Monday 10 December 2007

Marla Hlady: Playing Piano

Being in a room with a piano is an immersive experience. When a piano is played, the large wooden body of the instrument resonates and everything in the room resonates with it. Sound is cast off in every direction, bouncing off the ceilings and the walls, enveloping and at times overwhelming you. Among musical instruments the piano has an unmatched dynamic range – sound grows in volume and diminishes, fills the surrounding space only to recede from it. In the hands of an experienced pianist the piano is a tool of domination and submission, of seduction and conquest.

To experience a player piano is to add a further level of complexity. Piano keys move and notes sound as if struck by invisible fingers. But the music issuing from the instrument isn’t light and ethereal, as one might imagine coming from some ghostly spirit playing a piano. Rather, the music is robust, dynamic and rhythmic – everything we associate with performed piano. Unlike the experience of listening to a conventional recording, one keenly perceives the trace of an absent musician.

A 19th century mechanical engineering project, the player piano was perfected in the early 20th century. The basic principle involves music which is “recorded” by making a series of perforations corresponding to musical notes on a roll of paper. The paper is scrolled mechanically across a pneumatic “tracker bar” and as the paper perforations run over the tracker bar air is allowed to pass through, triggering the operation of switching valves. These switches open larger valves which effect the piano action – the hammer striking the string. The later development of the "reproducing" player piano saw an elaboration of the system of valve switches to enable the instrument to perform the tempo, phrasing, dynamics and the pedalling of a performance.

Paper perforations on the music roll have been likened to an early form of binary code and indeed, all contemporary versions of the player piano replace the paper roll with a digital MIDI interface. The basic pneumatic system of the player piano anticipated its later application in robotics and machinery and like a primitive programmable robot the player piano mimics basic human functions – the piano roll its programmed brain, its compressor the heart and lungs, its tubing and valves a system of veins and musculature.

Player pianos were a significant presence in the popular culture at the same time that artists in other fields were becoming inspired by the machine. Futurists, Dadaists, Suprematists and Constructivists as well as avant-garde filmmakers, dramatists, choreographers and architects proclaimed their love of the machine and aspired to make their new art with the angular, hard edge and mechanical qualities of turn of the century industrial culture. It is not hard to imagine that the rhythmic and contrapuntal qualities of Ragtime and Dixieland were a response to the accelerated tempo and mechanization of life at this time and the rote mechanical reproduction of the basic player piano may have been particularly popular for its ability to perform this up-tempo and impressionistically mechanical sounding dance music.

At the turn of the century the player piano competed as a new recording and entertainment technology alongside the Victrola and the moving picture, but it now exists as a curious historical footnote at the margins of our consciousness. While recorded music and cinema grew to become the basis of the 20th century entertainment industry, the emergence of commercial radio in the 30s was the beginning of the end for the player piano.

* * *

“Playing Piano” is an open ended investigation into the mechanics of sound. It is an open journal describing the way the artist listens, looks, thinks and explores the material world. Marla Hlady takes apart machines and exposes their inner workings to rebuild them as versions of their former selves, building and rebuilding machines that make and record sounds. Taking a thing apart is a critique – a way of honouring the thing, a way of admiring its construction and the many decisions of its designers and makers. It exposes the assumptions and aspirations upon which the thing is made and it reveals the author’s inventions and limitations. Rebuilding the thing is a form of love and respect. Adding to a thing – decorating it, manipulating it, customizing it – is to enter into a dialogue, to talk to the thing and to engage its maker’s spirit, to speculate on its history, to revel in its possibility and to indulge in creative anarchy. Among artists, Marla is a “hot-rodder.” She adores machines by taking them apart, honours them when she rebuilds them, and engages them in a dialogue by adapting them, reinventing them and “playing” with them. She builds and rebuilds machines in ways that describe the way sound would look like if you could see it, touch it, walk around it.

“Playing Piano” begins with the thing itself. An upright reproducing player piano is at once full of social, cultural and private histories (witness the little nicks and dents in the body, the missing pieces of moulding) and yet curiously also something of a blank slate. Slightly compact in appearance it could be overlooked in a home (especially if you don’t know how to play the piano), a large piece of furniture concealing its musical potential and its mechanical sophistication. But where to begin?

