Archive Dive: An Interview with Every House Has a Door
As a part of the ongoing work of The Creative Audio Archive at ESS, we present Archive Dive - a regular newsletter featuring unheard recordings and ephemera related to the collections housed in the CAA. Items shared here are In Copyright: Education Use Permitted. By clicking the private links below, you agree that you will not make public, copy, distribute, or otherwise put to use any of the recordings featured here without the written consent of ESS and/or the rights holder(s), except for educational purposes. For more information on the recordings and/or collections included below, please contact matt@ess.org or visit: http://www.creativeaudioarchive.org.
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This Saturday, December 4th, 2021, our current Archive Artists in Residence Every House Has a Door - led by director Lin Hixson & dramaturg Matthew Goulish - will present 5 Beginnings ESS, a new work made utilizing materials found within the Creative Audio Archive's ESS Collection.
Every house has a door presents:
5 Beginnings ESS
Premiering Saturday December 4th,
with screenings at 1pm (CDT) and 7pm (CDT)
Matthew, Lin, and I exchanged emails this past week to discuss 5 Beginnings: ESS, the culmination of their CAA residency project. In case you missed our previous Archive Dive transmission, you can read about the project in detail here on the ESS Website, and we hope you join us live on the stream at 1pm and 7pm this Saturday.
I am ecstatic, today, to share our conversation with you in advance of the film's premiere - along with stills from the film, in some cases here side by side with the archival recording it reinterprets - below...
On the left: Still from 5 Beginnings: ESS ft. Li-Ming Hu, Right: Still from What Happened II, by Laetitia Sonami from the Creative Audio Archive
Matt Mehlan: You describe your selections for 5 Beginnings: ESS as “a personal journey through the years... concerts we attended…” etc. - can you be more specific? Which of these events were you in the audience for?
Lin Hixson: We saw a different performance of Mark Booth’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, Cucumber but not the one in the ESS archive. We had intimate knowledge of this work at the time, back in the year 2000, and we knew that we wanted to take this opportunity to revisit it.
We were in the audience for Ken Vandermark, Option Series at ESS on May 22, 2017. I remember the pink quality of the space with the Vandermark performance; the smallness of the room and Ken addressing for a long while, the times we were living in, in this country. All of these things contextualized the moment as Ken sent shock waves through the room when he began playing the saxophone. The other uncanny thing that happened with this piece is that Ralph Loza, the sound director of 5 Beginnings: ESS was the person who shot the documentation of this performance in 2017. He had just begun working at ESS and it was one of the first performances he had videotaped at the space. Ralph remembered exactly the set-up including the lamps and bulbs used which were still at ESS and which we were able to use.
Matt Mehlan: What was it like to revisit these documents that you had memories of? And then to utilize them as materials for new work?
Matthew Goulish: As we began to select and sequence the archive beginnings that would constitute the aggregate performance through their recreation by different artists, it became clear fairly quickly that Mark Booth’s performance would operate as an ending. It’s a peculiar problem: when you string together a series of beginnings, they may take on the character of a beginning beginning that has an expositional quality, a middle beginning that seems like development, and an ending beginning that feels like resolution. The poetics of Mark’s list text offered a sense of recapitulation, so very quickly we positioned it as the end. We invited Madeleine Aguilar to warp it by making it into a song, and she responded ingeniously. Since the extract of Mark’s beginning text breaks down into roughly two parts, she presented the first part, mostly describing the elements at work in a 1602 painting by the Juan Sánchez Cotán, as recitation over a gently droning soundscape, very much like Mark’s original. Then when the text turns to “Still life with a large list of merged animals, such as an elephant-headed horse,” she made that section into the song that concludes the segment, and concludes the full sequence of five beginnings. The work for us has a feeling of landing there, at the end, fading out into an alternate universe of endless possibility.
