Project with the children of Jules Ferry Primary School in Villeurbanne
2018-20
Philippe Genet, Pascal Pariaud and Gérald Venturi
This project is part of a program of the French Institute of Education. The Jules Ferry elementary school in Villeurbanne is an « associated educational institution », a partnership between a research laboratory and schools. The project developed over the last three years by Philippe Genet, Pascal Pariaud and Gérald Venturi is being carried out in collaboration with the sociologist Jean-Paul Filiod and the teachers of the Jules Ferry school.
The four members of the research team have been working on identifying learning of musical (vocabulary, culture…) and psychosocial (self-esteem, cooperation…) nature. This involves musical listening and sound manipulation workshops.
Here are two examples of sound files realized by the children in this project:
To begin with, I wanted to propose we talk about my activity as a curator, because I think it speaks to the topic of this issue. In Berlin, I co-curate a monthly concert series called KONTRAKLANG (www.kontraklang.de). In a place like Berlin where you have a higher concentration of people doing contemporary music than anywhere else in the world, and at a very high level, it happens that people specialize, and they don’t necessarily see themselves as part of a bigger ecosystem. For example, some people in the sound art scene might go to galleries or have something to do with the radio, but they don’t necessarily spend much time going to concerts or hanging out with composers and musicians. Then you have, as you know, composer-composers who only go to concerts of their own music or to festivals to fish for commissions, or occasionally to hear what their friends are doing. And then you have improvisers who go to certain clubs and would never go to conventional new music festivals. Not everyone is like that of course, but it is a tendency: humans like to separate themselves into tribes.
Jean-Charles F.:
There is nothing wrong with that?
CW:
Well, I mean, there is something wrong with it, if it becomes the super-structure.
JCF:
Yes. And within the improvisation world you have also sub-categories?
CW:
Yes. Even though the pie is small, people feel the need to cut it up into pieces. I don’t mean to dwell on that as a permanent condition of humanity, but it is something that’s there – and which we wanted to address when we started KONTRAKLANG four years ago. We wanted to derail this tendency and to encourage more intersections between different mini-scenes. In particular, we gravitate toward forms of exchange, or work that has multiple identities. Sometimes, often actually, we have two-part concerts, one set – break – one set, in which these two sets are very different aesthetically, generationally, etc. But they might be tied up with similar kinds of questions or methods. For example, a couple of years ago we did a concert about collectives. We invited two collectives: on the one hand, Stock11 (http://stock11.de), a group of composers-performers, mainly German, who are very much anchored in the “Neue Musik” scene; they presented some pieces of their own and played each other’s works. And on the other hand, we presented a more experimental collective, Umlaut (http://www.umlautrecords.com/), whose members do not perform together regularly, but they are friends; they have a record label, a festival, and a loose network of people who like each other, but don’t have necessarily have a common musical history. They had never actually played a concert together as “Umlaut”; and now we asked them to perform a concert together. I think there were five or six of them and they made a piece together for the first time ever. So, the same theme applied to both sets, but it manifested under very different conditions, with very different aesthetics, very different philosophies about how to work together. This is the sort of thing we dig. Even when there is no nice theme to package the diversity, there is usually a thread that connects the content and highlights the differences in a (hopefully) provocative way. This is something that has been very fruitful for us, because it creates occasions for collaborations that wouldn’t normally be there, you know with festivals or institutions, and also I think, it has helped develop a wider audience than we would have if we were doing only new music, or improvised music, or something more obvious like that. We also invite sound artists: we have had a few performance-installations as well as projects involving sound artists who write for instruments. Concerts are not necessarily appropriate formats for people doing sound art, because they generally work in other sorts of spaces or formats; performance is not necessarily part of sound art. In fact, in Germany, especially, it is one of the walls, let’s say, that historically has been constructed between sound art and music. It is not that way in other places necessarily.
JCF:
Is it because sound artists are more connected to the visual arts?
CW:
Exactly. Their superstructure is the art world, generally speaking, as opposed to the music world.
JCF:
Also, they are often into electronics or computer-generated sounds?
CW:
Sometimes. But, as an American, my understanding of sound art is more ecumenical. I don’t really know where to put a lot of people who call themselves sound artists but also do music or vice versa. Nor do I really care, but I mention it to provide a background for our taste for grey areas in KONTRAKLANG.
2. Public Participation
JCF :
It seems to me that for many artists who are interested in sound matter, there is a need to avoid the ultra-specialized universe of musicians, which might be a guarantee of excellence but a source of great limitations. But there is also the question of the audience. Very often it is composed of the artists, the musicians themselves and their entourage. I have the impression that today there is a great demand for active participation on the part of the public, not just to be in situations of having to listen to or contemplate something. Is this the case?
CW:
Are listening and contemplating not active? Even in the most formal live concert situations, the audience is physically engaged with the music; I do not really relate to the concept of participation as a separate layer of activity. Everything I do as a musician is quite collaborative. I almost never do something by myself, whether making written pieces for other people or making pieces for myself, or improvising, even when it’s ostensibly “alone”. There is always some very clear aspect of sharing. And I extend that notion of course to listening as well, even if listeners are not voting on what piece I should play next, or processing my sounds through their smartphones or whatever. Imagination is inherently interactive, and that is good enough for me. I don’t really spend too much time on the more overtly social participation that is hyped in pop music or in advertising, or even curating in museum contexts nowadays. I am quite skeptical actually. Did you ever come across an architect and thinker called Markus Miessen?
JCF:
No.
CW:
He wrote a book called The Nightmare of Participation,[1] in which he takes apart this whole idea, and critiques the kind of cynical mindset behind “Let the people decide.”
JCF:
Yet active public participation seems to me to be what constitutes the very nature of architecture, in the active adaptation of spaces and pathways by users, or even their actual modification. But, of course, the process is as follows: architects build something out of a phantasm of who the users are, and then the users afterwards transform the planned places and pathways.
CW:
Well, architecture definitely offers an interesting context for thinking about participation, because it can be present in so many different ways.
JCF:
Usually, the public has no choice but participating.
CW:
They have to live there. Are you familiar with Lawrence Halprin’s work?
As you know, I wrote a chapter about it in my dissertation and I have been dipping into his work over the last couple of years. I also took a dance class with Anna Halprin, his wife, who was equally responsible for that whole story. She is ninety-eight now and still teaches twice a week, on the same deck where she has been teaching since the 1950s, it’s amazing. Anna still talks about RSVP Cycles a lot. Her view of RSVP is simpler and more open than her husband’s: he had a more systematic idea about what it should do and how to use it. It is fascinating to compare the utopian sense of participation in his writings with how he actually implemented it in his own projects. In her book City Choreographer Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America,[3] Alison Bick Hirsh views Halprin’s work with sympathetic eyes. But she also offers a critical view of the tension between his modernist sensibilities and his need for control and, on the other hand, his genuine desire to maximize the potential of public participation at different levels.
The project I use in my dissertation to unpack the principles of RSVP is the Sea Ranch, an ecological community in Northern California. If you saw it, you would recognize it immediately because the style of architecture has been copied so widely: unfinished wood siding with very steep roofs and big windows – very iconic. He developed this kind of architecture for that particular place: the slanted roofs divert the wind coming off the ocean and create a kind of a sanctuary on the side of the house not facing the coast. The wood siding derives from a feature of historical regional architecture, the barns that were built there by Russian fur traders before the land was developed. He and his many collaborators also drew up ecological principles for the community: there were rules about the kind of vegetation to be used on the private lots, that no house should block the view of the sea for any other house, that the community should be built in clusters rather than spread out suburb-style – these sorts of things. And pretty soon this community became so sought after, because of the beauty and solitude, that basically the real estate developers ran all over his ecological principles.
Ultimately they let him go and expanded the community in a way that totally contradicted his original vision. This project was based on the RSVP Cycle, that is, on a model of the creative process that prioritized a transparent representation of interactions between the Resources, the Score, the Value-actions, and the Performance. But the power of purse hovering over the whole process, which kind of rendered everything else impotent at a certain point, is not represented in his model. This asymmetrical power dynamic was apparently a problem in more than one of his projects. It was not always based on money, but sometimes on his own vision, which wasn’t represented and critiqued in the creative process.
JCF:
That’s the nature of any project, it lasts and suddenly it becomes something else, or it disappears.
CW:
Some of his urbanist projects were extreme in this way: a year’s worth of work with the community, meeting with people, setting up local task forces with community representatives, organizing events, and taking surveys… and then ultimately he would shape the project to reach the conclusions that he wanted to reach in the first place! I can understand why it would be the case, in a way, because if you let the people decide complex issues, it can be hard to reach conclusions. He didn’t do that, I think, because of his training and his strong aesthetic ideals, which were very much rooted in the Bauhaus. He studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with Gropius. He could not, at a certain level, escape his modernist impulses. In my experience, authorial power structures rarely disappear in these kinds of participatory projects, and it’s wise to accept that and use it to the collective advantage.
In that same chapter in my dissertation, I talk about a set of pieces by Richard Barrett. He is an interesting guy, because he’s an illustrious composer-composer, who’s often worked with very complex notation, but he has also been a free improviser throughout his career, mainly on electronics; he has an important duo with Paul Obermayer called furt. Fifteen years ago or so Richard started working with notation and improvisation together in his projects at the same time, which was kind of unheard of in his output – it was either one or the other up until that point. He wrote a series of pieces called fOKT, for an octet of improvisers and composers-performers. What I find interesting about this series is that his role in the project is very much that of a leader, a composer, but by appealing to the performers’ own sound worlds, and offering his composition as an extension of his performance practice, he created a situation in which he could melt into the project as one musician among many. It was not about maintaining a power structure as in some of Lawrence Halprin’s work. I think it is a superb model for how composers interested in improvisation can work. It provides an alternative to more facile solutions, such as when a composer who is not an improviser him/herself gives improvisers a timeline and says: “do this for a while, then do that”. There are deeper ways to engage improvisation as a composer if you don’t adopt this perspective of looking at performance from a helicopter.
JCF:
In the 1960s, I experienced many situations like the one you describe: a composer who included moments of improvisation in his scores. Many experimental versions were already available in the form of graphic scores, directed improvisation (what today is called “sound painting”), not forgetting the processes of aleatoric forms and indeterminacy. At the time, this produced a great deal of frustration among the performers, which led to the need for instrumentalists and vocalists to create situations of “free” improvisation that dispensed with the authority of a single person bearing creative responsibility. Certainly, today the situation of the relationships between composition and improvisation has changed a lot. Moreover, the conditions of collective creation of sound material at the time of the performance on stage is far from being clearly defined in terms of content and social relations. For my part, over the last 15 years, I have developed the notion of improvisation protocols which seem to me to be necessary in situations where musicians from different traditions have to meet to co-construct sound material, in situations where musicians and other artists (dancers, actors, visual artists, etc.) meet to find common territories, or in situations where it is a question of people approaching improvisation for the first time. However, I remain attached to two ideas: a) improvisation holds its legitimacy in the collective creation of a type of direct and horizontal democracy; b) the supports of the « visual » world must not be eliminated, but improvisation should encourage other supports that are clearly on the side of orality and listening.
3. The Question of Immigration
JCF:
To change the subject and come back to Berlin: you seem to describe a world that is still deeply attached to the notions of avant-garde and innovation in perspectives that seem to me to be still linked to the modernist period – of course I am completely part of that world. But what about the problem of immigration, for example? Even if at the moment this problem is particularly burning, I think it is not new. Do people who don’t correspond to the ideal of Western art come to the concerts you organize?
CW:
Actually, in our concert series we have connections to organizations that help refugees, and we have invited them to our events. Maybe you know that many of the refugees – besides the fact that they are in a new place and they have to start from scratch here without much, if any, family or friends – they don’t have the right to work. Some of them go to study German, or they look for internships and the like, but many of them just are hanging around waiting to return to their country, and of course this is a recipe for disaster. So, there are organizations that offer ways for them to get involved with society here. We have invited them to KONTRAKLANG, and it is a standing invitation, free of charge. The venue offers them free drinks. Occasionally we have had a crowd of up to twenty, twenty-five people from these organizations, and some of those concerts were among the best of the season, because they brought a completely different atmosphere to the audience. Imagine that these are mostly kids – say between eighteen or even younger up through their mid-twenties – many of whom, I suspect, have never been to any formal concert, much less of contemporary music. The whole ritual of going to a concert hall, paying attention, turning off their phones, seems not to be a part of their world. Sometimes, they talk to each other during the concerts, they get up and go to the bar or go to the bathroom while the pieces are being played. It is distracting at first, but they have no taboos about reacting to the music. I can remember the applause for certain pieces was just mind-blowing – they got up and started hooting and hollering like nobody from our usual audience would ever do. And they laugh and make comments to each other when something strange happens. Obviously this is refreshing, if sightly shocking, for a seasoned contemporary music audience. Unfortunately, these folks don’t come so often anymore; maybe we need to get in touch again and recruit some more, because it was a very positive experience. However, some of them did come back. Some of them kept coming and asking questions about what we do, and that is very encouraging. But, of course, this is an exception to the rule.
JCF:
Do they come with their own practices?
CW:
Well, I don’t know how many of them are dedicated or professional musicians, but I have the impression that some sing or play an instrument. Honestly, it’s something of a blind spot.
JCF:
More generally, Berlin is a place that is particularly known for its multiculturalism. It’s not just the question of the recent refugees.
CW:
It’s true that there are, here in Berlin, hundreds of nationalities and languages, and different communities. Are you curious why our concerts are so white?
4. Mediation
JCF:
It is about the relationship between the group of “modernists” – which is largely white – and the rest of society. It has to do with the impression I have of a gradual disappearance of contemporary music of my generation, which in the past had a large audience that has now become increasingly sparse and had a media exposure that has now practically disappeared, all this in favor of a mosaic of diversified practices (as you mentioned above), each with a group of passionate aficionados but few in number.
CW:
In Berlin you get better audiences than practically anywhere else, in my experience. Even though you may have only fifteen to twenty people in the audience at some concerts, more often you have fifty, which is cozy at a venue like Ausland[4], one of the underground institutions in improvised music. They have been going for fifteen years or so, and they have a regular series there called “Biegungen”, which some friends of mine run. The place is only so big, but if you get a certain number of people there, it feels like a party; it’s quite a lively scene. But then again you have more official festivals with an audience of hundreds. KONTAKLANG is somewhere in between, usually we have around a hundred people per concert. So, I don’t have the impression at all that this type of music and its audience are dwindling per se. What you are talking about, I think, is rather the disconnect between musical culture and musical practice.
JCF:
Not quite. To come back to what we said before, it’s more the idea of a plethora of “small groups”, with their own networks that spread around the world but remain small in size. It’s often difficult to be able to distinguish one network from another. It is no longer a question of distinguishing between high art and popular culture, but rather of a series of underground networks whose practices and affiliations are in opposition to the unifying machine of the cultural industry. These networks are at the same time so similar, they all tend to do the same thing at the same time, and yet they are closed in the sense that they tend at the same time to avoid doing anything with one another. Each network has its own festivals, stages, concert halls, and if you’re part of another group, there’s no chance of being invited. The thought of the multitude of the various undergrounds opens up fields of unlimited freedom, and yet it tends completely to multiply the walls.
CW:
The walls! Yes, that is what I mean by musical culture: how people organize themselves, the discourses that they are involved in, and places that they play, magazines they read, all of this stuff. To me, it is obviously extremely important, and it has a major impact on practice, but I don’t think that the practice is bound by it. There is a lot of common ground between, for instance, certain musicians working with drones or tabletop guitars, and electro-acoustic musicians, and experimental DJs; similar problems appear in different practical contexts. But when it comes to what is called “Vermittlung” in German, the presentation, promotion, dissemination of the music, then swshhhh… they often fly by each other completely. What interests me more, as a musician who understands the work on the ground, is how practice can connect different musical cultures, and not how musical cultures can separate the practices. Musical culture has to be there to serve the practice, and this is one of the reasons why I am interested in curating, because I can bring knowledge of the connectivity between these different practices to bear on their presentation. Too many of the people running festivals, institutions, schools, and publications don’t have that first-hand perspective of working with the materials, so they don’t see these links and they don’t promote them. Sometimes they might dare to bring seemingly incompatible traditions together for isolated encounters, like Persian or Indian classical musicians and a contemporary chamber ensemble. These things happen every so often, but more often than not they are doomed by the gesture of making some sexy cocktail of presumed others. What we try to do in our series is to explore the continuities that are already there but may be hidden from view by our own presumptuous music-cultural frameworks.
5. Artistic Research – A Tension between Theory and Practice
JCF:
This brings us to the last question: the walls that exist between the academic world of the university and that of actual practice. Music practitioners are excluded from higher education and research institutions, or more often do not want to be associated with them. But at the same time, they are not completely out of them these days. It seems to me that you are in a good position to say things about this.
CW:
Well, I am lucky to have one foot in academia and one foot out, so I don’t have to choose, at least at this point. I have always been interested in research, and obviously I’ve always been interested in making music for its own sake. In my doctorate I developed a strong taste for the interface between the two.
JCF:
Then, the notion of artistic research is important to you?
CW:
Yes and no. The contents of artistic research are important to me, and I am very fond of the idea that practice can do things for research that more scientific methods cannot. I am also fond of the potential that artistic practice – particularly experimental music – has for larger social questions, larger questions around knowledge production and dissemination. I am also interested in using research to step outside of my own aesthetic limitations. All of these things are inherent to artistic research, but on the other hand, I am ambivalent about the discipline of artistic research and its institutions. The term “artistic research” suffers a lot of abuse. On the one hand, the term is common among practitioners who cannot really survive in the art or music world, because they don’t have the skills or the gumption to live as a freelance artist. On the other hand, there are academics who colonize this area, because they need a specialism. Perhaps they come from philosophy or the social sciences, art history, musicology, theatre studies, critical theory, or the like. For them, artistic research is another pie to be sliced up.
JCF:
Yes, I can see.
CW:
So, there are conferences and journals and academic departments, but I can’t determine if or how many people in the world of artistic research really prize practice as practice. You can probably sense my allergy to this aspect of artistic research – sorry for the rant! Let’s just say I care less about promoting or theorizing artistic research as a discipline, and more about doing it. I suspect most of the people who do the best work in the field feel the same way. This topic has been more in my mind lately than it ever has been, first of all because I’d like to have some sort of regular income; this freelance artist hardship number is getting tiresome!
JCF:
Indeed, the relationships between the different versions of artistic careers are not entirely peaceful. Firstly, independent artists, particularly in the field of experimental music, often consider those who are sheltered in academic or other institutions as betraying the ideal of artistic risk as such. Secondly, teachers who are oriented towards instrumental or vocal music practice often think that any reflection on one’s own practice is a useless time taken from the actual practice required by the high level of excellence. Thirdly, many artists do research without knowing it, and when they are aware of it, they often refuse to disseminate their art through research papers. Many walls have been erected between the worlds of independent practices, conservatories and research institutions.
CW:
Well, in terms of just the limited subject of improvisation, more and more people who can do both are in positions of power. Look at George Lewis: he’s changed everything. He paid his dues as a musician and artist, and he’s constantly doing interesting stuff creatively; and meanwhile he’s become a figurehead in the field of improvisation studies. Through his professorship at Columbia University, he’s been able to create opportunities for all kinds of people and ideas which might not otherwise have a place there.
JCF:
At Columbia University (and Princeton), historically, Milton Babbitt was the figurehead of the music department. It’s very interesting that now it’s George Lewis, with all of what he stands for, who’s in that position, who’s become the most influential intellectual and artistic figure in the department.
You did your PhD at Leiden University[5]. It seems to be a very interesting place.
CW:
Yes, for sure. There are lots of interesting students, and the faculty is very small – it’s basically Marcel Cobussen, Richard Barrett (my two main advisers), and Henk Borgdorff, who is an important theorist of artistic research. My committee chair was Frans de Ruiter, who ran the Royal Conservatory in The Hague for many years before founding the department in Leiden. I believe Edwin van der Heide, a sound artist who makes these big kinetic sculptures and lots of sound installations, is also involved now. It is a totally happening hub for this kind of stuff.
Concerning my search for a more stable position, I am sure something will pop up, I just have to be patient and keep asking around. Most of these kind of opportunities in my life have happened through personal connections anyway, so I think I have to keep my hands on the wheel until the right person shows up.
Our encounter is ending, because I have to go.
JCF:
Thank you very much for this nice meeting.
1. 2010 Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, Berlin: Sternberg Press
2. See Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in Human Environment, G.Brazilier, 1970. RSVP cycles are a system of creative and collaborative methodology. The meaning of the letters are as follows: R = resources; S = scores ; V = value-action; P = performance. See en.wikipedia.org
4. “Ausland, Berlin, is an independent venue for music, film, literature, performance and other artistic endeavors. We also offer our infrastructure for artists and projects for rehearsals, recordings, and workshops, as well as a number of residencies. Inaugurated in 2002, ausland is run by a collective of volunteers.” (https://ausland-berlin.de/about-ausland)
Christopher A. Williams (1981, San Diego) makes, organizes, and theorizes around experimental music and sound. As a composer and contrabassist, his work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. Performances and collaborations with Derek Bailey, Compagnie Ouie/Dire, Charles Curtis, LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, Ferran Fages, Robin Hayward (as Reidemeister Move), Barbara Held, Christian Kesten, Christina Kubisch, Liminar, Maulwerker, Charlie Morrow, David Moss, Andrea Neumann, Mary Oliver and Rozemarie Heggen, Ben Patterson, Robyn Schulkowsky, Ensemble SuperMusique, Vocal Constructivists, dancers Jadi Carboni and Martin Sonderkamp, filmmaker Zachary Kerschberg, and painters Sebastian Dacey and Tanja Smit. This work has appeared in various North American and European experimental music circuits, as well as on VPRO Radio 6 (Holland), Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Volksbühne Berlin, and the American Documentary Film Festival.
Williams’ artistic research takes the form of both conventional academic publications and practice-based multimedia projects. His writings appear in publications such as the Journal of Sonic Studies, Journal for Artistic Research, Open Space Magazine, Critical Studies in Improvisation, TEMPO, and Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance(Routledge).
He co-curates the Berlin concert series KONTRAKLANG. From 2009-20015 he co-curated the salon series Certain Sundays.
Williams holds a B.A. from the University of California San Diego (Charles Curtis, Chaya Czernowin, and Bertram Turetzky); and a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden (Marcel Cobussen and Richard Barrett). His native digital dissertation Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is at www.tactilepaths.net.
From 2020-2022 he is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz.
Encounter between Reinhard Gagel and
Jean-Charles François
Berlin, June 29, 2018
Reinhard Gagel Reinhard Gagel is a visual artist, pianist, improviser, researcher and pedagogue who is associated with the Exploratorium Berlin, a center in existence since 2004 dedicated to improvisation and its pedagogy, which organizes concerts, colloquia and workshops (he retired in March 2020). He works in Berlin, Cologne and Vienna. This interview took place (in English) in June 2018 at the Exploratorium Berlin. (www.exploratorium-berlin.de) in June 2018. It was recorded, transcribed and edited by Jean-Charles François.
I think that today many people work in different environments with professional, artistic, sentimental, philosophical, political (etc.) identities that are incompatible with each other. The language that should be used in one context is not at all appropriate for another context. Many artists occupy, without too many problems, functions in two or more antagonistic fields. Many teach and give concerts at the same time. The antagonisms are between art teaching circles and those of artistic production on stage, or between the circles of interpretation of written scores and those of improvisation, or between music conservatories and musicology departments in universities. The discourses on both sides are often ironic and unlikely to degenerate into major conflicts. Nevertheless, they correspond to deep convictions, such as the belief that practice is far superior to theory, or vice versa: many musicians think that any reflexive thinking is a waste of time taken from the time that should be devoted to the practice of the instrument.