For Marla, “playing piano” means to explore the instrument's sculptural and aural potential. Making reference to a history of music that employed “prepared pianos,” she set the terms of her engagement by deciding to explore the range of sounds she could get out of the piano with various mechanical adaptations. Getting started meant pulling out the keyboard, eliminating the temptation to engage the piano conventionally inside the thing. Once the keyboard was gone, it reverted from a musical instrument to a machine. She then stripped away the front panels to reveal the strings, valves and music roll mechanism above, the power source, valves and bellows below.

Marla then proceeded to “eviscerate” the piano, to gut it, by removing the electric motor and bellows compressor, the source that activates the valves and hammers. She pulled the motor and the compressor out of the piano and across the room, reconnecting it with lengths of rubber tubing. It is the air pressure in the system of tubing that determines the median tempo of the piano and by stretching, extending and reducing the air pressure in the system she began the process of slowing the tempo of the playback mechanism. Having exploded the air compression source, she turned her attention to the music roll assembly. She removed it too from the body of the piano and remounted it above, in the process extending the system of pneumatic tubing to reach the elevated the music roll and its air motor and adding further drag to the tempo. The once the familiar jazz melody on the found piano roll now plays so slowly as to be completely unrecognizable.

Pulling out the “guts” of the upright piano revealed its strings. In pianos hammers “strike” strings, but strings can be activated in other ways. She fabricated a strumming mechanism from a cannibalized photocopier then added two pie-plate press machines. She also added two whistle machines and microphones to the bellows and the air vents of the tracker bar. Each of these devices is initiated by vibration sensors attached to the piano's strings. When a string vibrates, it causes a sound event by one of the machines or activates one of the microphones. To make these sounding mechanisms audible she attached two surface resonating speakers to the piano soundboard, amplifying the discreet strumming and damping sounds though the native amplification system.

Marla’s removal of the keyboard and her extrusion of the piano’s heavy air compressor and music roll assemblies are physical aggressions; her affixing of a variety of light mechanical electronic devices to its sound board and strings are a series of gentle caresses. In her hands the player piano has begun to resemble a mechanical “one-man-band” with her electronic preparations creating a half dozen simultaneous sound events and actions. She has taken a magnifying glass to the instrument so that we can experience it – as a musical instrument but also as a fascinating piece of vintage mechanics. She has drawn and stretched the piano outside of its body to expose its internal system as a network of distances – a network of sources and pathways and destinations that circulate, escape and return within a closed but leaky system.

Gordon Hatt, 2007

Monday 22 October 2007

Fool for Love

Love makes me treat you the way that I do,
Gee baby, ain't I good to you?
There's nothing in this world too good
For a girl so good and true.
Gee baby, ain't I good to you?

From the song, Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You? (Don Redman, Andy Razaf, 1929)


What role do visual fictions play in our consciousness? How do we respond to enacted images of happiness on billboards, sadness in television melodramas, or fear in horror movies? Do we rush to emotionally embrace each unfolding narrative, fooled every time as it were, empathizing with people who act out our daydreams and nightmares? Some suggest that we have a unique ability to temporarily suspend disbelief, to empathize with pictures as if the narratives they describe were real, and then to cleanly disengage as the credits roll and we turn the page. Can we maintain objective distance, and release only a fraction of our potential emotional response for fictions, reserving real empathy for real people and real events?1

The ability to discriminate between real and manufactured emotion is a talent individuals possess in varying measures. Yet our ability to negotiate the emotional power of fictional imagery may  be compromised by sheer volume. Everyday life is saturated by the proliferation of fantasy-based advertising imagery, coupled increasingly with an omnipresent popular culture of superheroes and supermodels that enact fantasies of prowess and attraction. Many times a day, we are seduced by images of wish fulfillment. Many times a day, we are invited to consider the disappointments of our own lives.

