I’ve been having fun on the intertubes of late trying to find so-called high art in ridiculous places. For example, I found this lovely little performance art piece on Yoko Ono’s Twitter Feed:
Draw a line with your body. See how it effects you, see how it effects where you are drawing the line. See how it effects the whole world.
On Twitter? Really? Once I got over that little obstacle, I discovered another obstacle that my ivory tower education placed in my way: Grammar. I scoffed, “It’s supposed to be affects, not effects.” Right. But, if you 1) replace the pronouns with the prior nouns to which they refer and 2) replace effects with a synonymous phrase or word, the piece could very well mean like this:
Draw a line with your body. See how your body results in you, see how your body results in where you are drawing the line. See how your body results in the whole world.
That’s a little different, no? It emphasizes the body, not the line. The line is merely a tool by which one becomes aware of their bodily limitations, tendencies, memories, etc. One also becomes aware in the end how bodies are the source material for “the whole world” according to Ono.
As a singer, I often think about the sounds bodies make, i.e. the aural evidence of physicality, when “art” enters. I’ve been pretty fascinated with it lately, because I’ll soon perform a piece by a friend of mine with contact mikes plastered all over my body. This project, let me tell you, has made me very aware of the sounds my body makes… and they’re not pretty.
Moreover, I love me a good bit of wordplay. After reading Ono’s piece, my attention turned to this line that she requires. What sort of line was it exactly? How would one draw it with their body–as a whole, not just with a part, with hands, with feet or with mind alone? How many different types of lines intersect our bodies in modern life?
Bodies–intersected by lines–bodies in the industrial to digital to ??? revolution. There are power lines, phone lines, life lines, central lines, waiting lines, musical lines, clothes lines, blood lines, lines all over the place… in calculus, in the wild, in game shows, in music. So, if bodies make sounds, if lines cut across and combine with and separate from and define our bodies every day, if there are musical lines, why not take advantage of the metaphor and turn Ono’s piece into a sonic etude?
Furthermore, and more pragmatically, I had to write a piece for my computer music class that evoked a person and three moods surrounding that person. My choice was Yoko Ono (as a symbol for the archetypal body), and the moods were longing, insistency, and that ineffable quality derived from social networking… cheesy superficiality.
So, I interpreted/performed Ono’s piece as a sonic etude (musique concrete). Here, again is the tweet and the instruction piece:
Draw a line with your body. See how it effects you, see how it effects where you are drawing the line. See how it effects the whole world.
And, now, here’s a link to my aural interpretation (cover?) of Yoko Ono’s piece as musique concrete and a little bit about what to expect in the form, intentions and effects.
–> Etude 6
The piece opens with electronic sounds–a geiger counter and a sine wave. A processed ostinato figure (derived from a heart monitor and a busy signal) soon joins them, sliding up and down octaves within and without the range of human hearing. The sine wave persists on the same volume and pitch (3349Hz) for the entire piece, and the ostinato loops throughout. I then interpolated the sound of a dial-up modem interacting with a phone line, which I layered and processed in order to create mounting density (stretto?) and frenetic, contrapuntal opposition, i.e. contrary motion, saturated cannon. When the density reaches critical mass, the layers give way to the sound of a Native American flute (so cheesy you can smell it!) which becomes progressively processed and disappears into the persistent background ether. Next, the sine wave assimilates the ostinato and the clicking of the geiger counter slips away.
The sine wave is the constant connecting fiber of this piece and correlates to Ono’s line. While the line remains empirically static (thanks to the computer), human ears perceive it differently throughout the piece. I present and conceived of the sine wave as background material, yet it intrudes–sometimes painfully–on the listening process as if it were foreground material. For example, sometimes the volume seems to fluctuate due to the competing sounds, even though no such thing empirically happens. Thus, to stay within the metaphor, the ear draws the sine wave in a totally different location and manner than the mathematics. This experience makes the listener aware of where their body delineates pitch, movement, orientation/physical relationships, the senses, focus, etc. and how the body effects–results in–where one draws the line.
I chose a geiger counter in the sense that the word “counter” describes a surface, opposition (to counter) and quantities. The tool refers to a quantity of radiation… where is it radiating from? Along what trajectory does it draw us? In this instance, there is no trajectory and the only correlating radiation is the sine wave. Both sounds are evidence, nay, residues of natural phenomena that were and always were; both sounds function and inherently don’t function musically as background and foreground material, countering notions of noise and music.
Moreover, geiger means violin in German, and I find it only appropriate to this piece that one plays the violin by essentially shortening strings–resonating lines–with their body. The metaphor obtains.
Finally, the geiger “counter” is a contrasting textured surface against the other smoother, more legato, reverberant sounds, such as the flute, the sine wave and the ostinato. This counter/surface creates a transparent ledge through which the range of textures becomes apparent. Simply put, without the rough, popping sounds, the whole piece just dissolves into one big, indistinguishable reverberant ooze. On the contrary, the rougher articulations delineate the other end of the spectrum of articulations and attune the ear to variances in attacks.
“See how it effects the whole world.”
Or,
“See how your body results in the world.”
I’ve mentioned numerous concepts, systems and descriptive metaphors that cross the boundaries coughlinescoughcough of culture, creed, gender, age, race, handicap, etc. But I’m not sure that’s really what Ono was getting at. Rather, I think she was getting at the first person experience of looking out on these concepts and the process by which individuals come to understand how their bodies (not necessarily their minds or common sense) draw distinctions for them, how they are passive and submissive to the will of the body. Ultimately, one’s outlook on life–and the whole world–will be effected by their bodies, and it is a fact of the human condition that mind cannot be divorced from flesh.
Its sorely tempting to go on a rant right now about the way the Cartesian divide has fucked us all up, but I won’t. Instead, I want to place a challenge to future times:
Notice how bodies effect where we draw lines.
Notice in ourselves just how extensive that process is.
Just notice.
Notice how it effects us.