Reinhard G.:
There is also a tradition here in Germany of considering old-fashioned to work in both pedagogy and improvisation. At the Exploratorium (in Berlin), for years and years all the musicians in Berlin said that the Exploratorium was only a pedagogical institute. This is really changing: for example, our concerts include musicians who are also scholars. There was a problem between the academic world and the world of practicing musicians, and I think that these boundaries are being erased a little bit, in order to be able to develop exchanges. The type of symposium I am organizing – you attended the first one – is a first step in this direction. The musicians who are invited are also researchers, pedagogues, teachers. But in Germany, our discussions are mainly focused on the constant interaction between theory and musical practice. This is my modest contribution to trying to overcome the problem that exists in many of the colloquia in which we participate: that’s there’s only talk talk talk, endless speeches, successions of paper presentations and little that really relates to musical practice. Your action with PaaLabRes seems to go in the same direction: to bring together the different aspects of the artistic world.
Jean-Charles F.:
To bridge the gaps. That is to say to have in the Editions of our digital space a mixture of academic and non-academic texts and to accompany them with artistic productions, with artistic forms that, thanks to digital technology, mix different genres.
Reinhard G.:
In your Editions you use French and English?
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes and no. We really try to concentrate on the French public who often still have difficulty reading English. Translating important texts written in English and still little known in France seems very important to me, this was the case with the texts of George Lewis, David Gutkin and Christopher Williams. Unfortunately, we do not have the possibility to translate texts written in German. We are in the process of developing a bilingual English-French version of the first edition.
Reinhard G.:
I have the feeling that your publication is interesting, even though I didn’t have much time to read it in detail. I find the theme of the next edition “Break down the walls” really important. My next symposium at the Exploratorium in January (2019) is going to be on “Improvising with the strange (and with strangers), Transitions between cultures through (free) improvisation?” I invited Sandeep Bhagwati, a musician, composer, improvisator and researcher, who works at a university in Canada and lives in Berlin. He belongs to at least two cultures, and he has created an ensemble here in Berlin that tries to combine elements from lots of different cultures to produce a new mixture. It’s not like so-called “world music” or inter-cultural music or anything like that – I think they’re trying to find a really new sound. This should be built from all the musical sources of the musicians who make up the ensemble and who all come from different cultures. I invited him to give a concert and to present the keynote address of the symposium. The last symposium was about “multi-mindedness.” This term is said to come from Evan Parker, and it refers to the problem of how a large group of musicians organizes itself while playing together. Some musicians use methods of self-organization, others use conducting in various forms. For example, my Offhandopera brings a lot of people together to create an opera in real time, with moderate conducting. The symposium has led to a good exchange and the new edition of Improfil[1] (2019) will be devoted to these issues.
Jean-Charles F.:
A first reaction to what you have just said might be to ask how this idea of trans-culturalism is different from Debussy’s approach, which takes the Indonesian gamelan as a model for certain pieces. There are, for example, many composers who use other cultures from around the world as inspiration for their own creations. Sometimes they mix in their pieces, traditional musicians with classically trained musicians. The question that can be asked in the face of these sympathetic attempts is that of the return match: to put the musicians of European classical music in their turn in situations of discomfort by confronting themselves with the practices and conceptions of other traditional music. It is not just a question of treating the musical material of particular cultures in a certain way, but of confronting the realities of their respective practices. In Lyon within the framework of the Cefedem AuRA[2] that I created and directed for seventeen years, and where from the year 2000 we developed a study program that brings together musicians from traditional music, amplified popular music, jazz and classical music. The main idea was to consider each cultural entity as having to be recognized within the entirety of its “walls” – we have often used the term “house” – and that their methods of evaluation had to correspond to their modes of operation. But at the same time, the walls of each musical genre had to be recognized by all as corresponding to values as such, to necessities indispensable to their existence.
Reinhard G.:
For their identity.
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes, but we have also organized the curriculum so that all students in the four domains should also be required to work together on concrete projects. The idea was to avoid the situation where, as in many institutions, the musical genres are recognized as worthy of being present, but separated in disciplines that communicate only very rarely, and even less allow things to take place together. There are many examples where a teacher tells the students not to go and see those who make other types of music.
Reinhard G.:
It is typical of what happens often in musical education.
Jean-Charles F.:
In fact, this also happens a lot in higher education. The question also arises in a very problematic way with regard to the absence of minorities from popular neighborhoods in France in conservatories: the actions carried out to improve recruitment can often be considered as neo-colonialist in nature, or on the contrary are based on the preconception that only the practices already existing in these neighborhoods definitively define the people who live there. How to break down the walls?
Reinhard G.:
This fits my ideas quite well:
My first idea was to say that improvised music is typically European music – free improvisation – there are for example differences in practice between England and Germany. British musicians have a different way of playing. Nevertheless, there is a communality. Whether it is a common language, is a question that I ask myself, I don’t have a ready-made theory on the subject. On the one hand there are the characteristics linked to a country or a group of musicians, but on the other hand there are many possibilities to meet in open formats, as for example at the CEPI[3]last year. If I play with someone sharing the same space, I don’t have the impression that he/she is an Italian musician. Nevertheless, she/he is Italian and there is a tradition of improvisation specific to Italy.
But the next idea that came to my mind was that of Peter Kowald – do you know him? – the double bass player from Wuppertal who had the idea of the global village. His idea was to find out in practice whether there is a common musical language between the cultures. He coined the term « Global Village » for improvisation and he brought together musicians of different origins.(See the article in the present edition: Christoph Irmer, We are all strangers to ourselves .)
And the third idea that motivates me concerns things that I see as very important in the actual political situation: the scientific research concerning the encounter between different cultures. In Franziska Schroeder’s book Soundweaving: Writings on Improvisation[4]there is a report written by a Swedish musician, Henrik Frisk, on a research project about a musical group that tried to grow together with two Vietnamese and two Swedish musicians. He describes in his text the difficulties they had to overcome: for example, you cannot just say “OK, let’s play together” but you have also to try to understand the culture of the other, that is the strangeness that despite everything exists. So, they provide a good example. The Swedish musicians went to Vietnam and the Vietnamese musicians went to Sweden. And they tried to stand in the middle between the two cultures: what is the tradition of Vietnamese music, what could they do or not, and so on… They meet each other to work together and play. And that was the basis of my idea to organize the next symposium in January with musicians and researchers, and I found Sandeep who I think is very aware of these issues: for him it’s an essential aspect of his project. He told me that he is not talking about trans-culturalism, but about trans-traditionalism. Because, he says – it’s the same as what Frisk says – a culture always has a tradition and you have to know that tradition, your culture can’t be all that matters, but tradition is what’s most important. And I’m very curious to know what he is going to say and what we will learn from the debate that will follow.
Jean-Charles F.:
And at the Exploratorium, how do you address the question of the public and the difficulties of bringing in specific social groups?
Reinhard G.:
For the past year we have been developing a project called « Intercultural music pool ». And there are questions in Germany and in Europe today concerning refugees and borders, the question of bringing in only a few and not too many; and on top of that the question of terrorism and invasion and all that. In this situation, in Germany, we are moving in both directions: on the one hand, official political decisions and, on the other, local initiatives that try to integrate emigrants. So, we decided to develop an integration project so that people from other countries can play with musicians who have been living in Germany for a long time. And there are examples of choirs that exist in Berlin where people and refugees sing together. Matthias Schwabe[5] and I accompanied this project from the theoretical point of view, with the papers and other necessary formalities. This project has been in place for a year but with no refugees participating. In this ensemble, there are two musicians who come from Spain, but this is not at all what we hoped for. Certain musicians came and said that it could be possible to do it with improvisation; improvisation is a link to bring people together. I don’t know how we’re going to continue, but for now it’s a fact: we tried to make this project public, but they didn’t come. Therefore, I think we need to ask ourselves questions given this failure on inter-culturalism and trans-culturalism. And for me the question is whether improvisation is really the link, the bridge that fits? For example, it is perhaps more important for me to learn a Syrian song than to improvise with someone from that country. I will ask the musician leading this « intercultural musical group » to make an assessment of these experiences. We have not yet carried out the evaluation of this action, but it seems important to do so before the symposium. Here are the questions we are facing: is improvisation really an activity that involves a common language? No, I think it may not be the case.
2. Improvisation Practices across the Arts
Jean-Charles F.:
Well, very often I also ask myself this question: why, if improvisation is free, why does the sound result most of the time fit into what is characterized as contemporary music from a classical and European point of view? And one way of thinking about this state of affairs in a theoretical way is to say that improvisation, historically, appeared as an alternative, at the time when structuralism dominated the music of the 1950s-60s. The alternative consisted of simply inverting the terms: since structuralist music was then presented as written on a score, and moreover was written in every detail, then one had to invert the terms and play without any notation at all. And since structuralist music had developed the idea that ideally every piece of music should have its own language, then it was absolutely necessary to develop the notion of non-idiomatic music, which obviously does not exist. And since all structuralist scores were written for well-defined instrumental sounds in treatises, then ideally all these sounds should be eliminated in favor of an instrumental production belonging only to the one who created it. You can continue to invert all the important aspects of the structuralist culture of the time. But to invert all the terms we risk depending only on the culture of reference, and to change nothing fundamentally. On the other hand, and this is a paradox, what free improvisation has not failed to preserve is particularly interesting: its artistic productions have remained « on stage » in front of an audience. Outside the stage, music does not exist. This is a legacy of the Romantic West that is difficult to get rid of. As a result, it can be said that free improvisation developed strategies to prolong the tradition of European learned culture while claiming that it did exactly the opposite!
Reinhard G.:
I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not just about looking at improvisation as such, but all the things that improvisation includes. I agree with you about romanticism, improvisation on stage and the idea of inspiration on the moment, the idea of momentum, of waiting for moments of genius. For me, everybody in the world of improvised music talks about the quality, good or bad, of improvisations and the inspiration of the moment, the momentum in jazz, these are important things that do not only concern the practice of improvisation. I discovered through you the works of Michel de Certeau and I am reading a lot about collectivism and its applications in collective performances and performance theory: this theory tries to reflect about the way to show something, and it’s not only to have music on stage. But it’s possible to think about things outside of just the music on stage: you can go and perform outside the concert hall and mix audience and the musicians together and find new forms of performance of dance and music. I kind of like this idea of saying that improvisation is not just about these genius things, but it’s really a common thing; it’s a way of making music; it’s elementary, you have to make music that way. So, I meet a person and we make sounds together, and if someone says, “Okay, I have a song,” then let’s sing it together, and if I don’t know that song, we’ll just play one strophe or a phrase or something like that. I also think that the concept of quality is also a Western idea, this perfection in performance…
Jean-Charles F.:
Excellence!
Reinhard G.:
Let’s stop saying that it’s necessary to organize concerts, but let’s rather say that it’s necessary to invest in places where it’s possible to play, that’s what interests me. The Exploratorium is going a little bit in this direction: we organize open stages where people can play together, and so people are invited to produce music by themselves. It’s not about doing something that someone tells them to do, but it’s “let’s do it together”. So, I think it’s necessary to think about improvisation not only in terms of what constitutes its central core, at the heart of the music, may be not only in the core constituted by the interactions together, but also in the core of concerts and situations. That seems interesting to me. For example, the game of “pétanque” organized in France by Barre Phillips[6]: it was a bit like this idea of putting something in common, not for an audience, but for ourselves. And today, we meet before we play together in a concert[7] and not only on the day of the concert.
Jean-Charles F.:
Right.
Reinhard G.:
Here’s what could happen: it was my idea to invite you to do a concert, but it would be very interesting to do a rehearsal before the concert. I’d like to do that in addition to playing at the concert and trying things out and being able to talk about them. For me this is as important as doing concerts. It goes hand in hand with the idea of coming and going, finding things, allowing yourself to get out of the cage, getting out a little bit of the cage of improvisation limited to musical things, dealing with issues of idioms, interactions, looking at other aspects…
Jean-Charles F.:
With PaaLabRes, we have been developing for two years a project to bring together practices between dancers and musicians at the Ramdam[8] near Lyon, notably with members of the Compagnie Maguy Marin. This project was also based on the idea of bringing together two different cultures (dance and music) and trying more or less to develop materials in common, the musicians having to do body movements (in addition to sounds), the dancers producing sounds (in addition to dance movements). Improvisation here was a way to bring us together on a basis of equality. Indeed, what improvisation allows is to put the participants in full responsibility towards the other members of the group and to guarantee a democratic functioning. This did not mean that there was an absence of situations in which a particular person assumed for a moment to be the exclusive leader of the group. At the Exploratorium what about the interactions between artistic domains, do you have any actions that go in this direction?
Reinhard G.:
Yes, I am also a visual artist. Since last year I have had a new studio – in the countryside – which I use as my atelier: I can create in a continuity my music and my visual works together, and in October (2018), a musician, a poet and I will play a performance of my paintings. As far as other art forms are concerned, the question of improvisation is not the most important thing. In the visual arts, I think that there is no reflection on the questions of improvisation.
Jean-Charles F.:
In our project with dance, at some point last year, Christian Lhopital[9], a visual artist joined us. If you go to look at the second edition on the PaaLabRes website, the map that gives access to the various contents is a reproduction of one of his paintings. He came to participate in a session of encounter between dance and music. At first, he hesitated, he said: “What am I going to do?” Then he said, “OK, I’ll come in the morning from 10:00 to 12:00 and I’ll observe”. The session started as usual with a warm-up that lasted almost two hours, it’s quite a fascinating experience, because the warm-up is completely directed at the beginning by a person from the dance who gradually organizes very rich interactions between all the participants and it ends in a situation very close to improvisation as such. We start with very precise stretching exercises, then directed actions in duet, trio or quartet, and little by little in continuity it becomes more and more free. Well, after a few minutes, Christian came to join the group, because in a warm-up no one is afraid of being ridiculous, because the goal is not to produce something original. And then after that he stayed with us all weekend and took part in the improvisations with his own means in his artistic domain.
Reinhard G.:
This is something very important. For example, if you say or think: “when I make music, I have to be completely present, concentrated, and ready to play”, then the music doesn’t necessarily materialize in action. If you think, “Okay, I’ll try this or that” [he plays with objects on the table, glasses, pencils, etc.] and it produces sounds and there’s I think pretending that it’s music, that music only functions when it is recorded, or is just on stage, or if you listen to it in perfectly made recordings. This can become a completely different way of practicing music. In Western music, I think, historically in the 17/18th centuries musicians were composers and practicing musicians (also improvisers); it was a culture of sharing musical practice, of common playing: there was Karl-Philip Emmanuel Bach and the idea of the Fantasy and meeting to play at dawn, with the expression of feelings and with tears, and these were very important events for them. Later, I think, we developed the idea that we had to learn to play the instruments before we could really play them to produce music.
Jean-Charles F.:
Specialization.
Reinhard G.:
Yes, specialization.
Jean-Charles F.:
And to continue this story, Christian participated in the improvisation process by using the stage as if it were a canvas to draw on by using paper cut-outs and drawing things on them as the improvisations unfolded.
Reinhard G.:
I would like to see this, where can I find this information?
Jean-Charles F.:
At the moment this is not available, it might become possible in the future.
Reinhard G.:
OK.
Jean-Charles F.:
You said earlier that visual artists don’t talk much about improvisation.
Reinhard G.:
This may be a prejudice on my part.
Jean-Charles F.:
It’s quite true though, Christian Lhopital, the artist in Lyon had never done it before. We met the American trumpeter Rob Mazurek[10], who is an improviser but also a visual artist. He produces three-dimensional paintings that serve as musical scores. The relationship between musical practices and the production of visual art is not obvious.
Reinhard G.:
Yes, it’s more a question of going into a trance through different media, and I think that with music and dance things are more obvious because it’s done in continuity over time and you can find combinations in the various ways to move the body and to produce sounds on the instruments. But let’s take for example literature, improvisation in literature. That would be something very interesting to do.
Jean-Charles F.:
There is improvised poetry, like slam.
Reinhard G.:
The slam, OK.
Jean-Charles F.:
Slam is often improvised. And there are improvised traditional poetic forms. For example, Denis Laborde wrote a book on improvised poetry practices in the Basque Country[11] in a competitive logic – as in sports – by improvising songs according to tradition and very precise rules: the audience decides who is the best singer. There are traditions where the literature is oral and is continuously renewed in a certain way.
Reinhard G.:
There are also singers who invent their text during improvisation.
Jean-Charles F.:
But my question was about what a center like the Exploratorium was doing in this area. Are there any experiments that have been carried out?
Reinhard G.:
Yes, one of the workshops is dedicated to this aspect of things, but it is not the main focus of our program.
Jean-Charles F.:
What is it about?
Reinhard G.:
She is a visual artist who makes pictures – I didn’t attend this workshop, I can’t say exactly what she does – but she gives materials to the participants, she gives them colors and other things, and she lets them develop their own ways of drawing or painting. She conducted this workshop in public during our Spring festival.
Jean-Charles F.:
But she does this with music?
Reinhard G.:
No. She doesn’t. I really don’t know why. Maybe it’s because that’s kind of the way we do things here, which is to say, “everybody does it their own way”. Ah! once we’ve moved to our new home, we’ll be more open to collaborations.
Jean-Charles F.:
And you also have dance here?
Reinhard G.:
Yes, we have dance.
Jean-Charles F.:
What are the relationships with music?
Reinhard G.:
It’s more in the field of live encounters on stage. There are three or four dancers who come with musicians for public performances, and there are open stages with music and movement, and last Thursday we had the “Fête de la musique” here. The performances that are given here often bring together dancers and musicians.
Jean-Charles F.:
But these are only informal meetings?
Reinhard G.:
Yes. Informal. Anna Barth[12], who is a colleague of mine and is working at the library with me, is a Butoh dancer. She has performed a lot with Matthias Schwabe in this very slow and concentrated way of moving, and they’ve done performances together. But that’s not one of our major focuses. Our work is concerned with free improvisation in all arts, but 90% of it is music. There is a little bit of theater-improvisation, but only a little bit. The Exploratorium is centered mainly on musical improvisation.
3. Pedagogy of Improvisation, Idioms, Timbre
Jean-Charles F.:
Are there any other topics you would like to share with us?
Reinhard G.:
Yes, there is a question I ask myself that has nothing to do with multiculturalism. I work in Vienna at the University of Music and Performing Arts with classical musicians on improvisation. They are students at the Institute for Chamber Music. I’ve only had two workshops with them. I only give them a minimum of instruction. For example: “Let’s play in a trio” and then I let them play, that’s how I start the workshop. And during this first improvisation, there are a lot of things they are able to play, and they do it, they don’t have problems like saying “OK! I don’t have any ideas and I don’t want to play”. They play and I invite them to do so. And they use everything they have learned to do well after fifteen years of study. My idea is that I don’t teach improvisation, but I try to let them express themselves through the music they know and are able to play, and this would mean that they have the resources to improvise, to make music not only by reproduction. They can be also inventors of music. And for them, it’s a surprise that it works so well. They’re present, they’re concentrated, and they have really good instrumental technique and what they’re doing sounds really interesting. The feeling expressed by all is that “it works!” So I’m thinking about a theory of improvisation which is not based on technique, but on something like memory, memory of all the things you have in your mind, in your brain, what you have embodied, and with all that you just have to give them the opportunity to express themselves by just allowing them to play what they want. And I think that if we lived in a culture where there would be more of this idea of playing and listening and where classical musicians would be allowed to improvise more often and to improve in improvised playing, we could develop a common culture of improvisation. I’ve been doing that for the past five or six years and I have many recordings with very amazing music. What I want to discuss with you is about these resources. What are the resources of improvisation? What does improvisation mean to you? I think it would be interesting to get a better idea of what a common idea of improvisation would be.
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes. It’s a very complicated question. Historically, in my own background, I was very interested in the idea of the creative instrumentalist in the 1960s. The model at that time was Vinko Globokar and I was convinced that thirty years later there would no longer be composers as such, specialized, but rather kinds of musicians in the broadest sense of the term. But curiously at that time I didn’t believe that improvisation – especially free improvisation – was the way to go. In the group that performed at the American Center on Boulevard Raspail in Paris with Australian composer, pianist and conductor Keith Humble[13], we were thinking more in terms of making music that belonged to no one, “non-proprietary music”. We thought, for example, that Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke X – only clusters – was grandiose, except that clusters cannot belong only to Stockhausen. The concept of this piece, “play all possible clusters on a piano in a very large number of combinations” could very well be realized without referring to the detail of the score. So, we organized concerts based on collages of concepts contained in scores, but without specifically playing these scores.
Reinhard G.:
I can understand this, because for me too, the term collage is a very important thing.
Jean-Charles F.:
I left Paris for Australia in 1969, then San Diego, California in 1972. One of the reasons for this expatriation had been the experience in Paris of playing in many contemporary music ensembles with most of the time three or four rehearsals before each concert with musicians who were very skilled in sight-reading scores. One had the impression of always playing the same music from one ensemble to another. The musicians could produce the written notes very quickly, but at the cost of a standardized timbre. We had the impression of being in the presence of the same sounds, for me, the timbres were hopelessly gray. At the American Center, on the contrary, without the presence of any budget – it was not a “professional” situation – music was made with as many rehearsals as necessary to develop the sounds. It was a very interesting alternative situation. And that’s exactly what a research-oriented university in the United States could offer, where you had to spend at least half your time conducting research projects. There was a lot of time available to do things of your own choosing. And once again, some composers in this situation wanted to recreate the conditions of professional life in large European cities around a contemporary music ensemble: to play the notes very well as quickly as possible without worrying about the reality of the timbre. So, with trombonist John Silber we decided to start a project called KIVA[14], which we did not want to call “improvisation”, but rather “non-written music”. And so, as I described above, we simply inverted the terms of the contemporary ensemble model: in a negative way, our unique method was to forbid ourselves to play identifiable figures, melodies, rhythms, and in usual modes of communication. It was rather a question of playing together, but in parallel discourses superimposed without any desire to make them compatible. We would meet three times a week to play for an hour and a half and then listen without making comments to the recording of what had just happened. At first things were very chaotic, but after two years of this process we had developed a common language of timbres, a kind of living together in the same house in which small routines developed in the form of rituals.
Reinhard G.:
And what were the sources of this language, where did it come from?
Jean-Charles F.:
It was simply playing and listening to this playing three times a week and not having any communication or discussions that could positively influence our way of playing.
Reinhard G.:
Ah! You didn’t talk?
Jean-Charles F.:
Of course we were talking, but we felt that the discussion shouldn’t influence the way we played. But this process – and today it doesn’t seem possible anymore – was very slow, very chaotic, and at a certain moment a language emerged that no one else could really understand.
Reinhard G.:
…but you.
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes. Composers in particular didn’t understand it because it was a disturbing alternative…
Reinhard G.:
But it wasn’t traditional music, but the music you had developed… Was it the experience of contemporary music that gave you the initial vocabulary?
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes of course, it was our common base. The negative inversion of the parameters as I have noted above does not fundamentally change the conditions of elaboration of the material, so the reference was still the great sum of contemporary practices since the 1950s. But at the same time, as Michel de Certeau noted when he was present on the San Diego campus, there was a relationship between our practices and the processes used by the mystics of the 17th century. It was a question for the mystics to find in their practices a way to detach themselves from their tradition and their techniques. It’s exactly the opposite of what you described, it’s a process in which the body has stored an incredible number of clichés, and good instrumentalists never think about their gestures when they play because they’ve become automatic. That’s what we’ve been trying to do: to bring all this into oblivion. You mentioned the idea of memory.
Reinhard G.:
Memory, yes.
Jean-Charles F.:
It was exactly another idea, to try to forget everything we had learned so that we could relearn something else. Of course, that’s not exactly how it happened, it’s a mythology that we developed. But for me it remains a fundamental process. The fear of classical musicians is to lose their technique, and of course whatever happens they will never lose it. In this process, I have never lost my ability to play classically, but it has been greatly enriched. The importance of this process is that through a journey to unknown lands, one can come back home and have a different conception of one’s technique.