Vancouver artist Susan Bozic’s Dating Portfolio is a series of fifteen photographs that describe the iconic moments of the modern dating ritual as staged by the artist and a male store window mannequin she calls Carl. Through the series of images, the two unlikely lovebirds enact simple pleasures, from sharing a coffee in a cafĂ© or enjoying a picnic, to more glamourous dates such as yachting and drinking champagne on a private jet. Taken as a whole, the dream-like images tell a story of the progressive staging of declarations of love, from casual meetings in public places to increasingly elaborate, formal dates. The narrative describes a modern dating ritual that is both humorous and psychologically complex, revealing dating as a socially constructed behaviour. The Dating Portfolio is a series of projections from the point of view of the female subject who is the active agent in the creation of every scene. Bozic’s store-window mannequin brings into relief the fantasy driving these images and defines an empty space of desire within the perfected image of relational happiness. The empty space, or the lack, represented by the male mannequin in Bozic’s images, functions as an ironic site of unrequited longing.

Bozic’s images combine the aesthetic values of commercial photography – contrived, tightly composed scenes, highly focused and controlled lighting, extensively refinished surfaces in post-production – with scenarios derived from romance literature and illustrated consumer advertising. The enacted photograph, the stock-in-trade of commercial photography, is a medium ideally suited for the visual realization of a contemporary idea of classical perfection. Conventionally used to sell hair and skin care products, make-up, spring wardrobes and automobiles, commercial photography is in the business of spinning dreams. Other-worldly glamour is lent to people and things through staged scenes of luxury and comfort that arephotographed in highly controlled lighting and polished through post-production photographic manipulation.2 Bodies can be toned and slimmed, images of food can be made to seem more appetizing than in real life, interior design and gardens can be rendered as small corners of heaven. In the enacted photograph and in the photographic still-life, every visible detail can be controlled and perfected, every gesture and nuance can be scripted. Life can be messy. Photographs can be perfect.

* * *

Eating popcorn and smiling a big, cover-girl smile, a young woman sits in a movie theatre curled under the arm of a store-window mannequin. The contrast of that smile and that stiff embrace is simultaneously humourous and disconcerting. Bozic calls the image He let me pick the movie – the “He” being, of course, her imaginary boyfriend Carl, the male mannequin with whom she sits in the cinema. The couple in the movie theatre is an icon of happiness and as such, He let me pick the movie doesn’t fail to charm. It is an image that generously communicates a flush of warm thoughts: the pleasure of human sociability, the warmth of companionship, the social approval of a public relationship and the thrill of romantic love. The movie theatre is a democratic space – indifferent to class or wealth. They eat popcorn – so we know it’s a light comedy or a popular  film, a passing diversion – neither high art nor serious documentary. Between them, there is no question of status or power or money. The charm of the image is in the absence of guile: the couple is there for no other reason than they simply enjoy each other’s company.

The charming images depicting simple shared pleasures in the Dating Portfolio eventually give way to an escalating fantasy of devotion and adoration. This is the fantasy of “Carl’s girlfriend.” Every activity is imagined from the point of view of her desire. The titles of the photographs name the things that Carl has done for her: He let me pick the movie; Carl takes me to the nicest places; He surprised me with a romantic getaway; He remembered our anniversary. Her imaginary boyfriend is so good in fact, that he is able to anticipate her needs in images such as All I said was my feet were a little sore, and He’s so thoughtful, it wasn’t even my birthday. Each consecutive image in The Dating Portfolio builds toward the inevitable emotional crescendo of the white wedding, a fantasy of mutual adoration codified in popular women’s literature, music and cinema.

Bozic’s staging of the Dating Portfolio recalls the highly aestheticized narratives of traditional romance fiction.  In its styling, the portfolio reprises the cover illustrations of the so-called “marriage” sub-genre of romance fiction, where marriage is the ultimate goal and the story-line traces a growing but somewhat dispassionate love. Marriage romances typically featured illustrations of attractive, well-groomed couples decorously, if stiffly, embracing.3 The lack of passion in this genre may account for the crucial role of the mannequin in Bozic’s restaging of the fantasy. However, she has updated the genre in many ways. The sketchy pastel renderings of the traditional romance covers are replaced here by saturated hues, satiny shimmer and the sharp-focus gleam of polished surfaces. In the image The picnic was his idea, the budding romance takes place under a clear blue sky and beneath falling cherry blossoms. In He remembered our anniversary, there is little left to chance in the wardrobe or setting. Carl’s girlfriend meets him at the door in pearls, embroidered satin skirt and matching satin shoes.

