Upon entering the Christian Marclay exhibition at the Whitney Museum the first thing I noticed was tens of chairs scattered throughout the space. It looked as though they had been intentionally placed in chaotic orbits around two stations, one for live performance, another was a large video projection with colorful shapes superimposed on the imagery. Aside from the large chalkboard wall lined with musical staff and covered with graffiti, the chairs were the most participatory part of the exhibition. Also on display were a several works made over the course of the last couple decades, but the majority of the pieces were recent. Most of what was shown were performance scores meant to provoke action in curated musicians, but not the general public. The sense of scrappy irony that drove a lot of the young, downtown art scene in New York during the 1980’s is quite apparent in his earlier performance works, which were projected on the walls in a back room, and remnants displayed in vitrines for protection.

The musical scores of Christian Marclay range from video works meticulously edited to create dynamics and rhythms that could be interpreted by musicians, to collages of found objects, to onomatopoetic text. The visual content of some of these performance scores were quite engaging, as well, which added yet another dimension of interpretation for the musicians. This ‘other dimension’ was noticeable in his sculptural works, the clothing scores, the vast assemblies of found paper objects with musical notation, the kitschy bells, the perceived score of which seems to be the size, shape, weight and whatever the handcrafted design evokes. The other dimension is the intention behind the work, the constructed experience. How would a musician respond not only to the occasionally readable marks of musical notation, but also to the colorful imagery, design elements, and so forth that jockey for space on the glossy magazine paper? These are all ‘readable’ scores, the tension palpable between form and content. In fact, anything can be a readable score if the musician is open-minded enough and practiced in improvisation.

As a dancer and artist working with improvisation in performance, I was interested in the scores as legible objects that could tease movement from my body. Having worked with many different kinds of scores in performance, I was keenly aware of my internal response to the notation dots hovering next to the tacky fruit drawings on a wavy musical staff. While I am an amateur musician and cannot read music, I have worked extensively with musicians, sound artists and recorded music. When I hear sound or music my body reacts as another part being played, like how tap-dancers are considered percussionists; I invoke the semi-silent musician in me who adds a contrapuntal visual component to the soundscape. It is no different when I encounter objects, architecture, text, or other bodies. Surely I was not the only one, besides the curated set of professionals, who came to that exhibit and was compelled to perform the scores.

However, the prohibitive institutional context in which these visceral scores were presented killed the impulse to perform before it could be released. There was no space demarcated by the artist or the museum for the viewer to interpret the scores in their own way. For me this was the biggest disappointment of the exhibition. While Marclay seemed to be pushing for a score that could live beyond performance as an objet d’art, a score is only alive when a person is activates it or is activated by it. Not allowing physical and artistic space for enthusiastic individuals from the public to express their own interpretations of the scores felt authoritarian and exclusive, which was ironic to me because Marclay seemed so open to allowing the professional artists to take his work and run with it, relatively unsupervised. From my semi-insider perspective this diminished the brilliant openness with which Marclay approaches the form of his artistic expression, as well as the idea of improvisation in general. The chalkboard wall was an attempt at crowd sourcing material for a ‘collaborative’ score, but it appeared to be afterthought, a minimal outlet for the viewers’ behavioral response to the space. People could add to the exhibition by chalking the wall, but could not play it; they could not play. What could otherwise have been an incredible experiment in viewer participation became flattened by the perpetuation of the long-standing (but not unchallenged) functional schism between art producer and art consumer. It made me ask the question of whether or not Marclay is detaching from his forebears in experimental art, which are primarily Beuys and Fluxus, according to Wikipedia. In line with those histories, anyone can be an artist.

As I explored the Marclay exhibition, the biggest development I saw in his work was a value shift from raw, uninhibited, experiments in counter-culture inspired by the punk movement to a refined, established system of signification set within the confines of the visual art world. Maybe this is a natural progression for most artists who ‘make-it’, but that does not change the fact that there is a loss, as well as a gain. When I have attempted to ossify into choreography ideas or movement created through improvisation or Authentic Movement, I notice the loss and the gain. What gets lost when refining or setting a work made through improvisatory processes is the impromptu decision-making, the inclusion of new ideas. The work becomes contained. This does not constitute a loss of value. It is a trade-off. What is gained is a nearly repeatable unit that is of a known quantity, a set of firm decisions for how to communicate content. Both choices have their own vernacular, though they pull from one another. The use of scored improvisation in Marclay’s more recent works has lost the gritty urgency of the 1980’s, but gained the resources and depth of polished work nurtured by institutional bodies.

Whether or not the exhibition was successful in engaging the public to the degree that would have satisfied a person like me, it had a vitality that only occurs when improvisation is used as a means to an end. The unresolved issue was one of participation versus consumption, which I address in my own work by using the tool of improvisation not only as a means, but also as an end.