Reinhard G.:
It’s a combination of new and old things?
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes, so it is possible to work with classical musicians in situations where they have to leave their technique aside. And in the case of John Silber for example – he borrowed this idea from Globokar, and Ornette Coleman[15] had the same kind of experience – because our playing periods lasted for a very long time without interruptions, he got tired when he only played the trombone. So, he had decided to play another instrument as well, and he chose the violin, which he had never studied. He had to completely reinvent by himself a very personal technique of playing this instrument and he was able to produce sounds that nobody had produced until then.
Reinhard G.:
But the process through which these classical musicians I work with go through seems different to me: it’s a bit of another way of considering instrumental playing. If I tell them “play!” they don’t really try to play new things, but they recombine.
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes, what they know.
Reinhard G.:
They recombine what they know. But because they are in an ensemble situation, they can’t have control over it. There’s always someone who comes across what they’re doing. If they have expectations, there’s always someone who comes and disturbs them, and then you have to find a new way. And the interesting thing is that they are able to follow these crossings without getting irritated and saying “no, I can’t…” It’s a phenomenon where in many workshops, the participants first say “I can’t” and as soon as they start – a bit like the painter you mentioned – it works. And the question I ask myself is: is it a musical problem or is it a problem related to the situation? My main theory is that suddenly there’s a room and someone allows them to do something and they do it. And it’s interesting to note that they never do it on their own. They come to me and they play, and then they go outside, and they never do it again. There has to be a group and a space dedicated to this activity. There is a musician who came with his string quartet and they tried to improvise. Later he told me that they played an improvisation as an encore at a concert; but they didn’t announce that it was an improvisation but that it was written by a Chinese composer; and he said that the audience really liked that encore very much, and he was really surprised that it could happen like that. For me the problem seemed clear, because if they had announced that they were playing their own music, there would have been people who wouldn’t have wanted to listen to it. If you play Mozart, it’s because you’re playing something serious, there’s an effort to be made, and so on. So, the improvisation is more centered on the personality of the person doing it, and you enjoy yourself doing it, that’s a very interesting fact.
Jean-Charles F.:
It is said – I don’t know if this is really the case – that Beethoven playing the piano in concert improvised half the time and that the audience much preferred his improvisations over his compositions.
Reinhard G.:
It is really an interesting fact, yes.
Jean-Charles F.:
Was it like that because improvisations were structurally simpler?
Reinhard G.:
Now we are faced with two possible paths. The first leads us to an open field where we say to ourselves: “I don’t want to do what others have already done or are doing”. And the second one is to say: “I’m going to do an improvisation that won’t be a complete” – what do you call it? …
Jean-Charles F.:
An erasure, an oblivion.
Reinhard G.:
This is about “thinking about your ways in a new way” rather than looking for a new musical content; and so, it is not a very avant-garde posture. Yes, we produce music that is a bit polytonal, with polyrhythms, and harmonies that are a bit wrong, a bit like Shostakovich, etc. But for me the important thing is not to say: “we are going to create a completely new music”, but that the students can see the work session as improvisers. What they are able to do in this situation and the skills they can develop will help them to explore things for themselves: “it’s not something original that will define me, I’m only a little bit open to new things, but I love the music we produce together, I find it moves me completely.” This happens in a very direct way because they’re playing as persons and not as someones to whom I would say, “please play me now from bar 10 to bar 12, in a wahhhhhhh [whispering loudly], you know how to do it.” But if they decide to do it on their own, then it’s something completely different.
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes, but for me the essential question is the timbre, the qualities of the sound. Because there is an equation between structural music and others: the more emphasis is placed on the complexity of an established grammar, the less interesting the sound material is, and the more emphasis is placed on the complex quality of timbre, the less interest is placed on the complexity of syntactic structures. If we consider the European classical music of the 19th and 20th centuries, there is a long process in which instrumental playing becomes increasingly standardized, and the dominant instrumental model of this period is the piano. And so, the challenge is to create a lot of different kinds of music, but from the point of view of what is represented by the notation system, the notes and their durations, which can easily be realized on the equivalence of the keys of the keyboard. It is a matter of manipulating what is standardized in the notation system, the design of instruments and the techniques of sound production, in a non-standardized way and differentiated from one work to another. The structural approach in this case becomes very useful.[16] And of course a lot of experimentation has been done in this context with the looting of traditional music by transforming it into notes: of course, in this process we lose 99% of the values on which this music works. The equation is complicated because from the moment concrete and electronic music appear, a different cultural branch is set up, a different conception of sounds. And with popular music such as rock, the combination of notes is of no interest, because it is too simplistic and tends to be based on few chords, which makes this music more accessible. But what matters is the sound of the band, which is eminently complex. The musicians of these types of music spend a considerable amount of time working out in groups a sound that will constitute their identity, reinventing their instrumental playing based on what they identify in past recordings in order to dissociate themselves from them. Following this model many situations can be envisaged in improvisation workshops that put musicians in processes where they have to imitate what is really impossible to imitate in others, difficult situations, especially for musicians who are so efficient in reading notes. What happens when a clarinetist plays a certain sound and now with your own instrument, a piano for example, you have to imitate the sound that is produced in the most exact way?
Reinhard G.:
It is a question of timbre.
Jean-Charles F.:
Yes. The world of electronics creates a universe of resonances. This is true even if we don’t use electronic means. But at the same time, you are completely right to think that the tradition of playing from the notes written on the score is still a very important factor in musical practices in our society.
Reinhard G.:
In Western society.
Jean-Charles F.:
A lot of good things can still be done in this context.
Reinhard G.:
You have a memory, and a pool, and an archive. I think – and this surprises me a lot, but that’s exactly how I see it – that improvisation doesn’t work with notes, but it functions with timbres. I call it musicalizing the sound. With the classical musician, you have a note, and then you have to musicalize it, you have to decode it.
Jean-Charles F.:
To put it in a context of reality.
Reinhard G.:
Exactly! Put it in a context, and then you bring it to sound. And when you turn the sign into sound, as a classical musician you are in the presence of a lot of fusion from sign to sound, using everything you’ve learned and everything that makes up the technique. The technique allows you to realize variations of dynamics, articulations and many other elements. This is the way they really learned to play. And now I’m going to take the notes out and ask them to keep making music. And that’s how I often start my workshops by asking them to play only one pitch. The seven or eight people who were at my workshop in Vienna last week, they did an improvisation on one pitch with the task of doing interesting things with that pitch. And it’s interesting because they have so many nuances at their disposal, and it sounds really very, very, well. And for me it’s the door that opens to improvisation, not to rush to many pitches, but to always start with things that are based on the sound qualities. If you look at the history of music, I think that humans who lived forty thousand years ago they had no language, but they had sounds [he starts singing].
Jean-Charles F.:
How do you know?
Reinhard G.:
I have a recording [laughter]. And I’ve done the following experiment with my students: do a spoken dialogue without using words [he gives an example with his voice], it works. They can’t tell you something specific, but the emotional idea is there. I think you’ll agree that the timbre of the spoken voice is really a very important thing, as Roland Barthes noted in The Grain of the Voice.[17] I agree with him. I try to get these classical musicians to improvise a little bit in their tradition, so they don’t create new things, to discover their instrument, but within their tradition.
Jean-Charles F.:
From the point of view of their representations.
Reinhard G.:
Yes exactly, and what came out of this workshop is very interesting.
Jean-Charles F.:
This is a very pedagogical way of doing things, otherwise the participants are lost.
Reinhard G.:
Yes, the former Head of the department of chamber music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna loves improvisation. I think what he likes about improvisation is that the students learn to get in touch with each other and with the issue of timbre production. For chamber music these are very important things. I’m not a perfect instrumentalist myself because I don’t spend thousands of hours in rehearsals, but I think I can work with that in my mind, I can really find a lot of artists working in music on scores that are interesting, it’s really very rich.
Jean-Charles F.:
In a string quartet, the four musicians have to work for hours on what is called the tuning of the instruments, which is actually a way of creating a group sound.
Reinhard G.:
That’s what I do with improvisation, I function in a way that is very close to this tradition. The tasks are often oriented towards intonation between musicians, but it’s not only about going in the direction of the perfect bow stroke, but also in the direction of the music. Well, I was very happy with this interview, which will feed into my writing. I would like to write a book on improvisation with classical musicians, but I don’t have the time, you know how life is…
Jean-Charles F.:
You have to be a retiree to have the time to do things! Thank you for taking the time to talk.
1. Improfil is a German journal [connected with the Exploratorium Berlin] concerning the theory and practice of musical improvisation and functions as a platform for professional exchange among artists, teachers and therapists, for whom the subject of improvisation is a main topic in their work. See https://exploratorium-berlin.de/en/home-2/
2. The Cefedem AuRA [Centre de Formation des Enseignants de la Musique Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes] is a center in existence since 1990, devoted to the training of music school instrumental, vocal and music theory teachers. It is a center for professional ressources and artistic higher education in music. It carries out research in musical pedagogy and publishes a journal Enseigner la Musique. See https://www.cefedem-aura.org
3. CEPI, Centre Européen Pour l’Improvisation [European Improvisation Center] : “For me CEPI is a meeting point where improvising musicians, other practitioners of improvised performance-arts, scholars, thinkers, anyone who is active and/or curious about new forms and methods of doing can meet to exchange their ideas and experiences and also to participate together in the creative process, in short to improvise together.” Barre Phillips, 2020. See http://european.improvisation.center/home/about
4. Franziska Schroeder, Soundweaving : Writings on Improvisation, Cambridge, England : Cambridge Scholar Publishing. See the French translation of Henrik Frisk, “Improvisation and the Self: to listen to the other”, in the present edition of paalabres.org.: Henrik Frisk, L’improvisation et le moi.
5. Matthias Schwabe is the founder and director of Exploratorium Berlin.
6. During the CEPI meetings in Puget-Ville (in 2018 in particular), Barre Phillips proposed a game of “pétanque”, in which each team consisted of two ball throwers and one person who would improvise music at the same time.
7. The encounter took place a day [July 2018] before a concert of improvisation at the Exploratorium Berlin with Jean-Charles François, Reinhard Gagel, Simon Rose and Christopher Williams.
8. RAMDAM, UN CENTRE D’ART [à Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon] is a place for working, a rather flexible place, open to a multiplicity of uses, with adjustable and transformable spaces according to the needs and constraints of the selected projects. Ramdam is place of residence of the Dance Compagnie Maguy Marin. See https://ramdamcda.org/information/ramdam-un-centre-d-art
9. Christian Lhopital is a French contemporary visual artist, born in 1953 in Lyon. He essentially produces drawings and sculptures. His work was presented at the Lyon Biennale: “Une terrible beauté est née”, by Victoria Noorthoorn, an ensemble of 59 drawings from different epochs (from 2002 through 2011) were presented in the form of a drawing cabinet. In June 2014,the Éditions Analogues in Arles have edited the book Ces rires et ces bruits bizarres, with a text by Marie de Brugerolle, illustated by photos, mural graphit powder drawings, sculptures, miniatures, from the serie « Fixe face silence ». https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Lhopital
10. Rob Mazurek is a multidisciplinary artist/abstractivist, with a focus on electro-acoustic composition, improvisation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, film, and installation, who spent much of his creative life in Chicago, and then Brazil. He currently lives and works in Marfa, Texas with his wife Britt Mazurek. See the known place “Constellation Scores” in the second edition of this site (paalabres.org) http://www.paalabres.org/partitions-graphiques/constellation-scores-powerpeinture/ Access to Constellation Scores. See https://www.robmazurek.com/about
11. Denis Laborde, La Mémoire et l’Instant. Les improvisations chantées du bertsulari basque, Bayonne, Saint-Sébastien, Ed. Elkar, 2005.
12. Anna Barth is a freelance dancer, choreographer and artistic director of the DanceArt Laboratory Berlin. She studied Modern Dance, Improvisation and Composition at the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Lab in New York City and Butoh Dance for several years with renowned co-founder and master of Butoh Dance, Kazuo Ohno and his son Yoshito Ohno in Japan. https://www.annabarth.de/en/bio.html
13. Keith Humble was an Australian composer (1927-1995), conductor and pianist who saw these three activities in continuity with a practice that resembled the function of the musician before the advent of the professional composer in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the 1950s and 1960s, he lived in France. He was the assistant to René Leibowitz and in 1959, at the American Centre for Students and Artists, he established the ‘Centre de Musique,’ a ‘performance workshop’ dedicated to the presentation and discussion of new music. It is in this context that Jean-Charles François met him. He continued to work with him until 1995. See http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/humble-leslie-keith-30063
14. KIVA, 2 CD, Pogus Produce, New York. Recordings 1985-1991, with Jean-Charles François, percussion, Keith Humble, piano, Eric Lyon, computer vocoder manipulations, Mary Oliver, violon and viola, John Silber, trombone.
16. See Jean-Charles François, Percussion et musique contemporaine, chapter 2, « Contrôle direct ou indirect de la qualité des sons », Paris : Editions Klincksieck, 1991.
17. Roland Barthes, « Le grain de la voix », Musique enjeu 9 (1972).
On April 26, 2019 a meeting took place in Lyon between György Kurtag (composer and improvisator visiting from Bordeaux), Yves Favier (then technical director at ENSATT in Lyon), and the members of the PaaLabRes collective, Jean-Charles François, Gilles Laval and Nicolas Sidoroff. The format of this meeting was to alternate moments of musical improvisation with discussions about the different participants’ backgrounds.
Following this meeting, we decided to develop a kind of “cadavre exquis” [game of consequences] around the concept of “edges”, each of the participants writing more or less fragmented texts in reaction to the writings that were accumulating little by little. In addition, the five people were also allowed to propose quotations from various authors in connection with this idea of edges, fringes or margins. It is this process that gave rise in the Grand Collage (the river) of this edition “Faire tomber les murs” to 10 collages (L.1 – L.10) of these texts accompanied by music, recorded voices and images, with in particular extracts from the recording of our improvisations made during the meeting of April 26, 2019. You will find below all the texts.
Direct access to the texts of the authors included in the collage:
The edge is a strip, a list, a margin (not a line) between two milieus of different nature, which have something of the nature of two entities without being confused with any of them. The edge has its own life, its autonomy, its specificity, its fauna, flora, etc. The edge of a forest, the fringe between sea and land (estran), a hedge, etc.
dans la cour platanes cinq
dans la cour platanes cinq
dans la cour platanes cinq
(Le cours de Pise, Paris : P.O.L., 2018, p. 61)
Yves Favier :
Evidently the notion of “Edge” or “Fringe” is the one that tickles the most (the best?) especially when it is determined as an « autonomous zone between 2 territories », moving and indeterminate musical zones, yet identifiable.
They are not for me “no man’s (women’s) land”, but rather transition zones between two (or more) environments…
In ecology, these singular zones are called “ecotones”, zones that shelter both species and communities of the different environments that border them, but also particular communities that are specific to them. (Here we touch on two concepts: Guattari’s “Ecosophy”, where everything holds together, and Deleuze’s “Hecceity = Event.”
Définitions : Lisières – subst. fém.
Étymol. et Hist. 1. 1244 « bord qui limite de chaque côté d’une pièce d’étoffe » (Doc. ds Fagniez t. 1, p. 151); 2. a) 1521 « frontière d’un pays » (Doc. ds Papiers d’État de Granvelle, t. 1, p. 185); b) 1606 « bord d’un terrain » (Nicot); c) 1767-68 fig. « ce qui est à la limite de quelque chose » (Diderot, Salon de 1767, p. 195); 3. a) 1680 « bandes attachées au vêtement d’un enfant pour le soutenir quand il commence à marcher » (Rich.); b) 1752 mener (qqn) par la lisière « conduire (quelqu’un) comme on mène un enfant » (Trév.); c) 1798 mener (qqn) en lisière « exercer une tutelle sur (quelqu’un) » (Ac.); 1829 tenir en lisière « id. » (M. de Guérin, loc. cit.); 4. 1830 chaussons de lisière (La Mode, janv. ds Quem. DDL t. 16). Orig. incertaine. Peut-être dér. de l’a. b. frq. *lisa « ornière », que l’on suppose d’apr. le lituanien lysẽ « plate-bande (d’un jardin) » et l’a. prussien lyso « id. (d’un champ) ». Cette forme *lisa a dû exister à côté de l’a. b. frq. *laiso, de la même famille que l’all. Gleis, Geleise « voie ferrée, ornière »; cf. a. h. all. waganleisa « ornière »; cf. aussi le norm. alise « ornière »; alisée « id. » (v. REW et FEW t. 16, p. 468b). L’hyp. du FEW t. 5, pp. 313b-314a, qui dérive lisière du subst. masc. lis (du lat. licium « lisière d’étoffe »), est peu probable, ce dernier étant plus récent que lisière (1380, « grosses dents aux extrémités d’un peigne de tisserand », Ordonnances des rois de France, t. 6, p. 473, v. aussi note b; puis, au xviiies., au sens de « lisière d’une étoffe », v. FEW t. 5, p. 312b). http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/lisi%C3%A8re
[He quotes here Pr. André Haynal, psychiatrist, psychanalyst, emeritus professor at Genève University, concerning the book by Daniel N. Stern, Le moment présent en psychothérapie : un monde dans un grain de sable, Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2003. https://www.cairn.info/revue-le-carnet-psy-2004-2-page-11.htm]
“More spectacular is the emergence of ‘urgent moments’ that produce ‘moments of encounter’.
Stern emphasizes experience and not meaning, although the latter, and thus the dimension of language, plays an important role. For him, present moments occur in parallel with the language exchange during the séance. The two reinforce and influence each other in turn. The importance of language and explicitness is therefore not called into question, although Stern wants to focus on direct and implicit experience.”
Yves Favier:
These edges between meadow, lake and forest are home to prairie species that prefer darker and cooler environments, others more aquatic ones, and forest species that prefer light and warmth.
Isn’t this the case in improvisation?…
Aleks Dupraz:
In my writings, the notion of “edge” or “fringe” is gradually replacing that of “margin”, which is very much used by sociology and is frequent in the alternative spheres of art and politics. Even though we know that “the margin” is always in interaction – if only in the imaginary – with its opposite (the center where the centrifugal force of norms may seem at its highest level, which seems debatable insofar as the proximity of power places also confers a certain freedom as to the application, alteration and production of norms), the notion of “edge” carries within it the possibility of another displacement that is no longer simply that of the relationship between “a center” and “its periphery”. Being on the edge of the University is already being on the frontier of other worlds, and perhaps this opens up possibilities for me to think about my life experience and my approach differently than through the sole prism of the tension at work in a process of identity construction that would relate mainly to the university institution and its norms. experiencespoetiques | lisière(s)
François Laplantine and Alexis Nouss:
The thought of the between and the in-between is linked to crossbreeding, because attention to the interstice makes us realize that we cannot be both at the same time but alternatively, as in Frenando Pessoa’s heteronymic process or as in the steps of the tango. (…) The in-between is what we cannot place border to border or put end-to-end and which prevents us from following the groove. It is a gap that cannot be filled, or at least cannot be filled immediately, but which calls for mediations that, as with Adorno, should be opposed to reconciliation and also to the notion of work of art insofar as the latter claims to reach a completion. Métissages, de Arcimboldo à Zombi. Montréal, Pauvert, 2001.
Michel Lebreton:
The edges are the places of what is possible. Their limits are only defined by the environments bordering them. They are shifting, subject to erosion and sedimentation: there is nothing obvious about them.
(See in the present edition paalabres.org the « house » of M. Lebreton).
1/ Would the improviser be this particular “being on the alert”?
Hunter/gatherer always ready to collect (capture?) existing SOUNDS, but also “herder”, in order to let those “immanent” ones emerge? Not yet manifest but already “possible in in the making”?…
2/ “the territory is only valid in relation to a movement by which one leaves it.” In the case of the notion of Hocquard’s Border associated with the Classical political conception, the improviser would be a transmitter between 2 territories determined in advance to be academic by convention: a transmitter between THE contemporary (sacred art) music and THE spontaneous (social prosaic) music…we’ll say that it’s a good start, but which will have no development other than in and through conventions…it will always be a line that separates, it’s an “abstraction” from which concrete bodies (including the public) are de facto excluded.
3/ What (musical) LINE, could mark as Limit, an “extremity” (also abstract) to a music so-called “free” only to be considered from the inside (supposedly from the inside of the improviser).
Effectively taking away any possibility of breaking out of these identity limits (“improvisation is this and no other thing”, “leave Improvisation to the improvisers”) comes from the fantasy of the creative origins and its isolated « geniuses ». … for me the « no man’s land » suggested by Hocquard can be found here!
Nicolas Sidoroff :
Emmanuel Hocquard distinguishes three conceptions of translation with regard to the limit (the “reactionary conception” where translation can only betray), to the border (the “classical conception” where translation passes from one language and culture to another), and to the edge (a conception that “makes translation […] a hedge between the fields of literature”).
(Emmanuel Hocquart, Ma haie : Un privé à Tanger II, Paris : P.O.L., 2001, pp. 525-526.)
I work on the notions of “border” and “edge” between different activities. (…) A border is crossed in the thick and consistent sense of the term, one part of the body then the other, more or less gradually. This body has a thickness, we are on one side and on the other of a line or a surface which constitutes a border at a given moment. This can create a swing, such as back and forth movements in body weight above that line or on either side of a line or surface which constitutes a border at a given moment. How do you cross a border between several activities: what happens when I change “caps,” for example, between a space-time where I am a composer and another where I am a sound engineer?
(Nicolas Sidoroff, « Faire quelque chose avec ça que je voudrais tant penser, faisons quelque chose avec ça, de ci, de là », Agencements N°1, mai 2018, Éditions du commun, p. 50)
Dominique Sorrente :
For a long time, I’ve lived on the edge of the world.
experiencepoetiques
From one edge to the other, our movements form a song of echoes, a forest of signs in the sky.
Ecological corridor :
An ecological corridor [corridor], as distinct from a biological corridor [corridor biologique] and from the ecological continuum [continuum écologique]], is a functional passage zone, for a group of species belonging to the same milieu [espèces inféodées] ], between several natural spaces. This corridor thus connects different populations and favors the dissemination and migration of species, as well as the recolonization of disturbed environments.
For example, a footbridge [passerelle] that overlooks a highway and connects two forest massifs constitutes an ecological corridor. It allows fauna [faune] and flora to circulate between the two massifs despite the almost impermeable obstacle represented by the highway. This is why this footbridge is called a wildlife passage.
Ecological corridors are an essential component of biodiversity conservation [biodiversité] and ecosystem functioning [écosystèmes]. Without their connectivity, a very large number of species would not have all the habitats necessary for their life cycles (reproduction, growth, refuge, etc.) and would be condemned to extinction in the near future.
Moreover, exchanges between environments are a major factor of resilience [résilience]. They allow a damaged environment (fire, flooding, etc.) to be quickly recolonized by species from the surrounding environment.
Taken as a whole, the ecological corridors and the environments they connect form an ecological continuum for this type of environment and the species that depend on it.
Will the teacher leave the barriers open to wandering and tinkering? Or will he confine all practices to the enclosure he has built over time?
Edouard Glissant :
(…) where the migrant people from Europe (…) arrive [in America] with their songs, their family traditions, their tools, the image of their god, etc., the Africans arrive stripped of everything, of all possibilities, and even stripped of their language. For the den of the slave ship is the place and the time when African languages disappear, because people who spoke the same language were never put together in the slave ship, just like on the plantations. The beings were stripped of all sorts of elements of their daily life, and especially of their language.
(Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris : Gallimard, 1996, p . 16)
Emmanuel Hocquard :
Everything that concerns margins (marginalia), crossroads, residual spaces or wastelands is to be attached to the edges…
The edges are the only spaces that escape the rules set by the State grammarians, the Versailles gardeners and international town planners.
(Op. cit. p. 62)
Edouard Glissant :
What happens to this migrant? He recomposes by traces a language and arts that could be said to be valid for everyone. (…) The deported African has not had the opportunity to maintain these kinds of punctual legacies. But he did something unpredictable on the basis of the only powers of memory, that is, of the only thoughts of the trace that were left to him: he composed, on the one hand, Creole languages and, on the other hand, art forms that were valid for all. (…) If this Neo-American does not sing African songs from two or three centuries ago, he is re-establishing in the Caribbean, Brazil and North America, through the thought of the trace, the art forms that he proposes as valid for all. The thought of the trace seems to me to be a new dimension of what must be opposed in the current situation of the world to what I call the thoughts of the system or systems of thought. The thoughts of the system or systems of thought were prodigiously fruitful and prodigiously conquering and prodigiously deadly. The thought of the trace is the most valid today to affix to the false universality of the thoughts of the system.
(Op. cit., p.17)
Jean-Charles François :
The wonderful “lisières” [edges, fringes, margins], the wonderful “lisières”, the wonderful “lisières”
The wonderful “lisières”, the wonderful “lisières” and… the nasty “lisier” [manure].
The wonderful “lisières” and the nasty “lisier”
The rebel “lisières” and in the middle of the field the “lisier”.
The “lisières”, the “lisières”, the “lisier”.
The beautiful “lisières” and the nasty “lisier”.
The “lisier” responsible for the beautiful green algae of northern Finistère [in Brittany], which decompose into nasty toxic elements dangerous to humans.
The beautiful “lisières” and the nasty “lisier”.
The mystery of the “lisières”, the great misery of the “lisier”.
The feast of the merry leeways, the feat of the mingled leaflets.
The flux of the winding river, the fever of the weak-link leaser.
The severe inklings of the pollster, the never-ending undulating of the roller-coaster.
The folly of the spending waist and the olive-green of peace on earth.
The beautiful “lisières” and the nasty “lisier”.
The “lisier” is used to define the nasty space of artichokes, between the beautiful “lisières” as nasty result of a beautiful industrial production and nasty ferment of a production of the same kind of beauty.
Being on the alert, entre-capture, being on advert, entre-rapture, being that asserts, prey that lets itself be captured, being-aggressor, enter raptors we get along well, being-a-Grecian, Kairos, intense moment of interaction, being-a-gracious…
The “lisier” is a nasty nose aggressor, while the polished “lisière” agrees to read the parking meters.
The perking masters of the church of the Most Holy Therese of Lisière get bogged down in agreeing with the prosaic Guest-State-Police-Lisier.
The Eldorado of the beautiful Gluierphosate grid fills clysteres in the back pockets of filthy sires linked to their glycemic-prostatic swellings.
The beautiful “lisières” and the nasty “lisier”.
How to get out of the “lisières” and into the space of the “lisier”?
This seems to be the problem of improvisation. The ideal of communication belongs to the “lisières”, the edges, but the content itself remains in the incommunicability of the “lisier”, the slurry (apart from its stench). If the definition of the origin of the sounds at the time of the improvised performance on stage seems to belong to the domain of the unspoken, because it is strictly relevant to the intimacy of each participant, then only the « lisières », the edges of human interactivity, seem to be able to enter the field of reflection. The planning of the sounds, their effective elaboration, appears then to be the exclusive domain of the individual paths. The collective elaboration of the sounds is left to the surprise of the moment of the encounter of personalities who have prepared themselves for it: come what may. Getting stuck in the “lisier” (liquid manure).
However, this is not to say that the “lisières” (edges) of communication between humans do not play an important role in the reflection. In this sense, the question of being on the alert and the meanders of the unconscious /conscious are essential vectors to be taken into consideration. But if improvisation is a collective game, then the elaboration of sounds by individuals on separate paths is no longer sufficient to reflect the collective elaboration of sounds. The problem of the co-construction of sound materials then arises. This is where we fall into the “lisier”. If one prepares the sounds collectively, there is a strong risk of no longer being in the ideal of improvisation, which democratically leaves voices free to express themselves, which accepts the principle – in principle! – of dissension in its midst. But if all those who belong to the club of improvisers have followed the same path before getting on stage, then democracy and dissension on the stage are nothing but a simulacrum, the effects of a theater for a naive audience. Likewise, if those who do not correspond to the idealized sound models of the network are not invited, the agreement among those who are will be almost total. Is the notion of deterritorialization a matter for individuals who meet on neutral ground, or is it the collective elaboration of an unknown terrain? The list of elements of the “lisier” is long. How can we open up this type of research project, both from the point of view of practice and of reflecting on practice?
Nicolas Sidoroff :
Emmanuel describes the edge as: “white stain” [tache blanche]. For a long time, I understood and made him say “white task” [tâche blanche]. The circumflex accent made a lot of sense, evoking both the work to be done (by the task) and a space to be explored characterized by its situation (by the slightly nominalized adjective “white”). Behind this, I understood and still understand, an invitation to come and inhabit, explore and practice such spaces. It evokes the unexplored places of geographical maps, where one could not yet know what to write nor in what colors. The “white stain” is very present in the work of Emmanuel Hocquard. The “white stain translation” for him, a “white stain activity” for me, is to create “unexplored areas (…), it’s gaining ground”. In my vocabulary habits, I would also say: to create the possible.
(« Explorer les lisières d’activité, vers une microsociologie des pratiques (musicales) », Agencements N°2, décembre 2018, Édition du commun, p. 263-264)
François Laplantine et Alexis Nouss :
The zombie or the borderline example of crossbreeding. Both dead and alive, it alone condenses the irreducible and unthinkable paradox of every being. The zombie will never be fully alive, or totally dead. As if the journey of the living to death and the return of the dead to life irretrievably prevented a return to a primary condition. Impossible and vacillating journey, which prohibits any possibility of returning to a point of departure, to a stabilized and recognized identity of social being or moribund being.
(Op. cit.)
Edouard Glissant :
For a very long time, Western wandering – it must always be repeated – for a very long time Western wandering, which has been a wandering of conquests; a wandering of founding territories, has contributed to the realization of what we can call today the “totality-world”. But in today’s space there are more and more internal wanderings, that is to say, more and more projections towards the totality-world and returns to oneself while one is immobile, while one has not moved from one’s place, these forms of wandering often trigger what we call internal exile, that is to say, moments when the imagination or sensitivity are cut off from what’s going on around. (…) And this is one of the givens of chaos-world, that assent to one’s “surroundings” or suffering in one’s “surroundings” are also operative as a way and means of knowing one’s “surroundings”.
(op. cit., p. 88)
Lisière, subst. fém. :
All the dreams had risen, abandoned to their free flight. Servet recounted his impending joy of coming out of the edges. (Estaunié 1896)
I’ll get up at noon: I’ll have cozy mornings in bed. No more studying, no more homework. (Estaunié 1896)
God! I will always have to be pushed and I will always have to be held on the edge and I will languish in eternal childhood. (M. de Guérin, 1829)
Edouard Glissant :
To oversimplify: crossbreeding would be the determinism, and creolization is, in relation to crossbreeding, the producer of the unpredictable. Creolization, it’s the unpredictable. We can predict or determine the crossbreeding, but we cannot predict or determine creolization. The same thinking of ambiguity, which specialists in the chaos sciences point out, at the very basis of their discipline, this same thinking of ambiguity now governs the imaginary of chaos-world and the imaginary of Relationship.
(Ibid. p. 89)
Nicolas Sidoroff :
The expression “edge nucleus” therefore allows, first of all, to radically evacuate representations in rigid boxes with borders or in limiting and excluding boxes. (…) To view musical practices as the interaction and articulation of six “edge nucleus”, each corresponding to a family of activities: creation, performance, mediation-education, research, administration, techniques-instrument making.
(op. cit., p. 265)
The notion of “edge” or “fringe” is the one that titillates (best): moving and indetermined yet identifiable musical zones.
Sons-pliés Boltanski
Gilles Laval :
Is there an improvised present, at instantaneous instant T? What are its edges, from the instant to be born or not born, or not-being, the instantaneous not frozen at the instant, right there, hop it’s over! Were you present yesterday at this precise shared but short-lived instant? I don’t want to know, I prefer to do it, with no return, towards the commissures of the senses.
Is improvisation self-deluding? Without other others is it possible/impossible? What target,if target there is?
Instantaneous stinging interpenetrations and projections, agglutinating morphological introspective replicas, turbulent scarlet distant junctions, easy or silly combinations, sharp synchronic, diachronic reactions, skillful oxymoristic fusions and confusions. If blue is the place of the sea, out of the water, it is measured in green, on the edge it is like a rainbow. Superb mass of elusive waves where inside shine and abound edges of gradations, departures with no return, unclear stops, blushing pink blurs, who knows whether to silence, to sight land or say here yes hearsay.
I’ve yes heard the hallali sensitive to the edges of improbreezation, (sometimes gurus with angry desires of grips tumble in slow scales (choose your slope), when others sparkle with unpredictable happy and overexcited surprises). End-to-end, let us invite ourselves to the kairostic heuristic commissures of imagined spaces and meanders, alone or with others, to moredames [pludames], to moreofall [plutoustes].
“commissure: (…) The majority of 19th century and 20th century dictionaries also record the aged use of the term in music to mean: Chord, a harmonic union of sounds where a dissonance is placed between two consonants (DG).”
“The end-to-end principle is a design framework in computer networking.
In networks designed according to this principle, application-specific features reside in the communicating end nodes of the network, rather than in intermediary nodes, such as gateways and routers, that exist to establish the network. In this way, the complexity and intelligence of the network is pushed to its edges.”
(End-to-end principle, Wikipedia)
“Kairos (Ancient Greek: καιρός) is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment.[1] The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, while the latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action.” (Kairos, wipikedia)
Kairos is the god of opportune occasion, of right time, as opposed to Chronos who is the god of time.
Jean-Charles François :
The “lisières” (edges) make you dream,
melt into white tears
the mythology of the white stain
is that all the maps are colored
no more of them to make us dream
Yves Favier :
…fluctuating moving data…leaving at no time the possibility of describing a stable/definitive situation…
temporary…valid only momentarily…on the nerve…
to touch the nerve is to touch the edge, the fringe, the margin…
improvisation as rapture…temporal kidnapping…
…where one is no longer quite yourself and finally oneself…
…testing time by gesture combined with form…and vice versa…
the irrational at the edge of well-reasoned frequency physics…
…well-tempered…nothing magical…just a fringe, an edge, reached by nerves…
ecotone…tension BETWEEN…
…between certainties…
…between existing and pre-existing…
immanent attractor…
…between silence and what is possible in the making…
this force that hits the nerve…
…that disturbs silence?…
…the edge, the fringe, the margin as a perpetually moving continuity…
The inclusion of each milieu in the other
Not directly connected to each other
Changing its ecological properties
Very common of milieux interpenetration
Terrier
Termite mound
A place where one changes one’s environment
For its own benefice and for that of other species
What narrative does the edge convey?…
Ecotones
György Kurtag :
[Quote from Pr. André Haynal :]
“In his new book (Daniel N. Stern, Le moment présent en psychothérapie : un monde dans un grain de sable, Paris : Editions Odile Jacob, 2003), Stern talks, as a psychotherapist and observer of daily life, about what he calls the ‘present moment’, what could also be called the blissful moment, during which, all of a sudden, a change can take place. This phenomenon, which the Greeks call kairos, is a moment of intense interaction among those who do not appear without a long prior preparation. This book focuses our attention on the ‘here and now’, the present experience, often lived on a non-verbal and unconscious level. In the first part, the author gives a very subtle description of this ‘now’, the problem of its nature, its temporal architecture and its organization.
In the second part, entitled ‘The contextualization of the present moment’, he talks, among other things, about implicit and intersubjective knowledge. Implicit <> explicit :
to make the implicit explicit and the unconscious conscious is an important task of psychotherapies of psychoanalytical (for him ‘psychodynamic’) or cognitive inspiration. The therapeutic process leads to moments of encounter and ‘good moments’ particularly conducive to a work of interpretation, or even to a work of verbal clarification. These moments of encounter can precede, lead to or follow the interpretation.
These ideas are obviously inspired by research on implicit non-declarative knowledge and memory on the one hand, and explicit or declarative knowledge and memory on the other. These terms refer to whether or not they can be retrieved, consciously or not. The second therefore concerns a memory system involved in an information process that an individual can consciously retrieve and declare. ‘Procedural memory’, on the other hand, is a type of non-declarative memory, which consists of several separate memory subsystems. Moreover, it is clear that non-declarative memory influences experience and behavior (the most frequently cited example is knowing how to ride a bicycle or play the piano, without necessarily being able to describe the movements involved).
A therapy séance can be seen as a series of present moments driven by the desire that a new way of being together is likely to emerge. These new experiences will enter into consciousness, sometimes as implicit knowledge. Most of the growing therapeutic change appears to be done in this way, slowly, gradually and silently. More spectacular is the emergence of ‘urgent moments’ that produce ‘moments of encounter’.”
Jean-Luc Nancy :
How can one, as an artist, give shape…? You are asking me to enter into the artist’s skin… That is precisely what I cannot do… And if I say » into the skin » it is of course very literally. The skin (peau) – “expeausition” (…) – is nothing more than the limit where a body takes its shape. If I think of the soul as “the shape of a living body” for Aristotle, I can say that the skin is the soul, or better, that it animates the body: it doesn’t wrap the body like a bag, it doesn’t hold it like a corset, it turns it towards the world (and as well towards itself, which thus becomes both a “self” and a part of the non-self, from the outside). The skin does not cover, it forms, shapes, exposes and animates this incredibly complex, entangled, labyrinthine ensemble, which constitutes all the organs, muscles, arteries, nerves, bones, liquors, which is in the end such an “ensemble”, such a machinery only to get in form in, through and as skin, with its few variations or supplements, mucous membranes, nails, hairs, and this notable variation which is the cornea of the eye, with also its openings – nine in number –which are not “inputs” or “outputs”, much less cracks or fissures, but instead the way the skin flares out or invaginates, shrinks and unfurls or expresses itself in various ways with the outside – food, air, odor, flavor, sound (we can add electrical, magnetic, chemical phenomena that mingle with what the “senses” tell us), – and the skin not only spreads from one opening to another but, I repeat, unfolds at each opening to form tubules, cavities, through the walls of which occur all the metabolisms, all the osmosis, dissolutions, impregnations, transmissions, contagions, diffusions, propagations, irrigations and influences (also like influenza). This system, which is both organic and aleatory, functional and hazardous (by itself essentially exposed), does nothing else but constantly reform, renew and transform the skin.
(Jean-Luc Nancy et Jérôme Lèbre, Signeaux Sensibles, Montrouge : Bayard Édition, p. 64-66)
Jean-Charles François :
For the apeaustle, the skin (peau) – expeausition – as the limit where the body takes its form, skin, edge where the pores are the form of the soul and animates the body, Saint-Bio of the contiguity of other bodies to the stars.
The peau-lisière (skin-edge) of Apollinaire, peauet until his trepanation, and peau-aesthete a-linear, was not at all police-wear, nor very polished, but poly-swarming, poly-swirling.
The emptiness of the soul is the form taken by this communion between the sensitive body and the epeaunym (in the sensitive lion eye of the Gaul primate).
Tim Ingold :
Wherever they go and whatever they do, men draw lines: walking, writing, drawing or weaving are activities in which lines are omnipresent, as is the use of voice, hands or feet. In Lines,A Brief History , the English anthropologist Tim Ingold lays the foundations of what could be a “comparative anthropology of the line” – and, beyond that, a true anthropology of graphic design. Supported by numerous case studies (from the sung trails of the Australian Aborigines to the Roman roads, from Chinese calligraphy to the printed alphabet, from Native American fabrics to contemporary architecture), the book analyzes the production and existence of lines in daily human activity. Tim Ingold divides these lines into two genres – traces and threads – before showing that both can merge or transform into surfaces and patterns. According to him, the West has gradually changed the course of the line, gradually losing its connection to gesture and trace, and finally moving towards the ideal of modernity: the straight line. This book is addressed as much to those who draw lines while working (typographers, architects, musicians, cartographers) as to calligraphers and walkers – they never stop drawing lines because wherever you go, you can always go further.
((Introductory text (in French ) to Tim Ingold,Une brève histoire des lignes, traduit de l’anglais par Sophie Renaut, Bruxelles : Zones sensibles, 2013. English original text: Lines. A Brief History, London-New York, Routledge, 2007.) http://www.zones-sensibles.org/livres/tim-ingold-une-breve-histoire-des-lignes/
Gustave Flaubert :
An edge of moss bordered a hollow path, shaded by ash trees, whose light tops trembled.
Tim Ingold :
But what happens when people or things cling to one another? There is an entwining of lines. They must bind in some such way that the tension that would tear them apart actually holds them fast. Nothing can hold on unless it puts out a line, and unless that line can tangle with others.
(op. cit., p. 3)
Aleks Dupraz :
My relationship to research became more pronounced after a year spent relatively on the fringes of the academic institutions. While I was wondering about research that I could join or set up with a perspective of contributing to the development of action-research, my trajectory has been strongly affected by my participation in different spaces of research and experimentation that were for me the network of Fabriques de sociologie (I joined in 2015), the creation of Animacoop collective in Grenoble (initiated in Grenoble a few months later), and the seminar of Arts de l’attention in Grenoble (inaugurated in Grenoble in September of the same year). Thus, it is above all in the encounter that my research recommitted itself, getting summoned to where it sometimes seemed to be lacking. Indeed, despite my attempts to introduce myself otherwise, I was often identified in these circles as a student and/or young researcher at the University. This was particularly the case at 11 rue Voltaire, the first location of the Chimère citoyenne, when I was part of the research seminar of the Arts de l’attention. I then became aware once again of the extent to which being identified as an academic came at first to freeze something of an identity to which I refused to be reduced while at the same time assuming a part of the social and political function that this entailed and the responsibility that this seemed to me to imply. In this tension, I could not help but notice my attachment to the world of the University – for which I remain very critical – this in a political context in which the discourses arguing the waste of time or the luxury of reflexivity and research in literature and the human and social sciences tended to multiply.
(« Faire université hors-les-murs, une politique du dé-placement », Agencements N°1, mai 2018, Éditions du commun, p. 13)
lisière eau
Nicolas Sidoroff :
Let’s take an artistic example: music and dance. Considering them as practices strongly marked by the historical setting of discipline, they are clearly separated. You are a musician, you are a dancer; you teach (you go to) a music or dance class. There are cases, boxes or tubes on both sides. Crossbreeding is possible, but it’s rare and difficult, and when it does take place, it’s in an exclusive way: you’re here or there, on one side or the other, each time you have to cross a border.
Considering music and dance as daily human practices, they are extremely intertwined: to make music is to have a body in movement; to dance is to produce sounds. Since 2016, an action-research was conducted between PaaLabRes and Ramdam, an art center. It involved people who are rather musicians (us, members of PaaLabRes), others rather dancers (members of the Maguy Marin company), a visual artist (Christian Lhopital), and regular guests in connection with the above networks. We’ve been experimenting with improvisation protocols on shared materials. In the realizations, each everyone makes sounds and movements in relation to the sounds and movements of others, each is both a musician and a dancer. For me, the status of the body (the gestures including those for making music, the care, the sensations, and the fatigue) are very different than the one I have in a rehearsal or a concert of a music group. They are even richer and more intense. With the vocabulary used in the previous paragraphs, in these realizations I am in a form of “tâ/ache blanche” (white task/stain) dance-music edge or fringe. A first assessment that we are in the process of drawing up shows that going beyond our disciplinary boxes (exploding the border, making the edge exist) is difficult.
(« Explorer les lisières d’activité, vers une microsociologie des pratiques (musicales) », Agencements N°2, décembre 2018, Édition du commun, p. 265)
The world in which we live can be defined as one in which a great diversity of practices and cultures coexist. As a result, it is difficult today to think in terms of the modern Western world, Eastern philosophy, African tradition or other labels too easy to use to guide us in the chaos of the world. We are in presence of an infinite number of networks, and each of us is active in more than one of these. Therefore, we have to think about musical practices in terms of ecological problems. A practice can kill another one. A practice can depend directly on another’s survival. A practice can be directly connected to another and still be different. The ecology of practices (see Stengers 1996, Chapter 3) or how to face a potentially very violent multicultural world is probably today as important as the ecological question of the future of the planet earth. I will attempt in this article to treat one aspect of the diverse world of artistic practices: improvisation with heterogeneous groups.
My own personal research on mediation between groups of musicians belonging to different cultural practices or musical styles stems from my involvement as the director (between 1990 and 2007) of a center devoted to the training of music school teachers, the Cefedem AuRA in Lyon, France. This institution was created in 1990, under the authority of the Ministry of Culture, and offers a two-year program leading to the Music Teacher State Diploma [Diplôme d’État de professeur de musique], geared towards the teaching of voice, instruments, basic musicianship, choral conducting, jazz, popular music [described in France as Musiques actuelles amplifiées, Today’s Amplified Music], and traditional music in music schools and conservatories organised throughout France by the towns. Research was conducted within the framework of curriculum development in this institution, in direct collaboration with Eddy Schepens and the entire pedagogical and administrative team of this institution.
For the first ten years all the students at the Center were classical musicians issued from Regional Conservatories. In 2000, the study program was completely reinvented to accommodate the inclusion of jazz, popular music, and traditional music students, alongside the ones from the “classical” sector. The curriculum was based on two distinct imperatives: (a) each musical genre had to be recognized as autonomous in its practical and theoretical specificities; and (b) each musical genre had to collaborate with all the others in specific artistic and pedagogical projects. We were thus confronted with the issue of how to face the problem of a difference of culture between a highly formalised teaching tradition with low exposure to public presentations, and traditions that are based on atypical or informal forms of learning involving a high degree of immediate public interactions. The problem that then had to be solved can be formulated as follows : the classical sector tends to develop an instrumental or vocal identity in a posture of technical readiness to play any music (on the condition that it would be written on a score) ; other musical genres tend to require of their members a strong identity based on the style of music as such accompanied by a technical approach based solely on what is necessary to express that identity. Our task was to find solutions that could include all the ingredients of this triple equation. Two concepts emerged: a) the curriculum would focus on student projects rather than on a series of courses and the definition of their content (although these courses continued to exist); b) projects should be based on the principle of a contract binding students to a number of constraints determined by the institution and on which evaluation would be based. The Centre has developed a research program on these issues and in pedagogy of music, and publishes a journal, Enseigner la Musique (see for example François & al. 2007).
Taking this concept of intercultural encounters as a model, experimental situations have been carried out by a Lyon collective of artists in existence since 2011: PaaLabRes (Artistic Practices in Acts, Laboratory of Research [Pratiques Artistiques en Actes, Laboratoire de Recherche]).
Several projects were developed:
A small group of improvisators met to propose protocols for developing common material in the context of collective invention[1]. These protocols were tested, discussed and then tried in a number of workshops addressed to the largest range of participants (professionals, amateurs; beginners and advanced students; musicians and dancers belonging to different musical categories, styles and traditions) (2011-2015).
Regular meetings of PaaLabRes musicians with dancers (Maguy Marin’s Company members among others) have been organized at the Ramdam, an arts center near Lyon, with the aim of developing common materials between dance and music in improvisation (2015-2017).
Through the digital space www.paalabres.org a reflection on the definition of artistic research, situated in between formal academic research and artistic practices, between various artistic domains and diverse aesthetic expressions, in between pedagogy and performance on stage. (See the station Débat, line “Artistic Research in the first edition of paalabres.org).