On the left: Still from 5 Beginnings: ESS ft. Corey Smith, Right: Still from Ken Vandermark's Option performance 5.22.2017 from the Creative Audio Archive
Matthew Goulish: Ken Vandermark’s beginning, as Lin mentioned, now seems to call out to us from one of the bleakest moments in recent U.S. history, at the nadir of the Trump years. His thoughts on the contributions of art and of music, to making subtle and long-term change, spoken as it were from the dead of night, had the feeling for us of seeing the stars begin to appear, of looking to actual collaborations for inklings of navigating a difficult time. We decided fairly quickly to place that beginning in the center, in the third spot in the sequence, but also in a sense as the center point of a quincunx. The other four beginnings radiated out from the questions that Ken posed in his spoken preamble. We thought of each of the other four artists, whether before or after Ken on a historical continuum, as responding to his proposals about art and politics. Each beginning offered a different response. Most directly, Maria Gaspar’s work follows immediately after, commencing with our recreation of her image of the prison wall exterior. But regarding recreating Ken’s performance, as Lin mentioned, we were in attendance, and we had Ralph to oversee the exactitude of the recreation. Since we had actual archival video, we set out to recreate the camera angles and movements.
The response artist, Corey Smith, actor, took on the task of studiously copying all of Ken’s expressions and gestures as he talks. When the music starts at last, Corey Smith, composer and musician, transcribed the saxophone improvisation to his instrument, the trumpet. We found the musical transformation remarkable. Finally, we also wanted to recreate that moment of whiplash in the transition from voice to music. Ken speaks for so long, and with a slightly introspective murmur that draws you in closer and closer as he works through his thoughts. Then very abruptly he states his conclusion, the title of the piece in low conversational tones, lifts his saxophone, and blasts the most explosive notes imaginable. Everybody in the audience who had been leaning in suddenly gets knocked back. You could almost fall over entirely. You realize that nothing in the words really prepared you for the music, for its materiality. For me it’s like the most profane interpretation of Bach’s terraced dynamics, the smash cut juxtaposition without transition. It’s joyful, and the trumpet in the place of the saxophone even emphasizes the wake up moment, since we think of the trumpet as the first note at dawn that wakes the troops, or the Angel Gabriel’s horn announcing the arrival of a new time.
Still from 5 Beginnings: ESS ft. Max Guy reinterpreting George Lewis
Matt Mehlan: Every house has a door is described in Fulla Abdul-Jabbar’s New City article as intentionally flexible, in terms of personnel, in order to “orchestrate different kinds of moments [...] that are radically different from one another.” Why is this important to your work? How does it play into 5 Beginnings: ESS?
Matthew Goulish: In the context of 5 beginnings: ESS this question brings to mind Max Guy’s remake of the George Lewis performance. Max is primarily a visual artist, and he has been a member of the collaborative team of some of our past performances primarily by contributing designed objects for use in the performance event. He has also performed in our work before, in relation to the objects he designed. Concepts of performance inform his object-making and gallery work. For the George Lewis piece, we selected a very early archival recording, one of the first of many ESS recordings of George performing. He was our colleague at the time, teaching at The School of the Art Institute. The quality of the short speech he made to the audience introducing his work fascinated us. It made clear the pioneering nature of the work in 1995, weaving as it did computer-generated sounds, projections, and live trombone.
George says, “…there’s a lot of things that aren’t happening which should be happening in this piece, so I’m really not going to worry about it, I’m just gonna…now that it’s over, I’d like to say that the people who, um, at the last minute went to the Art Institute and got another computer to replace the one that wasn’t working when we got here…” First, how amazing, we thought, to say, “now that it’s over” to describe a composition’s premier. What is over, exactly? The creation process ends with performance. The work crosses a threshold in that moment. Second, we needed to pause to consider what exactly it meant to replace a computer in 1995. I had a dramaturgical geek moment, and I emailed Lou Mallozzi who searched his memory banks. He wrote back, “I looked online at some info and images about the Macs in the mid-late 1990s to jog my dusty memory, and my guess is the computer George used at the time was a Mac Quadra 700 or 800 series. These were a big step forward at the time, and it's likely we were using these at SAIC. The dates seem to match, and they were more powerful and thus able to run software like George's more reliably. As you can see from the images at the site that I linked, these were tower style computers with a separate keyboard and monitor, which also seems right.” In 2021, this computer seems huge. By this time in our remake process, Max had connected completely with the transcribed text of George’s intro. Lin had been clear with all of the remake artists from the start that we wanted them to remain faithful to the original work while warping it in the direction of their own practice. I think Lin was excited about including Max partly because he is primarily a visual artist, and the counterintuitive nature of that choice for a sound-based performance.
