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.

Sometimes it’s nice to bend the design to the materials rather than bend the materials to the design. For me, building something is a dialogue with the materials, working towards some kind of ideal result while allowing a huge amount of play between what I want to happen and what is actually happening. When I’m designing/building something, it’s like watching a video of the finished work in my head. I see how it works or doesn’t work, and diverge on free associative tangents that bring new ideas or materials into the thing I’m building, thus changing the video of the finished work in my head. This is also how I work when I make performances– the piece starts finished in my head, and then I work backwards from there, finding out that the main idea is not really about, for example, “monsters”, but actually about how common childhood fears can stay with us through memory, and can inform collective culture. It’s almost like I remember the end product of all the work I haven’t done yet. I don’t like to think of it as being product oriented because, as many artists might agree, the product I imagine from the beginning is usually completely different from the product that comes out. And as I do the work the memory of the result gets amended, modified, adjusted, replaced… Part of me would like to be able to work linearly, to be able to think of a concept, design something coherent on paper that illustrates the concept, and then implement the concept and design to produce a thing or a performance, but that’s not how I live my life, and that’s not how I think. When it comes to memory, my thought process is a ball of consciousness that bounces around between instances of my life (kind of like Quantum Leap), in a semi-logical manner. I’m really good at remembering the last time I saw a person, what we did, etc, but remembering exact sequences of things, exactly what a person said, etc, does not come naturally to me. I’m good at seeing mechanical things working in my head, or visualizing objects that aren’t in front of me, but don’t yet have a system of skills that allows me to go ahead and build or express it. That’s on the way! That’s why I’m happy to build modular systems that can be changed or used in different ways.

I read Walter Benjamin’s piece titled above (apparently oddly translated) and had a gut reaction as a performance artist and dancer. I agree with Benjamin that the unique existence of a body moving in space/time is problematic when it comes to reproduction. Daily practice of one’s art is inherent to many art practices across the board. The writer usually writes every day or at least considers why he or she is doing something else, and not writing. The painter, the sculptor, the singer/songwriter– in various stages of art production, these types of artists are for the most part solitary, and usually don’t rely on others until later stages of the work at which point other people become necessary. Dance, like film as described by Benjamin, is often seen as a group endeavor, with a central figure as the main brain and various individuals carrying out directions. In modern dance and ballet lineage, mechanical reproduction of a piece was sometimes executed in the form of Laban notation (a written form of dance notation), whereas before it was primarily oral and demonstrative with illustrative pictorial diagrams. The mechanism was social. Now more often the mechanism is video– the choreographer might video the dancers to remember the details of what he or she wanted, and for the benefit of the dancers who need to remember the details of how the sequence went. This is different than using video media to present a dance to an audience. In my opinion, the problem in reproducing a dance or any live performance using video lies in the failure of the technology to capture the depth and breadth of the experience the live viewer might have had. The camera is not the eye, and an enormous amount of information is lost in translating experience to the moving screen. The mechanism of reproduction for live performance is still lagging when compared to the plastic arts and 2D or digital art.

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