2. Alternative forms to definitive art works
Improvisation situations seem in this context to be a good way to deal with heterogeneous encounters through practicing music, not so much as a focusing on aesthetics values, but rather as a democratic process that this situation seems to promote: each person is fully responsible for her or his sound production and for interacting with the others persons present in the space, and also with the diverse means of production available.
The definition of improvisation, within the art practices of the West—especially in its “freer” forms— is often proposed as an alternative to the written music that dominated European art music for at least two centuries. Improvisation faced with the structuralism of the 1950-60s tended to propose a simple inversion of the prevailing model:
The performer considered up to that time as not being a major participant to the creation of major works, becomes through improvisation completely responsible for her/his creation in a context that changed the definition of work of art.
The practice of writing signs on a score and respecting them in interpretation is replaced by the absence of any visual notation and the prevalence given to oral communication.
There will be no more works definitively fixed in historical memory, but processes that are continuously modified ad infinitum.
The slow reflective method used by the composer in a private space when elaborating a given piece of music will be replaced by an instantaneous act, in the spirit of the moment, on stage and in the presence of an audience.
Instead of having compositions that define themselves as autonomous objects articulating their own language and personal sleight of hand, free improvisation will tend to go in the direction of the “non-idiomatic” (see Bailey 1992, p. ix-xii)[2] or towards the “all-idiomatic” (the capacity to borrow sound material from any cultural domain).
And so on, all the terms being inverted.
For this inversion to occur, however, some stable elements have to remain in place: notably the concept that music is played on stage by professional musicians before an audience of educated music lovers. This historical stability of the concert performance largely inherited from the 19th century goes hand in hand according to Howard Becker with what he calls a “package”: an hegemonic situation that controls in a global way all the actions in a given domain with particular economic conditions, definitions of professional roles and supporting educational institutions (see Becker 2007, p. 90). The reversal of elements appears to guarantee that certain aesthetical attitudes would remain unchanged: for example, the concept of “non-idiomatic” might be considered as reinforcing the modernist view of an ever-changing process towards new sounds and new sound combinations. We don’t know which idiom will result from the composer’s work, but the ideal is to arrive at a personal idiom. The improviser should come on stage without idiomatic a-priori, but the result will be idiomatic only for the duration of the concert. The “blank slate” ideal persists in the idea that each improvisation has to occur outside beaten paths.
The nomadic and transverse approach to improvisation cannot be confined to the idea that it is an alternative to sedentary human beings personified by the classical musicians of the West. The nomadic and the transverse practices cannot just pretend to offer an alternative to institutional art forms, through their indeterminate movements and infinite wanderings. Rather the (transversal) nomads have to deal with the complex knots of practices situated in between oral and written communication, timbre and syntactic articulation, spontaneity and predefined gestures, group interactivity and personal contribution.
3. Improvisation
One of the strong frameworks of improvisation – as distinct from written music on scores – is the shared responsibility between players for a collective creative sound production. However, the exact content of this collective creativity in actual improvisations seems unclear. In improvisation, the emphasis is on the unplanned public performance on stage, on the ephemeral act that happens only once. The ideal of improvisation seems to be dependent on the absence of preparation, before the act itself. And at the same time, the actual act of improvisation cannot be done by participants who are not “prepared” to do it. The performance may be unprepared in the details of its unfolding, but generally speaking it cannot be successfully carried out without some intense preparation. This is indeed the paradox of the situation.
Two models can be defined, and we have to remember that theoretical models are never reflecting reality, but they offer different points of reference allowing us to reflect on our subject matter. In the first model the individual players undergo an intensive preparation inscribed in a time frame of many years, in order to achieve a personal voice, a unique manner of producing sound and gestural acts. This personal voice, or manner of playing, has to be inscribed in memory – inscribed in the body – in a wide-ranging repertoire of possibilities. This is the principal condition of the improvisation creative act: the creative elements are not inscribed on an independent support – like a score – but they are directly embodied in the playing capacities of the performer. The players meet on stage as separated individuals in order to produce something together in an unplanned manner. The performance on stage will be the superimposition of personal discourses, but if players can anticipate what the partners will be able to produce (above all if they have already played together or listen to their respective performances), they will be able to construct together, within that unplanned framework, an original sonic and/or gestural world. The emphasis on individual preparation seems to not hinder the constitution of a fairly homogeneous network of improvisators. This network is geographically very large and imposes, without having to specify any definition, the conditions of its access by a set of implicit unwritten rules. What is at stake here? The main focus of this model is on the public performance on a stage, where the important issues concern the sonic or gestural quality of the acts in that encounter produced by everybody present, including the attitudes and reactions of the audience.
The other alternative model puts the emphasis on a collective co-construction of the sonic universe independently from any eventual presentation on stage or other types of interactive actions. It implies that a substantial time is spent on elaborating a repertoire of sonic (or any other) materials within a permanent group of people. The development of the collective sound depends on a sufficient number of sessions working together with all members present. That these sessions are performed before an audience or not, is beside the point. This second model does not present much interest if the members of the group are homogeneous in their background, notably if they acquired their professional status in the same kind of educational institutions and the same processes of qualification. If they are not different in some important respect, the first model seems to be more adequate, as there is no difficulty in building a collective sound world directly through improvised performance on stage. But if they are different, and above all if they are very different, the idea of building a collective sound material, or a collective artistic material, is not a simple task. On the one hand, the differences between participants have to be maintained, they have to be strictly respected in mutual terms. On the other hand, building something together will imply that each participant is ready to leave behind reflexes, habits, and traditional ways of behavior. This is a first paradoxical situation. Another paradox immediately becomes apparent adding to the complication: on the one hand, the material that is collectively developed has to be more elaborate than just the superimposition of discourses in order to qualify as co-constructions; and, on the other hand, the material should not become fixed in a structuration, as would be the case with a written composition, the material should remain open to improvisation manipulations and variations, to be realized at the actual moment of the improvisation performance. The performers should remain free to interact as they see fit on the spirit of the moment. This second model does not exclude public performance on stage but cannot be limited to this obligation. It is centered on collective processes and might involve other types of social output and interactions.
The challenges of the second model are directly linked to debates about the means to be developed in order to break down the walls. To face these challenges, it is not enough to just gather people of different origins or cultures in the same room and expect that more profound relationships will develop. It is also not sufficient to invent new methodologies appropriate for a given situation, to ensure that a miracle of pacific coexistence will occur. In order to face complexity, you need to develop situations in which you should have a number of ingredients:
Each participant has to know in practical ways what all the other participants are about.
Each participant is obligated to follow collective rules decided together.
Each participant should retain an important margin of personal initiative and remains free to express differences.
There can be processes in which a leadership can emerge, but on the whole the context should remain on a democratic level.
All this complexity demonstrates the virtues of pragmatic tinkering within the framework of this plan of action.
As the sociologist and jazz pianist David Sudnow showed when he described the learning processes of his hands that enabled him to produce jazz improvisations: sound and visual models, although essential to the definition of objectives to be attained, are not sufficient to produce real results through simple imitation:
When my teacher said, “now that you can play tunes, try improvising melodies with the right hand,” and when I went home and listened to my jazz records, it was as if the assignment was to go home and start speaking French. There was this French going on, streams of fast-flowing strange sounds, rapidly winding, styles within styles in the course of any player’s music. (Sudnow 2001, p. 17)
Some degree of “tinkering about” is necessary to allow the participants to achieve their purposes through heterogeneous detours of their own, outside the logical framework given by the teacher.
The idea of dispositif (apparatus, plan of action) associated with “tinkering about” corresponds to the definition found in the dictionary: an “ensemble of means disposed according to a plan in order to do a precise action”. One can refer to the definition given by Michel Foucault as “a resolutely heterogeneous ensemble, comprising discourses, institutions, architectural amenities, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative arrangements, scientific enunciations, philosophical, moral and philanthropic statements, some explicitly stated, some implicitly unsaid…” (Foucault 1977, see also the station timbre, line “Improvisation” in the first edition of paalabres.org)
In applying this idea to a co-production of sonic or gestural materials in the domain of artistic practices, the institutional elements of this definition are indeed present, but the emphasis is here directed towards the network of the elements created through everyday action, which are contextualized by given agents and materials. Thus, the means are defined here as concerning, at the same time, the persons concerned, their social and hierarchical status within a given artistic community, the materials, instruments and techniques that are provided or already developed, the spaces in which the actions take place, the particular interactions – formalized or not – between participants, between participants and materials or techniques, and the interactions with the external world outside the group. The dispositifs are more or less formalized by charters of conduct, protocols of action, scores or graphic images, rules pertaining to the affiliation to the group, evaluation processes, learning and research procedures. To a great extent, however, the dispositifs are governed on an everyday basis in an “oral” manner, in contexts that can change radically according to circumstances, and through interactions, which by their instability can produce very different results.
4. Artistic Processes or just Human Interactions?
The idea of dispositif, or complex apparatus, at the same time denies that artistic acts be simply limited or confined to well identified autonomous objects, and it also enlarges considerably the scope of artistic endeavours. The network that continuously forms, informs and deforms itself cannot be limited to a single focus on the production of artistic materials for the benefit of a public. The processes are no longer defined in specific specialized spaces. The term improvisation is no longer strictly limited to a series of sacred principles of absolute freedom and spontaneity or, on the contrary, respect for any tradition. Improvisation can incorporate activities that involve a variety of media supports – including using writing on paper – to achieve results in particular contexts. The purity of clear and definitive positions can no longer be what should dictate all possible behaviour. This does not mean that ideals have been erased and that the values that one wants to place at the forefront of the reality of practices have lost their primordial importance.
The confrontation of nomadic and transverse artistic practices to institutional imperative requirements may concern many areas: improvisation, research, music and art education, curriculum design, reviving traditional practices, etc. More and more artists find themselves in a situation in which their practice in strictly artistic terms is now considerably widened by what we call “mediation”, or mediating between a diversity of elements (see Hennion 1993 and 1995): pedagogical activities, popular education, community involvement, public participation, social interactions, hybrid characteristics between artistic domains, etc. The immersion of artistic activities into the social, educational, technological and political realms implies the utilization of research tools and of research partnerships with formal institutions as a necessary part of the elaboration of artistic objects or processes (see Coessens 2009, and the PaaLabRes’ station the artistic turn). Research practices in artistic domains need to a large extent the legitimacy and evaluation given by academic bodies, but it is equally important to recognize that they must be seen as part of an “eccentric science” (see Deleuze & Guatarri 1980, pp. 446-464), which considerably changes the meaning of the term “research”. The important questioning of these artists pertains directly to the very practice of conducting research: it tends to attempt to erase the usual strict separation between actors and observers, between the scientific orientation of the publication of results and other informal forms of presentation, and between the artistic act and reflections about it.
A possible nomadic and transverse response would be found along a pathway between the freedom of creative acts and the strict imposition of traditional canons. In this context, the creative act can no longer be seen as a simple individual expression asserting freedom in relation to a fiction of universality. The constitution of a particular collective, defining its own rules along the way, must play, in an unstable friction, against individual imaginative desires. To place somebody in a situation of research would mean to anchor the creative act on the formulation by a collective of a problematical process; the complete freedom of creation is now bound by collective interactions and to what is at stake in the process, without being limited by the strict rules of a given model. The creative act would cease to be considered as an absolute object in itself, and the accent would be put on the numerous mediations that determine it as a particular aesthetical and ethical context: the convergence at a certain moment of a number of participants into some form of project. The knots of this convergence need to be explicated not in terms of a particular desired result, but in terms of the constitution of some kind of chart of the problematic complexity of the situation at its inception: a system of constraints which deals with the interaction between materials, spaces, institutions, diverse participants (musicians, administrators, amateurs, professionals, theoreticians, students, general public, etc.), resources at hands, references, etc. According to Isabelle Stengers, the idea of constraint, as distinct from “conditions”, is not an imperative imposed from outside, nor a way to institute some legitimacy, but it requires to be satisfied in an undetermined manner open to many possibilities. The signification is determined a posteriori at the end of a process (Stengers 1996, 74). Constraints have to be taken into account, but do not define pathways that might be taken for the realization of the process. Systems of constraints apply best when very different people with different specialized fields are called to develop something together.
5. Protocols
We have called “protocols” collective research processes that take place before an improvisation and that will colour its content, then accumulate in the collective memory a repertoire of determined actions. The detail of this repertoire of actions is not fixed, nor is it necessarily decided that a given repertoire should be called up during an improvisation. The definition of the term protocol is obviously ambiguous and for many will seem to go completely against the ethics of improvisation. The term is linked to connotations of official, even aristocratic circumstances, where behaviour considered acceptable or respectable is completely determined: it refers to socially recognised modes of behaviour. Protocol is also used in the medical world to describe series of care acts to be followed (without omissions) in specific cases. It is not in the sense of these various contexts that we use the term.
The definition of protocol is here linked to written or oral instructions given to participants at the beginning of a collective improvisation that determine rules governing the relationships between persons or that define a particular sound, gestural or other type of material. It corresponds more or less to what you may find in dictionary (here French Larousse dictionary on-line): “Usages conformed to relationships between people in social life” and “Ensemble of rules, questions, etc. defining a complex operation”. The participants have to accept that in a limited time, some interaction rules in the group would be determined with the aim of building something together or to understand another point of view, to enter into playing with the others. Once these rules are experimented, when situations have been built, the protocol in itself can be forgotten in order that interactions less bound by rules of behaviour can take place, retrieving then the spirit of unplanned improvisation. The ideal, when determining a protocol, is to seek a collective agreement on its specific content, on the exact formulation of the rules. In fact, this rarely takes place in real situations, as different people understand rules in different ways. A protocol is most often proposed by one particular person, the important factor is to allow all present the possibility to propose other protocols, and also to be able to elaborate variations on the proposed protocol.
The contradiction that exists between the intensive preparation that improvisers impose on themselves individually and improvisation on stage that takes place “without preparation”, is now found at the collective level: intensive preparation of the group of improvisers must take place collectively before spontaneous improvisation can take place, using elements from the accumulated repertoire but without planning the details of what is going to happen. If the members of the collective have developed materials in common, they can now more freely call them up according to the contexts that arise during improvisation.
Thus we are in the presence of an alternation between, on the one hand, formalized moments of development of the repertoire and, on the other hand, improvisations which are either based on what one has just worked on or, more freely, on the totality of the possibilities given by the repertoire and also by what is external to it (fortuitous encounters between individual productions). The objective remains therefore that of putting the participants in real improvisational situations where one can determine one’s own path and in which ideally all the participants are in specific roles of equal importance.
Different types of protocols or procedures can be categorized, but care should be taken not to catalogue them in detail in what would look like a manual. In fact, protocols must always be invented or reinvented in each particular situation. Indeed, the composition of the groups in terms of the heterogeneity of the artistic fields involved, the levels of technical (or other) ability, age, of social background, geographical origin, different cultures, particular objectives in relation to the group’s situation, etc., must each time determine what the protocol proposes to do and therefore its contextual content.
Here are some of the categories of possible protocols among those we have explored:
Coexistence of proposals. Each participant can define a particular sound and/or gestural movement. Each participant must maintain his or her own elaborate production throughout an improvisation. Improvisation therefore only concerns the temporality and the level of personal interventions in superimpositions or juxtapositions. The interaction takes place at the level of a coexistence of the various proposals in various combinations chosen at the time of the improvised performance. Variations can be introduced in the personal proposals.
Collective sounds developed from a model. Timbres are proposed individually to be reproduced as best they can by the whole group in order to create a given collective sound.
Co-construction of materials. Small groups (4 or 5) can be assigned to develop a coherent collective sound or body movements. The work is envisaged at the oral level, but each group can choose its own method of elaboration, including the use of paper notations. Then teach it to other groups in the manner of their choice.
Construction of rhythmic structures (loops, cycles). The characteristic situation of this kind of protocol is the group arranged in a circle, each participant in turn (in the circle) producing an improvised short sound or gesture, all this in a form of musical “hoquet”. Usually the production of the sounds or gestures that loop in the circle is based on a regular pulse. Variations are introduced by silences in the regular flow, superimposing loops of varying lengths, rhythmic irregularities, etc.
Clouds, textures, sounds and collective gestural movements – individuals drowned in the mass. Following the model developed by a number of composers of the second half of the twentieth century such as Ligeti and Xenakis, clouds or sound textures (this applies to gestures and body movements as well) can be developed from a given sonority distributed randomly over time by a sufficient number of people producing them. The collective produces a global sound (or global body movements) in which the individual productions are blended into the mass. Most of the time, improvisation consists in making the global sound or the movements evolve in a collective way towards other sound or gestural qualities.
Situations of social interaction. Sounds or gestures are not defined, but the way of interacting between participants is. Firstly, there is the situation of moving from silence to collectively determined gestural and bodily movements (or to a sound), as in situations of warm-up or early stages of improvisation in which effective improvised play only begins when all participants have agreed in all senses of the word tuning : a) that which consists of instruments or bodies being in tune, b) that which concerns the collective’s test of the acoustics and spatial arrangement of a room to feel together in a particular environment, c) that which concerns the fact that the participants have agreed to do the same activity socially. This is for example what is called the prelude in European classical music, the alãp in North Indian classical music, a process of gradual introduction into a more or less determined sound universe, or to be determined collectively. Secondly, one or more actions can be prohibited in the course of an improvisation. Thirdly, the rules of the participants’ playing time, or of a particular structuring of the temporal course of the improvisation can be determined. Finally, one can determine behaviours, but not the sounds or gestures that the behaviours will produce.
Objects foreign to an artistic field, for example, which have no function of producing sounds in the case of music, may be introduced to be manipulated by the collective and indirectly determine the nature of the sounds or gestures that will accompany this manipulation. The example that immediately comes to mind is that of the sound illustration of silent films. But there are an infinite number of possible objects to use in this situation. The attention of the participants is mainly focused on the manipulation of the object borrowed from another domain and not on the particular production of what the usual discipline requires.
6. Conclusion
The two concepts of dispositif and of system of constraints seem to be an interesting way to define artistic research, especially in the context of heterogeneous collective creative projects: collective improvisation, socio-political contexts of artistic acts, informal/formal relationships to institutions, Questions of transmission of knowledge and know-how, various ways of interacting between humans, between humans and machines, and between humans and non-humans. This widens considerably the scope of artistic acts: curriculum design, interdisciplinary research projects, teaching workshops (see François & al. 2007), become, in this context, fully-fledged artistic situations outside the exclusivity of performances on stage.
Today we are confronted with an electronic world of an extraordinary diversity of artistic practices and at the same time a multiplication of socially homogeneous networks. These practices tend to develop strong identities and hyper-specializations. This urgently forces us to work on the meeting of cultures that tend to ignore each other. In informal as well as formal spaces, within socially heterogeneous groups, ways of developing collective creations based on the principles of direct democracy should be encouraged. The world of electronic technologies increasingly allows access for all to creative and research practices, at various levels and without having to go through the institutional usual pathways. This obliges us to discuss the ways in which these activities may or may not be accompanied by artists working in formal or informal spaces. The indeterminate nature of these obligations – not in terms of objectives, but in terms of actual practice – brings us back to the idea of nomadic and transversal artistic acts.
1. The following musicians participated to this project: Laurent Grappe, Jean-Charles François, Karine Hahn, Gilles Laval, Pascal Pariaud et Gérald Venturi.
2. Derek Bailey defines “idiomatic” and “non-idiomatic” improvisation as a question of identity to a cultural domain, and not so much in terms of language content: “Non idiomatic improvisation has other concerns and is more usually found in so-called ‘free’ improvisation and , while it can be highly stylised, is not usually tied to representing an idiomatic identity.” (1992, p. xii)
Bibliographie
Bailey, Derek. 1992. Improvisation, its nature and practice in music. Londres: The British Library National Sound Archive.
Becker, Howard. 2007. « Le pouvoir de l’inertie », Enseigner la Musique n°9/10, Lyon: Cefedem AuRA – CNSMD de Lyon. This French translation is extracted from Propos sur l’Art, pp. 59-72, paris: L’Harmatan, 1999, translation by Axel Nesme.
Coessens, Kathleen, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas. 2009. The Artistic Turn, A Manifesto. Ghent : Orpheus Institute, distributed by Leuven University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles et Felix Guattari. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Paris : Editions de Minuit.
François, Jean-Charles, Eddy Schepens, Karine Hahn, and Dominique Clément. 2007. « Processus contractuels dans les projets de réalisation musicale des étudiants au Cefedem Rhône-Alpes », Enseigner la Musique N°9/10, Cefedem Rhône-Alpes, CNSMD de Lyon, pp. 173-194.
François, Jean-Charles. 2015a. “Improvisation, Orality, and Writing Revisited”, Perspectives of New Music, Volume 53, Number 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 67-144. Publish in French in the first edition of paalabres.org, station timbre with the title « Revisiter la question du timbre ».
Foucault, Michel. 1977. « Entrevue. Le jeu de Michel Foucault », Ornicar, N°10.
Hennion, Antoine. 1993. La Passion musicale, Une sociologie de la médiation. Paris : Editions Métailié, 1993.
Hennion, Antoine. 1995. « La médiation au cœur du refoulé », Enseigner la Musique N°1. Cefedem Rhône-Alpes and CNSMD de Lyon, pp. 5-12.
PaaLabRes, collective. 2016. Débat on the line “Recherche artistique”, a debate organized by the PaaLabRes collective and the Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in 2015.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1996. Cosmopolitiques 1: La guerre des sciences. Paris: La Découverte / Les empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1997. Cosmopolitiques 7: Pour en finir avec la tolerance, chapter 6, “Nomades et sédentaires?”. Paris: La Découverte / Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Sudnow, David. 2001. Ways of the Hand, A Rewritten Account. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Les Allumés du jazz, does that ring a bell ? They organized three days of meetings in Avignon, last November, with a lot of guests to talk about the issue(s) of resistance to business, of how to create musical networks, etc. As I couldn’t take part in it because I was in the middle of working on Ubu Roi, I handed the baby over to Cyril Darmedru, who did a really judicious contribution there, I think. After that, Les Allumés edited a document with all the written contributions of this meeting, as well as complementary texts, and even a vinyl with music from all the musicians present. There are a lot of interesting articles in this document, I think. This is for your information. Les allumés du jazz
In fact, I was initially approached because I know Jean Rochard, the head of the Nato label who’s also in charge of Les Allumés. I really like this guy… He was invited to take part in what was called at the time “the Counter Forum of Culture”, because we were lucky enough to have in Avignon, the “Forum of Culture”. That was at the time of Sarkozy. There have been several Forums like this in Avignon with the European Ministers of Culture under high police protection, etc. With Sud Culture [a trade union organization in the cultural daomain] (of which I’m a member), we decided to organize a counter-forum: we organized three or four editions, with many exciting guests each time. And so, one year we invited Rochard. I thought his contribution was really cool. In addition, since we were (we are or we were, I don’t really know if I should say it in the present or in the past tense since I’m not there anymore) on the Hauts Plateaux above the AJMi Jazz Club[1] and Les Allumés du Jazz are obviously very close to the AJMi. So there you go, they asked me if I wanted to do something, but it was too complicated for me at the time.
Gilles L. :
He founded the Nato record company in the early 1980s and has been recording American musicians. Notably Michel Portal in Minneapolis with musicians from Prince. He’s stubborn, it’s an incredible label. Nato
Guigou C. :
Nato, it’s a great label! They’re one of the first ones to produce for example Jean-François Pauvros and a lot of other musicians like that.
Gilles L. :
I often play his records in Villeurbanne for my students, especially News from the Jungle.
Jean-Charles F. :
Should we begin the interview?
Gilles L. :
Are we going to have coffee or should we begin?
Jean-Charles F. :
Yes, there is coffee, I forgot! [laughter]
Gilles L. :
Shall we begin after we have coffee or before we have coffee… during coffee… ?
