Collective
29.07.2014 - 07.09.2014
In the Presence of Absence
Laura Yuile
“The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me: I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning.”1
For Don’t trip over the wire..! Marie-Michelle has drawn upon the history of graphical music scores and experimented with her own methods of abstracting language and systems of notation. Graphical music scores emerged and evolved in the 1950s as a more flexible form of notation, one that allowed experimental composers to incorporate noises, effects and random elements that could not comfortably sit within the generic staves of standard musical manuscript paper. Sprawling arrangements of squiggles, patterns, clusters, loops, geometric and abstract shapes replaced the familiar musical language, making way for a different kind of structural consistency, one that functions more as a map of a musical territory than a set of clearly defined instructions. Marie-Michelle often takes a set of rules as a starting point for her work. Her method of constructing the sound piece present in this exhibition was generated through a process of abstracting and reconfiguring such rules. This process prompts a shift in the relationship between artist, performers (which here may be referred to as interpreters) and finished work – a restructuring of a typically hierarchical relationship into one that accommodates an exchange of salvaging and the acceptance of loss.
Adopting a similar approach to that of a graphical score, the artist has invited the musician and performer to have freedom of interpretation, giving up a certain amount of control over what the final output might be. With the abstraction of systems of notation prompting a move towards a more untrustworthy form of language, the interpreters must draw upon their own creative and cultural experiences in order to read and translate visual information. The communicative process turns its back on certainty and embraces an abstract dialogue generated through a complicated relationship to the notion of control. We might refer to this act of interpretation as a performance whereby the artist sets some limitations, or guidelines, and by doing so sparks the translation of a score into its realisation in sound, gestures and perhaps words, pronounced out loud. In performing the score, the already abstracted rules are further deconstructed into a sonic architecture that will never be fully accessible to us; a rhythm that echoes with that which it lacks, and that which may still be possible.
Soundscapes and sonic architectures affect our visual perception of a space and present different ways to engage with its physicality. In mapping the musical territory and thinking about the spatial and visual dimensions of sound, we might wonder what the sound re-translated into shapes, patterns, or words written down might look like. We can try to grasp at the edges and seams of sounds and silences, in order to embody the music and translate it back into something solid. We can try to imagine what we hear as tangible material with a certain amount of fixity and determinacy – a blueprint from which various slightly differing interpretations can be derived. But what we hear performed is perhaps not fully contained within the material that produced it, nor its performative interpretation, rather it is partially held, or masked, within the invisible residue that escapes the process of abstraction. A translation materialises as a conglomerate of two structures that includes the features assigned to the language of translation itself, which attempts to adopt logical models that are rooted in the universal workings of the human mind. In any interpretative exchange between systems of visual, verbal or non- verbal signs, we must accept both that which is lost and that which is gained, situating ourselves within this conflicted space and finding a way to contend with the loss of meaning. To interpret something is to make sense of it, to assign it significance.
Don’t trip over the wire..! is an invitation to interpret or translate; a finger that traces a line around spaces and sounds as the listener steps in to replace the loss that has occurred throughout this process of abstraction, or the final step in a process of exploring the limitations and emotive possibilities of the unknown in both visual and verbal forms of language.
1 Roland Barthes,The Empire of Signs, (Hill& Wang), 1970.
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