I think this speaks to Fulla’s characterization of orchestrating moments that stand in radical contrast to one another within the confines of the same project. In addition to recording himself live reading the text of George’s intro, Max proposed to make lightweight cutout replicas of all the objects in the performance, including the trombone, and now, the Mac Quadra computer components. Lin directed him to begin with an empty stage, bring the objects on one by one, and conclude when the performance is about to start, “now that it’s over.” I think Max connected with the deconstructive aspect of George’s music, that sense of encyclopedic knowledge that he devotes to reconsidering all of the elements of composition and putting them back in play. Max reflected all of that recombinatory freedom back into the pre-show announcement, investing it in a sense with the logic of the music that we never hear, like taking on the scope of George’s intricate, boundless classical forms and gently wrestling them down to where we live in 2021, down here among the gravediggers. Finally, we had in mind visually differentiating the same room, the ESS studio in which we filmed all five segments. How could we make it look like a different setting each time? We had some large cardboard sheets left over from the garage pandemic films we had made, and tried placing them as an artificial floor for this segment. This surface made the floor a sonic element, and strangely seemed to encourage Max to move around with such caution and care that he almost crept on tiptoe. We raised the camera up so we could see the floor as part of the background like in a Tarkovsky film. The sequence now has a sort of DIY virtual Hot Tub Time Machine quality, concentrated on fragile materiality.
But as to the why of your question, why are these contrasts important to our work, for me they speak to the performance as construction, in one respect making the familiar ordinary appear strange, and in another suggesting something perhaps profound about ourselves, the self, that is, that appears in the performance, and the self for which it stands in while performing. I mean that we make ourselves over from the outside, in encountering difference, and keeping difference intact, not absorbing it, but responding to it. The element encountered here, the outside, is a moment from a past that some of us recall as memory but others, those who might say, “We that are young…” know only as history.
Still from 5 Beginnings: ESS ft. Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse
Matt Mehlan: How did you come to choose the artists who are re-performing beginnings in this piece? Can you speak to who they are and why you chose them?
Lin Hixson: The remake artists did not know the work of the archive artists with whom we paired them, or if they knew of their work, they had not spent time with it. Before we began the project, we received the blessings of the five archive artists, although none of them knew their corresponding remake artist. Matthew and I were in a position to know all of their work, and we thought of ourselves as facilitating a series of intergenerational introductions. It seemed to us that their souls were connected somehow, with striking resonance between the work of each archive artist and the work of each remake artist. It was like they were friends, although they did not know it yet. We could foresee how each remake artist would migrate the archive artist’s work into the present time while staying respectfully true to its heart, just by virtue of each artist’s personality and concerns as we understood them.
I’m going to speak specifically about Li-Ming Hu and Tim Kinsella/Jenny Polus as we mentioned the other re-performing artists earlier.
Li-Ming Hu re-performs Laetitia Sonami, What Happened II from 1995. Li-Ming’s an accomplished artist and performer with an acute sense of how to ride the borders between appropriate and inappropriate behavior when performing. In her own work, she also navigates the thin line between paying tribute to subjects while employing an uncanny carnivalesque sense of atmosphere. She’s able to catch tragedy and comedy in one go. She’s also an incredible maker of things.
We felt we needed Li-Ming with all these intelligences to take on Sonami’s graceful work which constructs a mysterious electronic musical event pulling sounds from the air with a glove of her own making, wired with motion sensors, transducers, ultrasound detectors, and more while telling a fragmented slightly demented story. Li-Ming created her own glove with flashy lights and decided to use an iPad to make the sounds. The framing in the documentation was important to this piece and also Sonami’s movement with the reach of her arm. Hence the slow movement of the iPad in order to re-create this choreography. Li-Ming also has a command of performing and theatrical experience which was crucial in delivering the text written by Melody Sumner Carnahan.
Tim Kinsella and Jenny Polus re-perform Maria Gaspar’s On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous from August 26th, 2016. We wanted to work with consummate musicians, as well as with performance artists, in the ESS project, so we had Tim and Jenny in mind from the start. 5 Beginnings, as a whole, moves from more performative works to more musical works. We needed them for this. As Matthew mentioned earlier, Corey’s redo of Ken Vandermark serves as a midpoint for the piece not only conceptually but compositionally as well. We advance into music at the end of Corey’s re-do, followed by Tim and Jenny playing bass and guitar; and then Madeleine Aquilar’s spoken word/song to end the piece.