Jean-Charles F. :
After coffee.
Gilles L. :
[from far] Do you want sugar?
Guigou C. :
No, not me. Do you want sugar?
Nicolas S. :
No thank you.
Jean-Charles F. :
No.
Gilles L. :
Really? Well, so much the better. [noise of pouring coffee]
Jean-Charles F. :
Thank you.
Gilles L. :
I believe it’s very hot, be careful. [Noises, the coffee is served. Very long silence with a loud noise of a machine far away]
Guigou C. :
Oh! We are lucky! Do you know him? [He shows the book by Serge Loupien, La France Underground 1965/1979 Free Jazz et Rock Pop, Le Temps des Utopies] There’s a lot of things I’ve learned. There’s talk of Etron Fou Leloublan but… that’s anecdotal, sorry. There are a lot of super interesting things that I didn’t know and that I discovered. Still, it was a rather prolific era… Notably, he tells, I mean, he quotes this story that I think is absolutely great, it’s one of the first Sun Ra concerts in France in 1970, at the Pavillon Baltard in Paris, before it was the Cité de la Villette, and so there’s a big hall, a big hangar, which holds 3000 people, there are 5000 guys who come to see Sun Ra, I don’t know if you can imagine that today. And so they can’t all get in, obviously, because it’s too small. So some of them start screaming at the exit: “Yeah, it’s an outrage!” They yell at Sun Ra and all that: “Say, you’re not going to play like this in these conditions, leaving half the people outside”. So you’ve got Sun Ra with his golden cape and the badge of the Sun, coming out of the hall with the whole orchestra behind him playing. They’re going right under the nose of the CRS. And the cops, they say, “Oh, it’s not going to be like in ’68 again” [laughter] And then he comes back with everyone behind him, the 5,000 guys in the hall, it’s huge, that’s it [laughter]. It’s an incredible story!
Jean-Charles F. :
I understood 5000 busses! [bus instead of gus (guys)]
Guigou C. :
Busses? It would have been even more people. [laughter] Well then? At some point you have to begin, right?
Jean-Charles F. :
Voilà! So, there is this project “L’Art résiste au temps” [“Art resists time”].
Guigou C. :
I still remember it.
Jean-Charles F. :
Gilles, if you want to intervene you may do so, since you were part of it…
Guigou C. :
You have the right to do it.
Gilles L. :
Well, I will let you explain…
Art Resists Time – General Presentation
Guigou C. :
Well, how to explain…? How did I come up with that particular storyline? First was to tell myself at a certain point that I felt a bit like making the connection between my supposedly artistic and my supposedly militant commitments. Having lived through this on many occasions, I have very often – I think you have too – met either extremely cutting-edge artists, interesting in their artistic practice, but totally useless at the political level, completely disconnected from reality, I would say, in my opinion; and conversely, hyper-acute militants who just listen to shitty music… There’s no way we can get the two things to come together. So that’s where we started from, actually, the whole reason for it, anyway. So, from there I read and reread Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This is an ultimate reference book on the state of the world today. And then I started to think about how we could work, which meant, among other things, finding times for work and reflection, for creation, different from the usual times. It meant settling down in places and staying there, and trying to do things with people, and then also breaking down barriers in terms of artistic practices. Hence the desire to form a team where there would not only be musicians, but also a visual artist, an actress / stage director, a philosopher, etc. And so that’s what we did. And then came one of the first work residencies at 3bisf, which is a contemporary art center inside the Montperrin psychiatric hospital in Aix-en-Provence.
Gilles L. :
Didn’t we do the Thor residency before? A week of research work, workshops, role-playing proposed by the various people you had brought together, most of whom did not know each other.[2] The main idea was to do research, but not specifically to find.
Guigou C. :
But the first real public residence, if I dare say so, happened at the 3bisf. Well, then, I had started talking with Sylvie Gerbault who was the director, now she has retired. It’s true that we musicians rarely have the opportunity and the habit of working on long residencies. And she actually forced us to stay for about three weeks or something like that. Which for us was a long time. Three weeks? What are we going to do for three weeks? Why three weeks? And in fact, by being there, I’m talking under Gilles’ control, it’s true that we realized that, in relation to the patients, the people who live there, after a while you don’t know who’s a patient, who’s a doctor.
Gilles L. :
Yes, the doctors are not dressed in their usual uniform.
Guigou C. :
No, they’re not in white coats, and they also invite an outside audience, since we had in fact taken it as a principle to make times that were open to the public in the broadest sense; that is to say, in the morning, there were some sort of writing workshops, and from there we would take up bits of texts that we set to music. In short, this is what the actress Agnès Régolo would undertake. So, there were times at the table, so to speak, and we didn’t know who was who, in fact. We knew pretty much who we were, although not always. But there were also patients, well, people who were being interned in this hospital, doctors and nurses, and then people from outside. It was quite funny because after a while you didn’t really know who was who!
Gilles L. :
We didn’t know who the insane ones were!
Guigou C. :
On the notion of madness, it was really interesting. And then, I became aware of this towards the end of that residency, effectively there were some people who were very shy or who had difficulty coming to us, and who ended up improvising some sort of flashes at times at the end of our residency, because they had time to acclimatize to us and to understand a little bit of the stuff. At first, they didn’t dare come, they came to the door of our working space, they took a look, then they left, then little by little they came. And at the time that was really interesting. We were almost totally immersed in it during all that time. And, well, after we got out of the hospital, we had three or four residencies, one in Rillieux-la-Pape, when it was still Maguy Marin who was at the Centre Chorégraphique National, and then two near Nancy, one in Frouard and a second one in Vandœuvre.
Art Resists Time – Diversity of Actions
Jean-Charles F. :
And so, the participants at the hospital at 3bisf, were they mostly writing texts?
Guigou C. :
So, there were different things: well, there were some who either choose to improvise or to write texts. So, what was written, at times, either they said it themselves, or we said it for them. And then there were some flashes of lightning, while we were making the presentation, for example, there was a patient who was there, who was a former hairdresser, who came and did some sort of interventions that disrupted us. In addition, I had used the term « disrupters », I wanted to have disrupting people taking part, this was just fine [laughter]. But the guy was great, because he understood the thing. He was exactly where he needed to be, he didn’t overdo it, he gave… Who did he give a gold chain to?
Gilles L. :
I don’t know, it was quite surprising.
Guigou C. :
He gave a jewel, just like that, to a member of the team, because he was happy… He wanted to show his interest, his gratitude, for our presence, and all that. But without going too far, without monopolizing what was going on. And then he went back to his seat. So, it was quite an astonishing thing! I remember, in the workshop – I don’t know if you remember? – one morning, we were around the table and may be the writing assignment was something like: “Do or write something that you’ve never done or written before”. At one point somebody got up, climbed up on the table, walked across the table and went back to sit down and said, “I’ve never done that!”
Gilles L. :
We seemed to understand then that he was a patient, but sometimes we were wrong. There were a couple of people, I was sure that they had been there for at least three or four years and in fact, they were just people who lived in town and who came to take part in the workshops.
Guigou C. :
Yes, I remember we did a little game with inflated balloons. It was just to have sound, very easily to make, with balloons. The assignment was: use the balloon. One of them makes it squeak, and then you have a guy next to him – and I was sure it was a guy from the outside – he starts… he was laughing his head off. And then you think: “Phew!” [laughter] Maybe he’s been living here for a few years. No, but there are some incredible things! Really amazing!
Jean-Charles F. :
So, there was a visual artist, what was her role?
Guigou C. :
Our friend Suzanne Stern, she has a somewhat marginal practice as a visual artist, if I dare say so. Initially she was a painter, and then she got fed up with it, after dealing for quite a long time with all the galleries network, etc., etc. So, she did her own stuff, at home, often in her house in the middle of the countryside. In the workshops at 3bisf, how can I explain, she used all the materials that were produced, the little pieces of paper with bits of text that she scattered all over the place… And then she used the material that was produced to make something out of it. She also had an overhead projector, she projected things on the wall, she hung things everywhere. The idea was to invade the space and transform it a little bit in her own way, and then sometimes she would also come and disturb us. [laughter] It’s good to do that.
Jean-Charles F. :
Disturb in doing what?
Guigou C. :
It could have been, I don’t know, maybe we were playing, doing a musical improvisation and then she would come and stick a little piece of stuff on your instrument with a little phrase written on it with I don’t know what, and then it would have meant: just cope with that! A lot of things like that.
Jean-Charles F. :
And the philosopher, then?
Guigou C. :
The idea for me was that he could really produce thought, because I think we’re in a period where there’s a serious lack of thinking. And so, he really used the time of the residency to write a text around Hannah Arendt, about culture, about what it meant to be engaged. Because these are the three main themes of this project: resistance, art and time. Vast subjects. So, he took off on that. I really wanted that, that at some point in the thing we were going to do, there would be a little bit of suspended time where you stop and that’s what we did. He was at his table and he read his text. It took I don’t know how long, ten minutes, but I liked it. It was also about breaking the format of a concert. That’s what it was all about. Afterwards, it’s like all the projects that we can carry out, it could have gone much further than it did, if we could have kept it going longer and dug even deeper.
Gilles L. :
Because during the whole first part anyway the audience was on stage, especially in Aix and Rillieux.
Guigou C. :
And also, in Frouard, near Nancy. People were very friendly. We held writing workshops with retired women, little ladies who were knitting. They gave us knitwear as gifts afterwards, etc. They wrote great things that we used a lot. And each time it got more fulfilling. In the end we had a lot of material. That allowed us to draw from it and not necessarily do the same thing every time.
Jean-Charles F. :
And some of the participants did music too?
Guigou C. :
Yes, it happened. It was really interesting, but a lot, a lot of work actually. When we were at the Montperrin Psychiatric Hospital in Aix, we divided the time into two parts: in the morning, it was the open workshop with people, but this workshop always gave rise to a time of public encounter. So, well, in the public, there could be one person, like two, ten or twenty, but it didn’t matter, something was presented. In those days, people, patients or others could intervene as they wished. So, it happened that some people tried Karine Hahn’s harp, for example, an instrument that was a rather fascinating instrument for non-musicians. And in the afternoon we concentrated more on the overall artistic construction of the project. This meant that a lot had to be done. The days were really busy.
Jean-Charles F. :
And precisely, in the team of musicians, then, there was Karine Hahn, who is a rather classical harpist.
Guigou C. :
But she has experimented a lot of things.
Jean-Charles F. :
Was she a disturbing element?
Guigou C. :
Oh, I think she was as disturbed as everybody else, she disturbed us too, but I think she enjoyed it, I think, well, she should talk about it herself. We amplified her harp, she did a lot of experiments.
Art Resists Time – Writing Worskhops
Jean-Charles F. :
And so, everything was improvised?
Guigou C. :
Not everything. I had also written pieces, even some of them fully written. For example, I gave Nicolas [Sidoroff] the score of a piece based on time. I had composed it using the times of sunrise and sunset, since it was a question of time. I had fun finding some kind of rule to transpose the sunrise and sunset times into musical notes – everybody had fun doing that kind of thing, right? [laughs] It was quite fun, but very hard for people to play [laughs]: “Oh, that’s great! However, wait a minute…”. We still managed to play that piece pretty well.
Gilles L. :
Where is the CD?
Nicolas S. :
To go into the details of the length of your immersion: was everyone on the team there for the three weeks?
Guigou C. :
Yes, because the hospital Montperrin in Aix is a bit in the middle of nowhere. There were a lot of people who came from far away and Mathias [the philosopher Matthias Youchencko] also had to continue his studies, so he came when he could. So, there you have it, we stayed almost all the time.
Nicolas S. :
Then, in fact, the project continued even when one person was not there?
Guigou S. :
Yes, we all had enough work in progress to do each time, so that even if one of us was leaving for two days, it didn’t stop the project from moving forward. On the contrary, sometimes it was nice to have someone who could get out of the way a little so that you could step back to get some perspective on things.
Nicolas S. :
At the hospital, I understood that there were several workshops happening at the same time?
Guigou C. :
Yes, because there were so many of us, we divided the group into several working sub-groups – which we did the very first times, before going to the hospital, when we had worked on the time, we divided into small groups, among ourselves. But at the hospital, I don’t remember if we did that, but I think it’s quite possible that we worked in at least two groups at the same time. One group that was more focused on writing, and one more focused on improvisation. In any case, we experimented a little everything we could experiment, that was the idea.
Nicolas S. :
And if we take a look at the schedule for the three weeks, what happens on the first morning? Do you arrive the day before?
Guigou C. :
In fact, when Sylvie Gerbault had suggested that we stay there for three weeks, I panicked a little: “Oh! hell! what are we going to do?” In the first place we will have different people that we don’t know, we’ve never worked with (in quotes) “crazy” people. And so, I had gone scouting with Agnès, one morning at the psychiatric hospital of Montfavet near Avignon, where a writing workshop existed for a very long time. They’ve done a lot of publications. It’s called “Papiers de soi”, it’s a play on words [papiers de soi = papers of self; papiers de soie = silk papers]. And so, we went there a little bit as outsiders, but we also took part in the writing games they were doing that day. We immediately understood that it could be an easy meeting point to put in place, without needing to have a musical instrumental technique, for example. It allowed people to meet and talk to each other and so on. And so the writing seemed to me to be a possible source of inspiration for the whole team. [Gilles puts the CD of Art résiste au temps (Art resists time) in the background.] Which seems good to me, beyond our own concerns, I find that the writing and the reflection were very much in tune. In fact, in tune with what we wanted to do, from philosophical thought to completely wacky remarks on any subject. [To Gilles:] “Did you find the CD?”
Nicolas S. :
When you arrive, who came the first time?
Guigou C. :
I don’t remember who came, but anyway we also spent some time with the 3bisf team. I had met them before, the team of animators, nurses, etc. We had the advantage that this is a place dedicated to this type of experimentation in a certain way. In fact to say, they are used to welcoming “artists” (in quotes) in residency, and they are used to mixing people, artists, hospital staff and the outside public.
Gilles L. :
This is quite specific to them. It’s one of the few hospitals to have that.
Guigou C. :
They took us to different pavilions to meet different types of patients more or less afflicted, the goal being to explain to them why we were there and what we wanted to do. And then afterwards, everyone decided whether or not to take part in the project. So, some people came, others didn’t. The problem with this type of project is that you can’t count on the regular attendance of participants. When people are on medication, it’s difficult. You have some who come regularly, you have some who are there all the time, and then there are those who come once and you don’t see them anymore – and it’s a real shame they didn’t come back, because it was good – but well, that’s how it is. [music continues]
Nicolas S. :
And the idea of operating with a workshop in the morning, with a public presentation, therefore a public workshop and made public from the public… [laughter] That was in the initial contract specification?
Guigou C. :
We thought about it with the team and decided that it could be good. It was also a means of making room for the patients in a way. We knew that we also wanted on our side to come up with a product of our own, even if I don’t like that word very much, a finished product that was only in the process of being developed. The idea was that it would be in constant evolution, but we had nevertheless planned a real public presentation at the end. The idea was that we could take the necessary time to mature and that we too could be shaken up, depending on what the external participants could do. Some things we kept, others we didn’t, because we said to ourselves “Well, she did something incredible for us, it would be good to integrate her at that time”. Then, of course, we could have gone much further in this process, but the notion of perturbation and perturbators and being perturbed ourselves by outsiders, was the central idea.
Jean-Charles F. :
The music on the CD we’re listening to is going to make the transcription of the recording of the encounter even more difficult! [laughter]
Gilles L. :
Yes, it might be the case.
Nicolas S. :
There is a chance.
Jean-Charles F. :
But you want to copy France-Culture where every time someone speaks, there has to be music behind it. [laughter]
Gilles L. :
No, no, it was for me to remember.
Guigou C. :
Yes, I listen to the CD again with pleasure.
Jean-Charles F. :
We will include excerpts of the music, yes, for sure. Forgive me. [Some extracts of L’art résiste au temps can be found in the Grand Collage: follow the paths and click on the river.]
Nicolas S. :
What happened between the morning and afternoon? The afternoon was more between you but with open doors, were there still people watching?
Guigou C. :
Yes, always, that’s the rule of how the place works, is that you are never locked up, people can see you, come in at any time. Which is pretty cool. It puts you in a different mindset towards your work, that’s what I liked.
Art Resists Time – Exchanging Roles
Nicolas S. :
Several times I’ve heard you talk about exchanges of role among team members. Can we go into a little more detail about what this meant for you?
Gilles L. :
I remember, at the very beginning, at Le Thor, we tried to interchange the roles of philosopher, stage directress, visual artist, and between musicians. We were a bit lost at first, but we made videos of that; we said to ourselves: “Well, we’re searching, but we are not obliged to find!”. We were wandering a bit sometimes.
Guigou C. :
Well, we did some experiments, like any group, but then, they were not necessarily converted tries… That is to say, well, it’s always funny and interesting to say: “I’m not a stage director or an actor, but I’m going to take over the text, and you’re a musician and you’re going to take on another role”. After a while, you reach the limits of this exercise: the one who’s better at making music is the musician, and so on. But we searched a lot at the beginning, and I think that this time, the time before going to the psychiatric hospital, all the time we spent together at Le Thor, for example, was also very important. Well, there were no mentally ill people, but it was very interesting because we hadn’t set any specific goals, except to try all the things that came through our minds. It was a time that contributed a lot to the shape the project took afterwards. I am comfortable with my contradictions, but I had prepared a certain number of pieces that were relatively all written, because I like to write pieces. And in retrospect, if I had to do it again now, maybe I wouldn’t do it like that. Maybe I would write a lot less, because it was a bit paradoxical with the idea that everything should be made on the spot. At the same time, well, I wanted to come up with a pretty coherent result with a certain thread, and in particular to be able to use certain texts that I had specifically identified in Naomi Klein’s book, these were things that I really wanted people to say. So, one of the contradictions for me in the project was surely the fact of having extremely determined things in writing that I had brought with me, when the idea was really to do something very, very, collective, with nothing predetermined at the beginning. Well, that was true up to a certain point, but not really completely. It’s the exercise of democracy: you’re free, but not completely.
Jean-Charles F. :
It was also your texts?
Guigou C. :
These were texts found mostly in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, but not exclusively.
Jean-Charles F. :
And what were these texts about?
Guigou C. :
On a kind of assessment of what is happening in the world. And this Shock Doctrine that she described very well. There was this idea of resistance in every sense of the word.
Gilles L. :
There is a film about Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, which we watched together with the whole team.
Guigou C. :
It’s a documentary, which is obviously less interesting than the book, because in this case when you try to illustrate a 500-page book in an hour and a half, there are a lot of things that you just skip over. There are some gems in the documentary, like little interviews with Margaret Thatcher, things like that, which are still pretty mind-boggling, but otherwise the book is a hundred times more interesting.
Gilles L. :
When she thanks Pinochet for example.
Guigou C. :
Voilà! There is also the passage where Milton Friedman receives his Nobel Prize in Economics, in Oslo. There are a few troublemakers who have managed to get into the hall and try to prevent the ceremony from taking place, and then, well, they are quickly evacuated, and Friedman has a little smile on his face and says to the journalists: “Considering what I wrote, it could have been much worse than that!” [laughter] It’s absolutely cynical [laughs]. [silence]
Jean-Charles F. :
Good! [silence, noise of pouring some liquid]
Guigou C. :
Hello? Any more questions?
Jean-Charles F. :
[to Gilles:] Do you have anything to add?
Gilles L. :
As Guigou said, the choice was made to exchange the roles over one or two sessions. I think it was also a way to meet and then react if the situation allowed it. In fact, it was more a time of meeting each other where we tried things. In the end, it created bonds and trust between us. Since we let go and allowed ourselves to go anywhere with others without being afraid of being in uncomfortable situations. So, there’s something that reminds me of what we do with PaaLabRes in the improvisation workshops,[3] with the dance-music meetings at the Ramdam,[4] or what we did this weekend with CEPI.[5]
Guigou C. :
We had also experimented a lot when I had worked with Maguy Marin and Volapük. We had done all kinds of improvisations. It was a great period when we had three months of rehearsals to put on a show. That helps!
Nicolas S. :
But what you describe is essential, even if it is difficult to tell or describe. On the one hand, we have the impression that this exchange of roles allows above all a meeting between you to make the work go well, in fact it is just experimentation without any particular objective. But on the other hand, and this is what is very interesting for me, it allows a certain number of things: a way of “mixing up our incompetencies” or “mixing up our discomforts”, etc., a form of equality in discomfort. All this allows other things to emerge, very different from those produced, for example, by a musician who a priori knows how to play his/her instrument. And so, it allows forms of encounters, which no longer exist afterwards, when each person actually takes up the role to which she/he is most accustomed. In any case, it’s very interesting to try to explain it, to describe it and to go into a little more detail. Because when you have a creative time of three weeks, it’s easier. Conversely, when you have less time, how is it possible that this kind of thing happens anyway? And as you said, looking without having to find seems to me an absolute necessity.
A Place of Resistance: Time
Guigou C. :
I think that was one of the reasons that made the link between time and resistance. In this regard, I remember something that struck me: a discussion about art that I had with a friend of mine, an Italian painter, Enrico Lombardi, from the Area Sismica gang in Meldola. He said to me: “In any case, the only place of resistance that is still possible today is time.” Time to take the time, time to do things, and I thought it was super accurate. That is to say, we know very well that there aren’t many possible spaces left where you can still resist something, except for refusing the time constraints that are imposed on you all the time. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do, but… And then, I experienced it in a much more extreme and important way than in Art résiste au temps, when I had set up the Figures project. We worked for six months – in fact, it lasted much longer than six months – with a group of unemployed people who were on the RMI [Revenu Minimum d’Insertion – Minimum income of insertion], and whom we had recruited just to make music for six months, a bit like what Fred Frith did with Helter Skelter in Marseille. When you work every day for six months with fifteen guys who have nothing else to do but experiment things, eight hours a day, it becomes an amazing mad thing. And, in this case, we did take some time, it was great. Then, the small events that we produced for a public around this project were almost like epiphenomena of an incredible laboratory work. I think that it made an impression on a lot of people – well, on those who took part in it in any case – it was an incredible amount of time. It’s an insane luxury to be able to do that. I really enjoyed it.
Jean-Charles F. :
This is one of the great frustrations at the moment: the inability to have long enough time slots. I went to work at the university (in 1972) for these reasons. I was able to run projects there for over fifteen years.[6]
Guigou C. :
Not bad!
Jean-Charles F. :
After that, the Cefedem was a project that I ran for over seventeen years, and without this length of time we could not have done anything. But in the artistic field, there was a whole period between 70-80 where there were a lot more possibilities than today to take the time to do things. So, well, it’s a double-edged sword, because in the time taken, there can be a very marked elitist aspect, the exclusivity of small groups. But at the same time, to break down the boundaries, there is no other way out.
Gilles L. :
But, I think it also depends on the artistic domains, because in music, the fact is that we are used to working in an incredible urgency, to prepare concerts or things like that. I was talking to Camel Zekri who works with circus artists, I think it’s two or three times over periods of two months of residency, before the creation. So it’s already over a year and a half and he would say to me: “But that’s crazy! We really have time, even time to waste. We have the time to do nothing, to go and listen to others, and at the same time to compose with an incredible calmness.” He tells me “That changes everything.” We are so little used to that. And then, with companies like Maguy Marin’s, it’s often the same thing: three months minimum for preparing a creation.
Guigou C. :
Well, that’s what Bastien and Thomas told me, did you know?
Gilles L. :
Yes.
Guigou C. :
I know two young super musicians, Bastien Pelenc and Thomas Barrière. They work with the circus company Trottola (https://cirque-trottola.org). Each show takes a year to set up. I saw their last show, which is superb by the way, I recommend it to you. So, they melted down a church bell just for the show: incredible! There’s a whole set of machinery under the stage and at one point they hoist this bell from under the stage with a winch system to the top of the tent. It is magnificent. Well, the musicians spent the first three or four months of the creation without making a single musical note. They were only working on building the device, and obviously it changes everything at the end, you don’t have the same result.