In Carl takes me to the nicest places the pair are out on the town in matching black. The marriage fantasy in the images is strongly equated with a fundamental materialist ethos. Make-up, hair and wardrobe are always fresh and perfect for the occasion. Deeper passion is equated with greater expense and better clothes. There is little that is spontaneous or left to chance in The Dating Portfolio.  In her aestheticizing of the dating ritual, Bozic describes for us a  culture in which the material qualities of life trump life itself.

If consumerism may be a characteristic particular to our time, commercial photography has lent itself well to the promotion of consumer values. In the Dating Portfolio, Bozic has referenced the photographic advertising conventions of magazine and billboard advertisements for jewellery, liquor, clothing and tourist destinations. Her actors enact their devotions to each other on a conventional stage, facing an unseen audience. Glamour is the focus of every shot, whether  it is mountains, pearls, champagne or apparel. Bozic moves beyond the conventions of commercial still photography in Bedroom, however, where the mannequin’s back to the camera recalls the conventional and economical staging of the daytime soap opera. Little is expended here in terms of adornment, the focus being on the anticipation of sex. Images such as Photo Booth and All I said was my feet were a bit sore point to a greater naturalism – seemingly referencing spontaneous photo booth sessions or casual snapshots. Yet even these apparently spontaneously captured moments have been codified, conventionalized, and marketed as signifiers of “unaffected” charm and affection.

The marketing of images of affection in cinema, television, and publicity plays on the inherent voyeurism of people and the Dating Portfolio images work within this convention. We have become accustomed to living vicariously through the emotional lives of celebrities and actors. The viewer of popular media functions as a fly on the wall, unseen by the actors who pretend to be in intimate situations and who behave as if there was no one watching, making the viewer's experience akin to that of a peeping-tom. Each episode produces a frisson of excitement similar to the feeling we get from looking through someone else’s private photos, or coming across someone's discarded photo-booth pictures, where we are afforded a fraction of a second of someone else's interior life.

The fantasy of Carl’s girlfriend’s that Bozic describes is clearly as hollow as Carl. While we are charmed by these images of simple affection and by the more elaborate displays of devotion, and drawn to the aura of glamour each image holds, there is a hole in the centre of  the picture. Carl’s girlfriend seems not to notice that her dream date is a dud. His perfect hair and rugged jaw line are only a cartoon fantasy of maleness. The viewer can’t help but laugh – perhaps at her naivetĂ©, perhaps at our own. Is the joke on us? The empty space, or the lack, represented by the male mannequin in Bozic’s images is ironic, making reference to desire through the absence of its object.  The enacted scenes are expressions of Carl’s girlfriend’s need for approval and for displays of affection and of her desire for unconditional love. One criticism of romance fiction is that such fantasy becomes a substitute for agency in women. To quote Germaine Greer, “This is the hero that women have chosen for themselves. The traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage.”4  

In Susan Bozic’s the Dating Portfolio, the emperor has no clothes. The imprisoning agent of her heroine’s desire is revealed as an empty shell. The artist mocks the fantasy of prince charming, and the contemporary culture of materialism associated with it, ironically asserting the emptiness of that dream. With the Dating Portfolio, Bozic directs our attention to the difficulties of establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships in a world of increasing atomization, digitization, and materialism, where face-to-face contact seems increasingly elusive. But the dream persists, even if the centre is hollow. Desire, that need for physical and emotional completion, persists even after we think we have deconstructed its political biases. We desire a connection to someone who listens to us, understands us, protects us and adores us. The possibility and promise of human connection suggest that with it, everything is beautiful and everything is possible. Instead, the desire for human completion remains chimerical – its emotional consolation a sterile and destructive dream of limitless consumption.

1. Cf. Naomi Rosenblum, who suggests that, “Camera images have been able to make invented ‘realities’ seem not at all fraudulent and have permitted viewers to suspend disbelief while remaining aware that the scene has been contrived.” Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 1984, p. 495.

2. Historically, photographic retouching was done using the airbrush. Contemporary photographic manipulation is now primarily digital, involving computer programs – the most popular being Photoshop.

3. Jennifer McKnight-Trontz, The Look of Love: The Art of the Romance Novel (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 35.

