between
what and whom, when lines are no longer to be followed but avoided, and
drawn to keep people away from each other.

La Monte Young was a classically trained composer before he became a
conceptual artist, with compositions like this one. Nam June Paik,
another artist trained as composer, performed it as ``Zen for Head'' by
soaking his hair with wet paint and dragging it over the ground, thus
turning the piece from abstraction to concretion, much like the Chinese
philosopher Chuang Tzu who preferred to ``drag his tail in the mud'' to
a high office at the emperor's court. In their performance at DE PLAYER
in 2015, Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz continued this righteous
tradition by live-painting their faces with their own fresh shit.

Is \emph{DE LAYER} the (literal) disembodiment of \emph{DE PLAYER}? And
if so, can it still be place that drags conceptualism into the mud?

\hypertarget{alvin-lucier-i-am-sitting-in-a-room-1969}{%
\section{\texorpdfstring{5) Alvin Lucier, \emph{I am sitting in a room}
(1969)}{5) Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room (1969)}}\label{alvin-lucier-i-am-sitting-in-a-room-1969}}

``I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now'':
Lucier's composition consists of a description of itself, beginning with
this sentence and then explaining its own acoustic setup and process.
That self-description gets replayed in the performer's room where it's
being filtered through the room's resonance. This process is being
repeated until the spoken text has dissolved into unintelligible
frequencies.

In pandemic times, ``I am sitting in a room different from the one you
are in now'' describes the so-called ``new normal''; the piece as a
whole the failing hope that its process will remove the distance between
the performer's and the listener's surroundings. In the end, the
remaining sound frequencies will always remain specific to the room of
the performer, never to that of the listener.

In this sense, \emph{I am sitting a room} was the first piece of
domestic tele work in music. It even told its listeners so in its first
sentence. If social distancing will continue for another five years, a
predicted by Harvard researchers in \emph{Science},\footnote{Kissler,
  Stephen M., et al. ``Projecting the Transmission Dynamics of
  SARS-CoV-2 through the Postpandemic Period.'' \emph{Science},
  Apr.~2020. science.sciencemag.org, doi:10.1126/science.abb5793.} then
\emph{I am sitting in a room} is poised to become proverbial. The piece
could become a classic of a genre that many are now busy establishing,
art that can be made and experienced within the confines of one's
domestic space through remote instruction.

Such art doesn't need spaces like \emph{DE PLAYER} any more. Since
\emph{I am sitting a room} is a classic of sound art, one could argue
that sound art can be auto-destructive in respect to its performance
spaces, in the sense of an ``art which contains within itself an agent
which automatically leads to its destruction'' (Gustav Metzger,
\emph{Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art}, 1960).

\hypertarget{sex-pistols-god-save-the-queen-1977}{%
\section{\texorpdfstring{6) Sex Pistols, \emph{God Save the Queen}
(1977)}{6) Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen (1977)}}\label{sex-pistols-god-save-the-queen-1977}}

To promote the Sex Pistols debut album \emph{Never Mind The Bollocks},
Sex Pistols inventor and manager Malcolm McLaren teamed up with Virgin
Records owner (and later billionaire) Richard Branson, renting a boat on
the Thames two days prior to the Queen's river procession. They had the
band play ``God Save the Queen - She ain't no human being'' and
``Anarchy in the U.K.'' on the boat's deck until the police came and
stopped the cruise, arresting, among others, McLaren and Vivian Westwood
(but not the band). In my opinion, this performance - plus Westwood's
fashion design and Jamie Reid's graphic design - was much more
interesting than the band's rock music.

To get oneself arrested in times of social distancing, the effort of
singing is no longer necessary. Aside from that, the Sex Pistols enacted
a now-classic Public Sound piece, demonstrating that sound performances
can not only be embarrassing, but also offensive. The Sex Pistols went
beyond making words viral - such as ``no future'', an early meme -, but
performed as contagious agents themselves, with the word ``punk'' and
their Westwood-designed looks suggesting filthiness, parasitism and risk
of infection.

DE PLAYER merged the two genres of the punk club and the performance art
space, being a deliberately filthy venue. This filthiness is even
preserved in its name, which was simply taken over from an organized
crime-run brothel and gambling bar called DE PLAYER. That bar had gone
out of business, an artist collective moved in and continued the
affairs.

Brothels were among the first venues that got shut down in the pandemic.
How can a filthy space with brothel DNA survive the 1.5 meters distance
society?

\hypertarget{goodiepal-pals}{%
\section{7) Goodiepal \& Pals}\label{goodiepal-pals}}

In his work and life, Goodiepal has periodically reinvented himself as -
among others - a hacker, commercial ring tone composer, teacher of
electronic music composition, inventor of a graphical score notation
system, cabin bike cyclist, mechanical clock builder, person who
publicly gave away money (among others, at DE PLAYER in 2009) and his
personal belongings, storyteller, Nordic mythologist, founder of a
band-commune-collective, smuggler of refugees in Serbia and now family
man in the Free State of Christiana.

But if there's a leitmotif in this music of changes, then perhaps:
community exchange. Whatever Goodiepal does happens in direct
interaction with other people, drawing energy out of their spontaneous
reactions, improvising and ad-libbing himself through the situations
that ensue.

How can this still be done in pandemic times? Do Goodiepal \& Pals have
to withdraw to their own commune and turn into a cult? How will he/they
reinvent themselves this time?

\hypertarget{tara-transitory-genderonoise-performed-among-others-in-de-player-in-2015}{%
\section{8) Tara Transitory,
//gender\textbar{}o\textbar{}noise\textbackslash{}\textbackslash{}
(performed, among others, in DE PLAYER in
2015)}\label{tara-transitory-genderonoise-performed-among-others-in-de-player-in-2015}}

To continue the story of punk and its viral body performances from the
second-last entry: noise musician Tara Transitory collaborates with
people who have been pushed to the margins of society, transgender
dancers and fire-eaters in Hanoi, for example, who perform their acts on
main roads in between traffic jams, living from cheap self-cooked candy
they sell to the car drivers who watch them. More recently, Tara's sound
performances have reflected on diasporas and involved local immigrant
co-performers at each place where she and her partner Nguyễn Baly have
toured.

In quarantined societies, the marginalized get pushed even further to
the margins: in the best case, surviving as low-paid service workers
without the privilege of working home but taking all the health risk, or
worse, as street people who lose their last means of existence in the
lockdown. The current situation of many freelance artists and gig
economy workers is structurally similar.

Under these circumstances, the transgender street performers and candy
vendors do not merely represent the margins, but they are today's
avant-garde. In this present and future, Tara Transitory's noise music
simultaneously continues and overturns the white, male, European, even
fascist affair begun in Italian futurism.

If there's a common denominator in Futurism, Fluxus and
//gender\textbar{}o\textbar{}noise\textbackslash{}\textbackslash{}, then
unsafety: as heroic militarism in Italian Futurism, as ``Danger Music''
in Fluxus (``Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same
with the other eye 5 years later'', a score of Takehisa Kosugi from
1964), as infusing and infecting art spaces with the precariousness of
marginalized milieus.

How will that still be possible in sanitized environments? Tara
Transitory emerged from a sanitized environment, Singapore, herself, the
city-state that is now on the forefront of containing the pandemic, and
thus likely one of the 21st century powers to emerge from it.

(with thanks to Peter Fengler)

\end{document}