Gilles L. :
So how do you do that with a project that is only musical?
Jean-Charles F. :
In the 1960s, I was a percussionist in contemporary music ensembles, it was four rehearsals for a concert of creations. So, it was awful! It was frustrating. But we also had a group at the American Center [Le Centre de Musique] where we did as many rehearsals as we could possibly do, but we were not paid.
Guigou C. :
Ah! Obviously..
Gilles L. :
But yes, without being paid, you can create a lot of things. There when they work for a year, I don’t know if they get paid all the time, but, in any case, they can make a living from it. In music we are used to rehearsing for free.
Jean-Charles F. :
And there was this fundamental difference, it was the situation at the university, paid time to experiment.
Gilles L. :
But I don’t think the criterion is necessarily whether you get paid or not. I don’t have any specific examples that come to mind, but the number of rock bands I’ve seen, especially a long time ago: you get a slap in the face, because you can see that they’ve been working like crazy for all their Saturday-Sunday for years, and when they get on stage, they play! It’s not an approximate thing because you’ve only done two rehearsals. There’s a great side to this way of doing things. A way that we, we lost a little bit, because we’re also too much in survival stories, well I speak for myself. So we have to get paid, we don’t have time to lose, and that’s it. [silence]
Jean-Charles F. :
Yes, absolutely. There is a lack of funding for this kind of research situation. Whereas it seems to me that in the 70s and 80s, there was much more support from public institutions in the cultural sector.
Guigou C. :
For me, I remember that in recent times, what has really brought the question of time to light is the movement of the intermittents du spectacle in 2003. I remember some fascinating debates on this issue, that is, the question of the whole invisible part of the work that is produced and not taken into account, you see? It’s really the hidden part of the iceberg, as they say. The spectators just see the emerged part of the work, and all our dear politicians don’t even want to hear about it. It has to be profitable, it has to be fast, and then they don’t really care anyway.
Part II : Helping Migrants
The Association Rosmerta
Jean-Charles F. :
Perhaps we can move on to the more recent projects you have carried out, for example your work with migrants?
Guigou C. :
Yeah, that’s not a musical project, but it’s exciting. Actually, it’s simple: it’s the militant part of my activity. In Avignon, we’ve been wondering for a while about the welcoming of migrants in the city. It was becoming more and more of a problem. I remember, it’s quite crazy, I was a bit of an activist at RESF [Réseau éducation sans frontières – Education without borders network] when this network was created at least fifteen or twenty years ago. If I exaggerate the line a bit, at the time, it was just a matter of fighting to find two migrants who arrived in Avignon, because there were very few of them! Now, all this has been totally reversed, for a few years now we can no longer cope. And we can no longer endure the inertia, the incompetence, the bad will of the institutions. This inertia is also the result of a political project, we should not have any delusions. That is to say, if there are so many problems, it is because there is a fierce will not to welcome these people. So, to cut a long story short: for more than a year and a half, a small group of people had been negotiating with the city, the diocese and the prefecture. We were trying to tell them, “Wait, there’s a real problem, every week, there are fifteen, twenty, thirty people sleeping in the street, who are not being accommodated, etc.” The answers varied according to the interlocutors: for example, the city of Avignon said “Ah, yes, we know!” This is not a really rich municipality, but socialist, so not left-wing, it’s socialism à la Valls! In short, they would tell us: “Yes, yes, we know there are problems, but you have to understand that we don’t have any buildings, etc.” At the prefecture, they completely denied it: “There is no problem, besides, people just have to call 115 and they will be immediately be housed.” At the diocese, they told us the same thing. The archbishop of Avignon has inclination to the extreme right. So, after a year of discussions – we have kept traces of all this mess – we said to ourselves last fall: “We are not going to spend another winter like that, now we have to take action.” We identified a number of possible buildings, including this former school belonging to the diocese. And we heard that they wanted to sell the building in question for 800,000€. Well, there you have it, very good, wonderful: an old school, with everything you need. It was in activity until 2016 and was therefore in relatively good condition, the closure was due to management problems. And then at the end of December 2018, we occupied the place and squatted it.
We got help from people who know how to do this kind of things, it’s a bit complicated at the beginning when you’ve never done it before. You have to consider the risks. So, we created an association called “Rosmerta”, we’re a collegiate of persons who signed its statutes. That means that seven of us are legally responsible in case of problems. We are currently housing 50 people. We have determined the criteria for taking in people, to protect ourselves from a certain number of people that we would not have been able to take care of. To be clear: all adult male drug addicts, sometimes violent. We clearly determined that we would only take in isolated minors or families. A lot of minors or just over 18 have been taken in, but as in many cases they don’t have papers, it is impossible to know if they are 16 or 18 years old. And we take in families, there are currently six of them. Most of them are Africans, but not only: there is a family of Georgians whose husband was a political opponent who was killed; so his wife and kids left from there and arrived in France, I don’t know how. Personally, I take care of a family of Indians from Punjab, whose wife was in a forced marriage; they arrived in Paris at the end of 2017 in a refugee center and then they were told, “Well no, you can’t stay, there is no more room. Well, let’s have a look on the map… Ah! Avignon, there seems to be some room!” They went there and stayed in a center for a few months. And they were kicked out just as we opened the place, so they ended up there. These are absolutely incredible life stories in most cases. So now we have 1200 adherents. Since December 2018, we have been holding a public event in the site every month, and each time we ask the people who come to join the association for a symbolic €1. And we have about 300 relatively active volunteers. We have the support of part of the population. And then there is a lawsuit in progress…
Jean-Charles F. :
Concerning the place or helping migrants?
Guigou C. :
So, we have two things in parallel: we have a lawsuit following the archbishop’s complaint of squatting; and parallel to that, the departmental services accuse us of having welcomed the public in a place without having passed the security commission first – which is tantamount to saying that we are squatting. Of course, it’s normal, it’s a squat! We were auditioned by the cops. The good side is that we are still in Avignon, so we still took advantage of the media coverage in July for the Festival. We had the visit of Emmanuelle Béart in July 2018, who used her networks, which made it possible to avoid the immediate expulsion, and gave us a little time. Parallel to all this, three working groups were formed, following the General Assemblies. One group is more concerned with resistance whatever the situation in the place; one group is looking into the idea of pushing the city to pre-empt the place; and another is working on the purchase of the building (800.000€), well, with all kinds of questions about this last issue. As far as I’m concerned, I’m completely against the idea of buying it for many reasons. First of all, because I don’t want to give 800.000€ to an extreme right archbishop, but on top of that this 800.000€ could be used for something else. Moreover, if you buy and you become an owner… Initially, the idea for us was to point out the negligence of the institutions and not to replace them, but on the contrary to tell them: “We did it because you don’t do it, but now it’s up to you to assume your political responsibilities.” To become professionals in the welcoming of migrants, I think, is not the goal and that it is not to do anyone a service to supplant the city or the prefecture. So, there is a lot of internal debate on these issues. But I would still say that overall, it’s a hell of a story. It’s pretty awesome. We encountered almost no problems, except sometimes a little tension on the management. What really struck me recently is to see how young people are gradually becoming autonomous: when we opened, obviously all the people who arrived there were completely lost, and little by little – some of them have been living there since December, not all of them because there are also many people who come and go – there are some who take things into their own hands: housekeeping, all sorts of things, formalities, as accompanying their friends to the ASE (Aide Sociale à l’Enfance – Child welfare) or to the department. Two were invited by Olivier Py, the director of the Avignon Festival, to take part in readings around the Odyssey, etc. Well, we did a lot of stuff. So, it’s a great project, extremely strong on one side, and extremely fragile on the other. So that’s it.
Jean-Charles F. :
Are there any artistic aspects to this project?
Guigou C. :
Yes, workshops have been set up by a whole bunch of people who are close to Rosemerta: puppet workshop, Beatbox workshop. Lots of stuff happens in the place. I admit that, personally, I haven’t done anything on this level, because I don’t want to mix things up too much, I find it a bit complicated. So, when I go there, I’m on duty or I take care of my Indian family or other things, but I haven’t done any musical things.
Nicolas S. :
What are the public events every month that you were talking about?
Guigou C. :
Well, mostly concerts with people who are close to us, let’s say, and also not too far away geographically, because that’s the easiest thing to do.
Nicolas S. :
And the workshops are aimed internally, within the setting of the people who are in the place or are they also open to the outside world?
Guigou C. :
There is a strong desire to organize meetings with the outside world, yes, and then a willingness to provide tools for people to be integrated. So, we also offer French courses, artistic or cultural workshops and many other things. It’s clearly a desire on our part that this dimension be present.
Relationships between arts and politics
Guigou C. :
There’s one aspect I haven’t talked about that is quite interesting from a political point of view. This place was used in the summer by a company of comedians called Del Arte, who made their nest egg by having a large percentage of amateurs perform with them – they did what all the other theatre rental places practice in Avignon. The first meeting was rather interesting and then we had no more news, except for extremely nasty letters against us that they sent to the Prefect. Maybe they were expecting that we would be evicted sooner? And as there are a number of people from the live performing arts with us, we have been accused by some people from the Festival of just wanting to get our hands on this place for purely artistic and cultural reasons, and not to take care of the migrants! We were caught between the sympathies of the diocese for the extreme right and the merchants of the temple of the theater, it was a bit complicated! And it still is.
Nicolas S. :
In our reflections on the history of walls, there is also this idea of a kind of necessity to go against the wind or against a certain number of things: the wall as a form of shelter and also as a form of intolerable barrier. In what you were saying, there seems to be a will not to mix artistic and political activity. And I tend to consider this as a kind of wall that you put up… How would you characterize it? How do you live with it more or less comfortably?
Guigou C. :
It’s just that, if you want, when you play in a marching band or with a street theater group, it’s extremely simple to come and play in a place where there are zero comforts. And it’s not that simple in most of my musical projects. So the only thing I could imagine doing, which I haven’t done yet but could do, is my little solo Musiques Minuscules[7] [tiny music]. For that I don’t need anything in broad terms, so I could do it, but otherwise it’s not always the right kind of form. And on top of that, I think that culturally, it’s not always easy. The audience is very varied, and of course I could come with my stuff completely out of whack, but it can make things untidy among left-wing Catholics! If I make a small parallel: I’m quite involved in the anti-nuclear collective in Avignon, and I’ve been trying to hook them up a number of times so that we could play with the Mutants Maha,[8] a project on Fukushima. Two or three years ago we did a piece of our repertoire for two people in a lighter version, and we took the little text that went with it. I told them that it would be nice to do the whole concert with the trio and everything that comes with it: “Well, okay! Do you agree to do this on April 26, the day of the commemoration of Chernobyl on Piazza Pio?” I said, “No, it’s just not possible.” I mean, first of all, not to mention whether or not we’re going to have electricity, you still need a little time to set up; you need a little bit of attention so that what you’re trying to get through will bear some fruit, and not to have the passers-by with shopping bags coming in the middle… Eventually, there’s a moment when it just doesn’t work, it’s not suitable for the mess to do it in that place under those conditions. It’s a real question what you’re asking, especially in relation to the place of the event. Then, it also happens that most of my projects are done with people who are not based in Avignon, so that means bringing people from far away to do a concert where they’re not paid, and so on. No, it’s often just a little bit complicated on so many levels, so I don’t necessarily want to get into that.
Jean-Charles F. :
In the case of slavery, slavers made sure that people who lived in the same place had to come from very different places so that they did not have common cultural references. This seemed more conducive to being able to impose artistic forms, like the quadrille in Martinique, for example. It’s very interesting to see how the slaves managed to recreate artistic forms that both respected the imposed rules and at the same time recreated or created their own culture. In what you’re describing, do we find this same phenomenon, that is, people coming from very different places, with the great danger of imposing ready-made artistic forms on them and the need to give them time to develop things of their own?
Guigou C. :
I’m not sure I’m super clear on this issue, which I think is very important. But what is also very clear is that it is quite impressive to see what some of these young people have experienced. I’ve spoken with some of them, I know a little bit about their backgrounds. They’ve been through some crazy stuff. But they’re still eighteen-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds living in 2019 with a cell phone, and they’re listening to rap like everyone else, or reggae or whatever. There’s this double thing going on all the time that’s very disturbing. There is a complexity that exists in everything anyway, especially in their situation, which goes beyond the caricatures people are drawing on their own. For example, one Sunday we distributed leaflets at all the exits from Mass to try to explain our point of view in relation to that of the Archbishop. In the church next to where we are, some people told us: “But anyway they are not real migrants because they are too well dressed.” They would have to be in rags to be considered real migrants. And that’s interesting to see too. I think you have to do things in a way… I don’t know if “subtle” is the right word, or… is not too much [laughs], come on, let’s go: subtle. For example, I brought the Indian family to the “100 guitares sur un bateau ivre”[9] [Guitars on a Drunk Boat] concert in June 2018. They thought it was great, and then I invited them to what I did in Avignon. There I find that when you get to build a relationship, you can start sharing stuff. When it’s people you don’t know at all, whose history you know nothing about, imposing something on them, I find it a bit difficult.
Nicolas S. :
Through the notion of encounter and of the long time – already mentioned – you describe a way of overcoming the kind of separation, between professional artistic activity in the sense of a show presented on stage and the almost daily militant acts. For my part, I find myself in forms of edges (or fringes) where things get mixed up when one suggests trying to do things together. I find it hard to detach myself from being in, doing or thinking about music making: I love playing music and experimenting with it, it’s something that keeps me alive. So even when I was teaching math or French – I did a lot of it, for example, in an educational outreach program – I couldn’t ignore all the musical resonances that came up, whether I was using it or not. With kids coming from all over the place, I often had proposals to do things that were eminently artistic, for me, but above all not recognized by the authorities. These proposals didn’t even exist on their radar. I’m trying to describe this kind of somewhat vague thing in which, in fact, you act as a musician, but not necessarily by making music as it is recognized and labeled by the Institutional forms with a capital I. I’m trying to describe this kind of thing. You talked about puppet or Beatbox workshops, how do you work with them?
Guigou C. :
I didn’t take care of them, I can’t tell you. But again, the basic thing here is that even in the two hundred or three hundred volunteers who work there, you have extremely different people, which is one of the aspects of complexity.
Nicolas S. :
And a richness…
Guigou C. :
It goes from the most radical, politically speaking, to the softest. So sometimes it’s complicated: at the moment we’re in a period of great tension, I think, between those who think, of which I am one, that there is a deficit of democracy, that we should involve the inhabitants – that is, the people we shelter – much more in the decisions than they actually are, and not consider them as children to whom we give charity, basically. And then those who are more in a process – how can I put it? – catho, machin, you know? [laughter] I can’t find the word.
Nicolas S. :
Cathos-paternalists ?
Guigou C. :
Yes, so there are these things… Well, it turns out that many people in the Rosmerta association immediately seized the cultural aspect. Personally, I feel more useful to do other things, such as papers so that the kids can go to school, than to come and do my je-ne-sais-quoi show, which is not necessarily going to interest anyone, at least not right away in these conditions. I could be wrong. Maybe it would have been useful, I don’t know. But in any case, I didn’t feel doing it at the time.
Nicolas S. :
I think it’s time.
Gilles L. :
It’s time! !
Guigou C. :
Monseigneur !
Jean-Charles F. :
Well, thank you.
Guigou C. :
Well, you are welcome. Thank you for stopping by.
1. AJMi Jazz Club (Association pour le Jazz et la Musique improvisée) is in Avignon a place devoted to jazz and improvisation in existence since 1978. AJMi
2. Here is the list of participants to the project « L’art résiste au temps » :
Guigou Chenevier / drums, machines, compositions, Laurent Frick / voicet, keyboards and sampler, Karine Hahn / harp, Serge Innocent / drums, percussions, trumpet, Gilles Laval / guitare, Franck Testut / bass, Agnès Régolo /theatrical disturbances, Suzanne Stern / visual arts disturbances, Matthias Youchencko / philosophical disturbances, Emmanuel Gilot / sound.
With the participation of : Fred Giulinai / keyboards, sampler, Fabrice Caravaca, Philippe Corcuff / written, spoken, declaimed, gesticulated texts.
3. In 2012-13 took place monthly encounters of members of the PaaLabRes Collective to experiment with improvisation protocoles (Jean-Charles François, Laurent Grappe, Karine Hahn, Gilles Laval, Pascal Pariaud, Gérald Venturi). Many members of the collective lead improvisation workshops on a regular basis (for example, this is the case with Gilles Laval and Pascal Pariaud at the National Music School in Villeurbanne).
4. During 2016-17, at the Ramdam – a Center for artistic practices near Lyon – took place experimental encounters between dancers from the Compagnie Maguy Marin and musicians from the PaaLabRes collective, with the objective to develop common practices (dance/music) in the improvisation domain. Ramdam
5. Founded in 2014 by Enrico Fagnoni and Barre Phillips, CEPI (Centre Européen Pour l’Improvisation) organizes nomadic encounters in the improvisation domain. In August 2018, these took place in Valcivières in Haute-Loire (Auvergne). Jean-Charles François and Gilles Laval participated in these encounters. CEPI
6. Between 1975 and 1990, the experimentalgroup KIVA, founded by the trombonist John Silber and the percussionist Jean-Charles François was in residence at the University of California San Diego.
8.Les Mutants Maha, Guigou Chenevier : drums, compositions / Takumi Fukushima : violin, voice / Lionel Malric : keyboards.
« Zizeeria Maha » is the scientific name of a butterfly. A very special butterfly, since it is found especially in the Fukushima region of Japan. Since the terrible nuclear accident of March 11, 2011, this butterfly mutated. Many malformations on its legs, wings and antennae have been detected by Japanese scientists. These malformations make this butterfly look more like an unsightly snail than the elegant insect it was originally. From this horrible news item read in the press, Guigou Chenevier thought about the idea of mutant compositions. Minimalist musical compositions at first almost drifting little by little towards strange and monstrous forms. Embarking Takumi Fukushima in this adventure was the obvious choice. Adding the two hands of Lionel Malric, an expert in keyboard tinkering, quickly sank in. Les Mutants Maha is a project of musical creation, at the heart of which writing and architecture dominate. No (or few) improvisations in this post-atomic universe where cows, useless producers of a noxious milk, are slaughtered in the open field, but rather this search for mutations and ionizations. A small tribute to Edgar Varèse can never do any harm…
9. Reference to the performance of « 100 Guitares Sur Un Bateau Ivre » by Gilles Laval. See Bateau Ivre.
Une approche qui déconstruit la pratique d’interprétation de la pièce de John Cage, Four⁶,
en se focalisant sur l’indécidable, l’interpénétration virale et la fusion des domaines.
…abris, garde, le mur du jardin, barrage, fortification…
…mur porteur, revêtement décoratif, Four Walls…
…déjanté, hors les murs…
…mûre, mûr…
… travail de sape…
… avec/sans fondations…
Les murs, choses bien compliquées, et si l’on poursuit cette ligne de pensée, qui sait où cela va nous mener ? Peut-être va-t-on tomber à la renverse, cul par dessus tête … ou bien s’écraser contre le mur ?
Avant de faire sur le champ tomber les murs, il convient plutôt de considérer ce que cela pourrait signifier d’être entre les murs ou à l’intérieur des murs, de les questionner, de se confronter aux fragments de ciment et de sable du mortier qui les composent, de faire un peu trembler leurs fondations, sans doute. Mais comment procéder pour lancer ce processus ? La déconstruction semble être un bon point de départ ; en examinant les jointures, les chaînages d’angle… en pénétrant le tissu même de la question, en initiant le processus d’interrogation, d’affaiblissement, du ‘peut-être’. Donc essayons d’ouvrir nos yeux et nos oreilles au déroulement de la déconstruction à l’intérieur de chaque domaine et à travers les domaines, en s’inspirant de l’œuvre de Derrida et de Bernard Tschumi (je pourrais aussi bien faire appel à Simon Hantaï et Valerio Adami), en se concentrant sur deux terrains d’intérêts : le pharmakon (et l’indétermination) et le virus.
Il y a un certain nombre de contradictions ou d’oppositions qui apparaissent dans la liste d’ouverture (abris/prison, mur de liaison/mur de séparation, mur porteur/revêtement décoratif). Les murs peuvent apparemment occuper simultanément deux ou plus de fonctions antagonistes, et dans ce cas, ils peuvent être considérés comme des pharmakoi. Considérons alors une œuvre de ‘musique’ dans laquelle ces murs, ces pharmakoi, ces possibilités de saper les fondations et de dissoudre les frontières, ces contradictions apparentes et ces bordures floues, ces exemples d’aporia (ou de perplexité), font partie intégrante de son interprétation, et dans laquelle l’instrumentiste créateur (le ‘joker’) peut s’adonner à déconstruire ou à pousser les ‘règles’ (les murs) du ‘jeu’ au point de rupture.
John Cage – Four⁶
Four⁶ (1992) pour quatre performers, plutôt que ‘musiciens’ ou ‘interprètes’ spécifiquement, ou plutôt, disons qu’il s’agit de quatre ‘performers’ sur la couverture de la partition et de quatre ‘interprètes’ sur les parties instrumentales (s’agit-il de jouer à des jeux, à un théâtre, s’agit-il de jouer à jouer ?), est une des œuvres de John Cage basées sur des tranches de temps (entre crochets) [time-bracket], ainsi nommées parce que lors d’une interprétation chaque participant doit :
Jouer par rapport au temps flexible entre crochets. Lorsque les crochets sont connectées par une ligne diagonale elles [les tranches de temps] sont relativement proches les unes des autres. (Cage 1992, p2)
Ainsi, la partie de l’interprète numéro un commence comme suit :
0’00” ↔ 1’15” 0’55” ↔ 2’05”
2
Cage donne aussi deux sortes d’information sur les types de son qu’il envisage, je dois dire ici qu’il n’y a pas de ‘contenu’ donné pour les représentation des tranches temps entre crochets, c’est ce que l’interprète doit inventer, car l’œuvre est écrite
pour n’importe quelle manière de produire des sons (vocalisation, chant, jeu sur un instrument ou des instruments, sons électroniques, etc.) … (Cage 1992, p1)
Et Cage nous dit en plus de
Choisir douze sons différents ayant des caractéristiques fixes (amplitude, structure des partiels, etc.) (Cage 1992, p2)
Ainsi, à l’intérieur des murs constitués par des ‘règles’, à l’intérieur des limites de la pièce, nous sommes en présence de contradictions ou d’opportunités créatives inscrites d’entrée de jeu au sein l’œuvre. Cage nous propose de manière moins évidente un pharmakon dans le fait que les sons sont apparemment à la fois fixés et libres. On peut penser que l’intention de Cage était que chacun des douze sons devait avoir des caractéristiques fixes, mais alors à quoi rime le début de la phrase dans ce cas-là ? Cela est redondant et ouvre la voie à la possibilité de l’aporia. Pourquoi ne pas dire seulement ‘produire douze sons avec des caractéristiques fixes (amplitude etc.)’ ? Cela paraîtrait tout à fait compréhensible pour tout musicien.
Il laisse aussi aux interprètes la complète détermination concernant leur provenance, c’est-à-dire à quel domaine ils/elles appartiennent (si elles/ils en ont un)[1], et tout aussi bien une certaine flexibilité dans la détermination de la ‘structure’ générale, dans la mesure où les tranches de temps (les murs de soutènement) permettent une variabilité dans le début et la fin du temps de chaque ‘événement’. Ces tranches de temps sont évidemment des coquilles vides – qui attendent d’être remplies, elles attendent d’être habitées par des évènements (ce que Derrida appelle « l’émergence d’une multiplicité disparate » [Tschumi 1996, p. 257]. En d’autres termes, leur ‘programmation’ n’est pas fixée. La relation ou hiérarchie entre le compositeur et l’interprète est complètement déstabilisée (un autre pharmakon), pour toute personne qui en fait ici ‘compose’ la réalisation de la performance : le compositeur, les interprète(s), les deux à la fois, ni l’un ni l’autre ? Chaque interprète est indépendant, dans un sens muré par rapport autres… peut-être ?