4. Germain Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 176.

Monday 10 September 2007

Objects of Affection: Press Release



Curated by Gordon Hatt, featuring work by Susan Bozic, Meesoo Lee, Jillian McDonald, Maria Legault, Warren Quigley & Tanya Read

Objects of Affection was an exhibition about misplaced love. Desire, that intoxicating stirring of affection for someone or something, is a constant throughout our lives. The objects of our affection, however, are constantly changing. What do we desire? Why do we desire, and how do we express this desire? 

Desire is of course shaped and channeled by religion, tradition, education, class and culture. We are educated in wants and needs, taught what to hope and wish for and what to disdain. But lurking beneath our educated restraint are subconscious desires, desires motivated by needs other than those determined by culture and society. Our needs may be a striving for personal completion and fulfillment, something which may be little more than a projection of our own narcissism. Never quite satisfied, we are driven to confront a gnawing existential unhappiness, constantly desiring, in an endless search to somehow fill the feeling of an emptiness within. 

The six artists in Objects of Affection address this existential longing through their work. Popular culture, that great vehicle for the creation and imaging of desire in the service of the consumer society, is referenced by all of the artists in the exhibition. Romance novels and advertising, Hollywood movies and fan magazines, soap operas and comics are the direct or indirect subjects of these artists. The artifacts of popular culture reflect back to us both our ideal and our comically pathetic selves. We attempt to measure ourselves against these representations but they never seem to fit. Engaging popular culture by appropriating its means, in effect talking back to it, these six artists create spaces for the desiring subject in a culture of publicity and celebrity. They address the inadequacies of popular culture's representations of who we are and what we feel, and confront the feelings of emptiness that these images of popular culture do much to create. 

Vancouver artist Susan Bozic has created the Dating Portfolio, a series of staged photographs depicting a young woman's romantic fantasies. Her fantasy date in these photographs is a store window mannequin. Together they enact images that recall romance novels, billboard advertising, television commercials and Hollywood films portraying the blissful co-existence of happy couples. Her matinee idol mannequin is a pliant clothes hanger, providing an amenable but insensate partner in the illustration of the young woman's impossible desire.

Meesoo Lee, also of Vancouver, has produced a series of videos he calls Pop Songs. Working within the genre of music video, Lee samples television and video, selectively editing and adding soundtracks. His resulting modifications tease out the structural relationships of the media and its content, focussing our voyeuristic gaze on televisual images of figure skaters, rodeo riders, actors and the other shooting stars of our media environment. Lee's Pop Songs reveal video and film as a virtual peep show that feeds false intimacy to an atomized and insatiably desiring public.

New York-based artist Jillian McDonald 's video Me and Billy-Bob is a projection and examination of the obsessional fantasy that fuels our now pervasive celebrity culture. Me and Billy-Bob is a collage of clips from movies starring the actor Billy-Bob Thornton. McDonald digitally inserts herself into existing film clips as the recurring object of actor Billy-Bob Thornton's affection. They exchange looks of longing, pleasure, and pain, yet the desire remains unconsummated, looping infinitely. McDonald's intervention is part of a larger body of work that includes other videos, a website, a photo series, music, and a participatory tattoo project for fans.

Toronto-based performance artist Maria Legault's work is based around a life-sized puppet she calls Plus One. As the name implies, Plus One is Legault's imaginary partner, a foil and a projection of her desires and anxieties in being part of a couple. Their marriage and its disintegration are the subject of a performance where intimacy and communication are doomed from the start. 

Ridgeway, Ontario artist Warren Quigley creates an installation environment through the arrangement of aspects of a motel room. His Love Motel makes reference to bordellos from New Orleans from the turn of the previous century, to the Love Motels of Asia in the 60s and 70s, to the North American roadside motels spawned by car culture. While other artists attempt to describe the illusiveness of desire through surrogate love objects, Quigley describes desire as a vacant shell of anticipation and regret.

Toronto-based artist Tanya Read created Mr. Nobody in 1998, a black-and-white anthropomorphic animal resembling a cross between a panda bear and a cat. Mr. Nobody is not the ideal integrated self, but the self as fragmented, aimless, confused and desiring. Like his popular television counterpart Homer Simpson, Mr. Nobody is a bottomless well of omnidirectional need and comic pathos. 

Image: Susan Bozic, He let me pick the movie, C-print, 30 x 40 inches, 2005.