For me, Gaspar asks in On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous – what does injustice or brutality sound like? What does setting free or liberation sound like? Her reply in sound is beautifully composed with nuance and complexity. Tim and Jenny seemed like the only musicians I knew who could respond to this work musically. They are socially engaged in all that they do. They are master musicians and composers. They always surprise me with what they create. And they are unapologetically honest and take risks. These are all things that I associate with Maria Gaspar.
Tim and Jenny developed an original piece of music with a complex score for their re-do based on research into the original archive sound work. Their composition remakes the original soundscape into analogous musical phrases, keeping the original time structures and relations between the parts intact. I asked them to keep the samples involving language from the original, and these occur at the same points in the performance. We borrowed an image from Gaspar’s immersive installation work Haunting Raises Specters (by A.G) of the entire north-facing wall of the Cook County Jail in Chicago to begin the work. Tim and Jenny shot the final image of Lake Michigan to end the work. We put our amazing cinematographer Julia Pello to work with a symmetrical zoom out and zoom in to frame this segment, to give the audience time with these images alone, before and after the reveal of them as projections on an old-fashioned portable screen.
With all the re-do artists, we chose them because we knew they were able to construct situations that make relations apparent before us; that help us to de-identify with the familiar; and to create space around their works that frees the mind to move.
Still from 5 Beginnings: ESS ft. Madeleine Aquilar
Matt Mehlan: You quote Morton Feldman about “the next 10 minutes” as art’s heaven... why is the first five minutes of a piece “heaven” for you? Why is it interesting as a premise for exploration for Every house has a door?
Matthew Goulish: I think Feldman intended this statement only to refer to heaven as a blissful state, the state of supreme attentiveness and close listening that defined the perpetual present of his music, music that so effectively in duration disoriented memory. We invoked the quote for those reasons, but also with the interpretation of a happy afterlife, as an activation of the archive, as if to say these works keep replaying those first moments on the archive shelves, even at night when nobody is around, like angels singing their infinite, singular song of praise.
Matt Mehlan: The piece itself is a variation on a piece you produced previously - why is the idea worth revisiting? What is different, besides the materials themselves, between 9 Beginnings: Bristol and 5 Beginnings: ESS?
Matthew Goulish: We hit on the form of the “beginnings” series for archive-based performances. It has partiality and collectivity encoded in its structure. It plays the beginnings off of one another in nearly mystical ways, like the poet Susan Howe’s phrase, “factual telepathy.” Something about the form fascinates us, and draws aspects of the nearly forgotten past back into our present moment, through the simplest degrees of acknowledgement and respect, and living again with it all, every inseparable accident recorded like a stowaway along with the artwork’s intent. We have the sense that we have not yet exhausted this form, or that it has not finished its work with us.
Matt Mehlan: 5 Beginnings: ESS is presented as a film, broadcast live as a streaming program. As artists working in the realm of performance, have the mediated/technological "stages" that the last year and a half & the pandemic, sort of, forced or otherwise instigated... been a hurdle to overcome? Or a creative opportunity? Or both? Can you speak a little on how this work came to be a film, and how it relates to the way you prefer to present your work?
Lin Hixson: The last year and a half has come with difficulties creatively. I was taught early on when making performance that difficulty produces work that is not about the world but is in the world. This has become foundational for me when making and directing work. It is not about setting up circumstances in the process that are difficult for those involved. In fact, we spend a lot of time attempting the opposite – pay attention to everyone’s needs, attempting to create an environment that is safe and calm in order to make something together. Difficulty here is paying attention to what’s comes from outside of our specific project with its intentions and process and making the outside pressures an equal partner in the collaboration. With this partner present, difficulty produces work that is in the world.
With the pandemic, we had to redefine how our audience could view our work which led us to making videos. We needed to consider safety which limited the number of people who could be in a room at one time. We needed to spend less time in a room together limiting rehearsal or breaking them up into smaller increments.
All these challenges effected 5 Beginnings. We have done works before in archives using beginnings. These were live performances with the same, two performers performing nine beginnings. With the ESS project and the form of a film, we chose to limit the beginnings to five and to choose different performers for each segment. This met the challenges posed by the pandemic and brought a new way of making and thinking to the company with possibilities unimagined before.
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Thanks for reading - and thanks to Lin and Matthew for taking the time to discuss the work - see you in the chatroom on December 4th... I hop you will be in touch with any requests, comments, thoughts, remembrances...
All the best,
-Matt Mehlan
Archive & Media Manager
Creative Audio Archive at ESS