Le pharmakon peut-il être utile pour dépasser les limites, en changeant (en défiant) la structure du mur et de ses fonctions ? Si une opposition binaire (inclus/exclus, libre/bloqué, etc.) peut être bousculée, par exemple en ayant ses fonctions remises en cause, alors les murs deviennent des seuils, des conduits, des zones de connexion, et non plus des barrières. Le pharmakon est un des concepts majeurs qu’on peut trouver dans le Phaedrus de Platon, ce qui nous amène à considérer les explications de Derrida sur le pharmakon, tels qu’on peut les trouver dans « La pharmacie de Platon » :
Ce pharmakon, ce « médicament », ce philtre, qui acte à la fois comme remède et poison… (Derrida 2004, p75)
et
Ce charme, cette vertu envoûtante, ce pouvoir de fascination, peuvent être – alternativement ou simultanément – bénéfiques ou maléfiques. (Derrida 2004, p75)
et
Si le pharmakon est « ambivalent », c’est parce qu’il constitue un moyen dans lequel les oppositions s’opposent, le mouvement et le jeu qui les lient entre elles s’inversent ou font qu’un côté traverse l’autre (âme/corps, bon/mal, intérieur/extérieur, mémoire/oubli, parole/écrit, etc.). (Derrida 2004, p130)
Ainsi, le pharmakon est un espace dans lequel les oppositions peuvent être démantelées ; un passage ou mouvement de convergence et d’interpénétration, le soit/ou, le ni/ni, le ‘et’. Le démantèlement des oppositions n’est pas seulement confiné à la parole et l’écrit (bien que Derrida s’y réfère ici) : il relève tout aussi bien d’autres champs, comme par exemple l’architecture, le champ par excellence des murs, le bastion de la solidité et des structures apparentes, et en plus un espace de collaboration pour Derrida avec Peter Eisenmann et Bernard Tschumi pendant les années 1980[2]. Derrida avait émis des doutes initialement sur ce type de collaboration, en disant à Tschumi « Mais comment un architecte peut-il être intéressé à la déconstruction ? Après tout, la déconstruction est antiforme, anti-hiérarchie, anti-structure, l’opposé de tout sur quoi l’architecture repose. » « « Précisément pour cette raison”, j’ai répondu. » (Tschumi 1996, p. 250). Tschumi a aussi fait remarquer que les stratégies de la déconstruction dans l’architecture s’étaient développées tout au long des années 1970 et 80, lorsque les architectes on commencé à
… se confronter aux oppositions binaires de l’architecture traditionnelle : à savoir, la forme versus la fonction, ou l’abstraction versus la figuration. Cependant, ils ont aussi voulu défier les hiérarchies qui se cachent sous ces dualités, comme par exemple « la forme suit la fonction » et « l’ornement est subordonné à la structure ». (Tschumi 1996, p251)
Et la pratique pédagogique ‘radicale’ de Tschumi à l’Architectural Association et à Princeton au milieu des années 1970 a exploité la fusion des domaines (par exemple l’architecture et la littérature) d’entrée de jeu :
Je donnais à mes étudiants des textes de Kafka, Calvino, Hegel, Poe, Joyce et d’autres auteurs comme programmes pour des projets d’architecture. La grille de points du Garden de Joyce (1977)… réalisée avec mes étudiants du AA à l’époque comme un projet architectural basé sur Finnegan’s Wake a été consciemment réutilisée comme stratégie d’organisation pour le Parc de la Villette cinq ans plus tard. (Tschumi, 1997, p125)
Ainsi le projet du Parc de la Villette de Tschumi (1982-98), la restructuration et le développement d’un grand espace urbain (les anciens abattoirs au nord-est de Paris), a exploité la programmation transversale, une réévaluation de l’‘événement’, le jeu de la ‘trace’, et des stratégies variées de la déconstruction dans la composition des lignes, des points, et des surfaces. C’est probablement le caractère iconique des folies rouges vives de Tschumi qui a rendu ce projet si célèbre (structures à multiprogrammation ou sans programmation à l’intérieur du parc) : une des folies pouvait être soit un restaurant ou une salle de concert, ni un restaurant, ni une salle de concert, ou bien, un restaurant et une salle de concert. Ainsi les folies sont des pharmakoi, elles restent dans l’indécision ; elles rejettent les ‘murs’, le confinement, la ‘programmation’ prédéterminée. Elles sont des coquilles vides – des tranches de temps entre crochets.
Comment fonctionne cette pluralité des jeux de l’indécidable dans Four⁶ ? Qu’est ce qui est indécidable dans la pièce et quelles implications cela peut-il générer pour renverser les murs dans la pédagogie et la praxis ? Pour continuer cette exploration, je vais me tourner maintenant vers une réalisation récente de Four⁶ dont j’ai été l’instigatrice.
Une liste partielle des éléments d’indécision dans Four⁶ peut se présenter comme suit :
Forces – qui peut jouer dans cette pièce ?
Contenu – que peut-on inclure dans les tranches de temps entre crochets ?
Hiérarchie – qui est le compositeur ?
Partition – qui en a la maîtrise ?
Four⁶ – ART : Abu Dhabi, avril 2018
La « version art » – c’est le nom que j’ai donné à une performance réalisée en 2018 à Abu Dhabi centrée sur les arts plastiques (un peu comme Step : A Composition for Painting) – a été conçue comme un moyen de se détacher de la musique, tout en reconnaissant encore ses traces à l’intérieur de l’œuvre (figure 1). Chaque exécutant a été appelé à élaborer douze actions ayant des relations avec les arts. L’exécution des tranches de temps entre crochets pouvaient être soit prévue à l’avance et notée sur la partition, ou bien choisie et réalisée en temps réel au moment de l’exécution ‘live’. J’ai demandé aux exécutants d’interpréter le terme d’‘art’ à leur façon, ce qui a donné le résultat d’une mixture de performance art, d’art sonore, d’art plastique, de théâtre, de poésie performée, etc. ; et je leur ai aussi demandé d’élaborer leurs ‘évènements’ individuellement, de façon à ce que l’exécution publique se passe sans répétitions et que toutes les réactions restent spontanées, potentiellement surprenantes pour les exécutants regroupés sur scène et pour le public – (un clin d’œil à la définition de Cage de ‘l’action expérimentale’ en tant que ‘quelque chose dont le résultat n’est pas prévu’) (Cage 1961, p. 39)
Une pièce de toile de 2×1 mètres [6×3 pieds] a été utilisée, montée sur un cadre de bois et surélevée sur des blocs (pour avoir un espace permettant de couper la toile) et posée sur une grande table. Des objets ont été mis à la disposition des exécutants pour être utilisés si nécessaire : des tubes de peinture (acrylique) en blanc, noir et bleu, des tubes de peinture des mêmes couleurs, de la craie, du charbon, des couteaux, un verre d’eau, des bouteilles en verre, des crayons, des tournevis, des pinceaux (de différentes tailles), des taille-crayons (en acier), des chiffons (pour effacer ou peindre, etc.). Une des participantes avait aussi apporté un sabre laser pour faire de la peinture avec. Les interprètes étaient libres d’utiliser n’importe quelle partie de leur corps pendant la réalisation de l’œuvre. Le choix qui a été fait par les exécutants 2 et 3 étaient :
1. Tacet, 2. Déchirer la partition et l’ajouter à la toile du canevas, 3. Secouer les pinceaux pour projeter de la peinture, 4. Eclabousser avec les pinceaux, 5. Faire gicler le tube de peinture, 6. Ecrire avec une craie, 7. Eclabousser avec de l’eau, 8 Percussion sur une bouteille et un pot de confiture, 9. Gommer, 10. Aiguiser un couteau, 11. Bousculer un autre exécutant, 12. Lacérer la toile du canevas.
Figure 1: portion de la toile du canevas immédiatement après l’exécution publique (avril 2018),
montrant la peinture fraîche et déchiquetée pendant l’exécution (au centre).
Pharmakoi
Le premier pharmakon concerne les forces en présence : qui a le droit de jouer cette œuvre ? Est-ce que la pièce est entourée de murs qui empêchent la participation et l’accès à son exécution ? Non, les frontières de l’exécution sont très ouvertes. En d’autres termes, n’importe qui peut jouer Four⁶, on n’a pas besoin d’une formation classique ou formelle dans n’importe quelle tradition. Four⁶ c’est de la musique et ce n’est pas de la musique ; cette pièce peut accueillir des exécutants de n’importe quel domaine artistique, en fait pouvant provenir de n’importe où, qui ont toute liberté de rester dans leur propre domaine (même si ces domaines vont s’entremêler) : artistes, musiciens, scientifiques, acteurs, historiens, philosophes, vétérinaires… la liste est infinie. Le mur de la discipline – le pour ‘qui ?’ est conçue la pièce – est instable et affaibli ; la pièce peut être jouée dans une mixture hybride de domaines, une infection virale à double sens (ou à quadruple sens) à tout moment au cours de l’exécution. On est en présence ici d’implications sociales et politiques ; il n’y a pas de barrières (murs) d’accès, pas de hiérarchie, et pas de fondement pédagogique requis.
C’est-à-dire : le programme n’a pas besoin d’être de la ‘musique’. La version que j’ai esquissée ci-dessus est basée sur un focus approximatif, mais ne requiert pas la présence d’un ‘thème’, il s’agit d’un réceptacle pour permettre à des évènements de se dérouler. Les exécutants appartenaient à différentes disciplines : musique, arts plastiques, psychologie et arabe classique. C’est ainsi que l’œuvre peut être considérée comme de la musique et en même temps n’est pas de la musique. Les tranches de temps entre crochets sont comme les folies du programme de Tschumi, décrites par Derrida comme « un espace d’écriture, un mode d’espacement qui donne lieu à un événement » (Tschumi, 2014, p. 115). Les folies ont un nombre de traits communs avec les tranches de temps entre crochets : une tranche de temps est un mode d’espacement dans le temps, et elle peut être remplie par n’importe quelle chose, par n’importe quel ‘événement’ qui crée du son, tiré de la collection de douze déterminée par chaque exécutant séparément, exactement comme une folie a un ‘programme’ indéterminé et ouvert à partir d’une collection d’évènements possibles[3]. La combinaison des évènements des tranches de temps (programmes) permet aux domaines individuels de fusionner, d’infecter, de réécrire, d’hybrider, comme dans l’exemple de notre folie, qui combine un espace de performance et d’un restaurant. Dans la version ‘art’, les domaines de la musique, du théâtre et de la philosophie occupent tous le même espace de temps.
Les évènements continuent aussi à vivre après coup, comme des cendres si vous voulez. Au fur et à mesure que la toile du canevas se sèche, la version ‘art’ continue de se modifier longtemps après que l’exécution de la pièce est terminée ; elle n’est donc pas confinée dans ces 30 minutes de ‘murs’ temporels. Elle continue d’évoluer à travers des changements de couleur et de texture (figure 2). Le processus de séchage à la fois révèle et dissimule l’écriture (sur la toile et en plus sur les lambeaux de partitions) et les modes d’application et d’addition (les morceaux de charbon dans la figure ci-dessous). Au fur et à mesure que la peinture se fissure et tombe, encore d’autres traces de la propre histoire de l’exécution apparaissent, alors que les parties individuelles peuvent devenir des objets d’art à part entière (figure 3) : une archéologie de la performance. Les cendres se laissent emporter par le flux.
Figure 2: portion de la toile un mois après la performance (mai 2018),
montrant les modifications apportées à la couleur et la texture,
des parties en lambeaux (en bas à gauche)
et des morceaux de charbon (au centre à droite).
Figure 3: : la partie de l’exécutant 4,
avec les additions de peinture faites
pendant les 30 minutes de la ‘performance’.
… commencer et finir à des points particuLiers de tEmps…[4]
Cage explique la structure variable très succinctement, dans la forme d’un mésostiche :
These time-brackets / are Used / in paRts / parts for which thEre is no score no fixed relationship / … / music the parts of which can moVe with respect to / eAch / otheR / It is not entirely / structurAl / But it is at the same time not / entireLy / frEe (Cage, 1993, p35-6)[5].
Il faut noter que Cage dit ‘les parties peuvent évoluer en rapport les unes avec les autres’ (les italiques sont miennes), et non pas qu’elles doivent ou sont dans l’obligation de le faire. Que pourrait vouloir dire ici le mot respect ? Littéralement qu’elles respectent l’espace des uns et des autres, les limites (murs) entre les participants, qu’elles ne doivent pas interférer, réécrire par dessus, gommer, infecter ou de franchir les programmes respectifs ; ou bien au contraire, qu’elles peuvent se frayer un chemin parce que les autres autorisent le libre passage, se permettant d’être infectées, gommées, greffées, hybridées ou réécrites par dessus, qu’elles permettent l’interpénétration parce que il n’y a pas de ‘partition, ni de relation fixe’, pas de mainmise de qui que ce soit ?[6] De nouveau, le mur est affaibli, sa fonction est hétérogène, ouverte au changement, mais sa trace, son fantôme restent présents.
S’il n’y a pas de partition, seulement des parties instrumentales, dans une danse du temps qui résulte d’une collection variable de quarante-huit coups, alors qui est le compositeur ? Qui a le contrôle sur la totalité ? Qui détient la clef qui permet le passage à travers les murs (s’ils existent) de la création de cette œuvre, de sa direction ? Il s’agit d’un autre pharmakon ; John Cage est l’auteur reconnu (son nom apparaît sur la couverture), mais en est-il vraiment l’auteur, l’auteur du contenu ? Nous n’avons que des parties, pas de partition, et nos parties n’ont pas de substance ; jusqu’à preuve du contraire elles sont informelles, sauf en termes de longueurs variables et de leur ordre, par exemple l’exécutant 1 commence avec l’événement sonore 2. C’est comme une pièce de théâtre sans livret unifié, avec des caractères qui ne connaissent pas leurs relations avec les autres caractères (en référence à l’idée de Cage que le terme « expérimental » implique des actions dont on ne peut prévoir l’issue), et avec des dialogues qui sont à la fois secrets et désordonnés. Dans Four⁶ on est en présence d’‘indications scéniques’ (instructions), et on a une ‘chorégraphie’ à temporalité variable qui nous indique approximativement quand nous devons placer les choses que nous avons trouvées en tant qu’exécutants. Mais attention, attendez un peu, n’est-ce pas à nous qu’appartiennent les contenus des tranches de temps ? Après tout, nous les avons trouvés, nous les avons élaborés et nous avons décidé précisément quand et où on allait les placer, nous avons décidé que l’événement sonore 12 allait être de tousser ou de lacérer la toile et nous avons décidé quand nous allions tousser ou lacérer la toile à l’intérieur de la tranche de temps – alors ne serait-il pas plus approprié de dire que John Cage est un des auteurs de Four⁶ plutôt que John Cage est l’auteur de Four⁶?
Ainsi la hiérarchie reste indécise, il n’y a pas la présence d’un seul contrôle de décision dans l’exécution, il n’y a pas de partition ‘maître’. Les exécutants ont une marge considérable de manœuvre à condition qu’ils respectent les ‘règles’ (car Cage n’a jamais été pour la liberté pour tous sans limites). Même dans ce cas, c’est une façon de composer très généreuse et égalitaire, en se souvenant que les règles peuvent toujours être détournées (tout en restant dans leurs limites), être interprétées de nouvelles manières[7]. Tous ces ‘murs’ hiérarchiques qui peuvent bloquer le passage (ou au moins de le rendre sens obligatoire) de la communication entre les interprètes et le compositeur restent ouverts ; les murs sont perméables (y a-t-il même encore des murs ?), donc ni l’interface compositeur/interprète, ni l’interface interprète/interprète ne sont fixes. Dans la version ‘art’, l’interface public/interprète est aussi plus ouverte – la peinture peut éclabousser n’importe où. L’exécutant est un compositeur/exécutant qui interprète de manière hybride au sein d’une composition, en composant dans le cadre d’une interprétation ; le compositeur (Cage) s’est ouvert à la communication virale de l’interprète ; les interprètes se sont ouverts aux formes indépendantes/non indépendantes de la praxis greffée ; ils sont tous en interaction tout en gardant leur individualité, il peuvent tous réécrire par dessus le travail des autres (produisant des sons et/ou des peintures), il peuvent tous greffer le geste et l’expression, s’ouvrant au virus, menant des conversations dans beaucoup de ‘langages’ traversant les domaines, se permettant d’être pénétrés à un quasi niveau cellulaire.
Comme le dit Derrida :
… tout ce que j’ai fait, pour le résumer de manière très réductrice, c’est de dominer par la pensée du virus ce qu’on peut appeler une parasitologie, une virologie, le virus étant beaucoup de choses… Le virus fait partie d’un parasite qui détruit, qui introduit le désordre dans la communication. Même du point de vue biologique, c’est ce qui se passe avec le virus ; il déraille un mécanisme de communication type, son codage et son décodage (Brunette and Wills, 1994, p12)
Le virus déstabilise les choses, les fait trembler, les secoue, désorganise la communication (les messages sont perdus ou envoyés aux mauvais destinataires, ils peuvent donner lieu à une multiplicité d’interprétations), ouvre un espace pour les interventions imprévisibles, introduit l’aporia. Dans Four⁶ on peut voir l’évidence de ce virus à travers sa trace, la façon dont il laisse des marques (des empreintes) dans la poussière, dans les cendres (charbon), dans la peinture, dans le son. Ainsi on a une fusion virale des actions dans la performance (altérant les actions des autres qui laissent une marque), de ‘personnes’ (interprètes/public/compositeur), et de domaines (art/musique/théâtre, etc.) : dans la version ‘art’ de Four⁶, l’art, la musique et la danse sont tous présents, comme l’est le théâtre[8].
Le virus infecte les moments lorsque la surface de la toile du canevas est créée, lorsque les couleurs se mêlent à de nouvelles couleurs, quand elles s’ajoutent par dessus, se greffent, sont effacées ; il laisse une marque par l’accumulation et la révélation de couches, à travers l’écriture et la réécriture par dessus, à travers la déconstruction quand le couteau entaille la surface, exposant l’autre côté de la toile du canevas qui devient à son tour une nouvelle surface, à travers l’altération intentionnelle d’un ‘événement’ d’un autre exécutant par des interventions physiques – bousculer, gommer, couper et couvrir. Ainsi, le parasite de Derrida détruit (ou devrions-nous dire ‘fixe’ ?) ; mais il ne détruit que la possibilité du moment, un clin d’œil de l’‘histoire’ de cette toile peinte au moment de la performance. Il force à changer, à muter, et qui peut savoir où cela va nous mener ?
Il y a aussi d’autres traces dans les cendres ; ‘il y a là cendre’ (Derrida 2014, p. 3), des traces intertextuelles, des traces hypertextuelles, d’autres œuvres (dans des sens multiples : la propre histoire de la toile du canevas utilisée, son histoire éventuelle telle qu’elle aurait pu être, l’histoire qui est encore à venir et les histoires du domaine auquel maintenant elle s’associe). La collection de 48 évènements sonores constitue un filet de pêche rempli de traces ; celles des muralistes gréco-romains, celles des peintures religieuses baroque (dont l’élaboration collective posera sans cesse des questions pour savoir qui en est l’auteur[9]), celles des Fontana, Kiefer et Hantaï, des situationnistes, du Vienna Action Art, du Fluxus des débuts, d’Heiner Goebbels, de Robert Wilson, de Heiner Müller, les traces du théâtre post-dramatique, du danse-théâtre de Lindsay Kemp, et évidemment d’autres œuvres de Cage. Ces traces font références à d’autres traces, dans des chaînes de résonance infinie. Les traces de nos propres expériences seront aussi toujours présentes dans toute entreprise – comment pourraient-elles ne pas y être ? Les murs sont omniprésents, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire, faites en ce que vous voudrez, mais ils ne sont pas simplement des barrières. Peut-être qu’il vaut mieux reconnaître leur hétérogénéité fonctionnelle plutôt que d’essayer de les faire tomber ; de s’efforcer d’aller vers des versions plus faibles (des filets de pêche moins remplis), pour permettre leur transfiguration, pour embrasser leur indécidabilité, car alors les murs deviennent à peine perceptibles, presque transparents, des mur[mur]es[10].
2. Cage a trouvé de nouvelles façons d’apprécier la ville et de contempler ses constructions, ses traces, ses interactions, après avoir marché à travers Seattle en compagnie du peintre Mark Tobey. (Cage & Charles, 1981, p.158)
3. Dans un sens elles peuvent être considérées comme des hétérotopies.
4. Cage, 1993, p34 : « …begin and end at particuLar/points in timE… »
5. « Ces tranches de temps entre crochets / sont Utilisées / dans les paRties / les parties qui ne se réfèrEnt à aucune partition, ni de relation fixe / … / la musique dont les parties peuvent éVoluer par rapport à / les unes / les AutRes / Ce n’est pas complètement / structurAl / Mais en même temps ce n’est pas / compLètement / librE ».
6. Derrida utilise le terme de ‘Animadversions’ dans les textes tels que Glas, Cinders et « Tympan » (Marges de la philosophie) et c’est une autre façon de contempler la présentation tout en les commentant (de manière parfois explicite, parfois implicite, parfois silencieuse), simultanément, des actions séquentielles à travers la même surface, par exemple la toile du canevas.
7. Comme l’a dit Cage : « Nous ne sommes pas libres. Nous vivons dans une société cloisonnée. Nous devons prendre en compte ces cloisons. Mais pourquoi faut-il les répéter ? » (Cage & Charles, 1981, p. 90)
8. En ce qui concerne le théâtre, l’un de mes co-interprètes a presque coupé la toile du canevas en deux à un moment de la performance, et j’en ai été assez choquée – en me demandant s’il restait assez de surface pour pouvoir travailler dessus et si la chose allait complètement se détériorer – mais d’autre part, j’ai pensé que cela était très drôle et j’ai dû réprimer mon envie de rire pendant le reste de la performance, et cela fait entrer une autre trace dans le jeu, celle de la tradition du théâtre qui rend les co-interprètes comme des ‘cadavres’.
9. Dés l’année 1934, Cage a rencontré le travail collectif en groupe, ce qu’il a appelé l’attraction de l’art médiéval et gothique. (Kostelanetz, 1993, p.16)
10. Note du traducteur. Dans la version originale en anglais, Clare Lesser utilise « swallow » (avaler) qui contient « wall » (mur): « for then walls can be barely perceptible, almost transparent, they can be s[wall]owed ».
Références
Brunette, P., & Wills, D., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cage, J., Silence, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
Cage, J., Four⁶, New York, NY: Edition Peters, 1992.
Cage, J., Counterpoint (1934) in Kostelanetz, R. (ed), Writings about John Cage, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Cage, J., Composition in Retrospect, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993.
Cage, J., & Charles, D., For the Birds, New York, NY: Marion Boyars, 1981. Edition en français: Pour les Oiseaux, Paris: Belfond, 1976.
Derrida, J., ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, London: Continuum, 2004. Edition en français : La dissémination, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972.
Derrida, J., Cinders, trans N. Lukacher, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Derrida, J., ‘Points de Folie – Maintenant l’architecture’ in Tschumi, B., Tschumi Park De La Villette, London: Artifice Books, 2014.
Kostelanetz, R. (ed), Writings about John Cage, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Tschumi, B. Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Tschumi, B., ‘Introduction’, in J. Kipnis and T. Leeser (eds.), Chora L Works, New York: Monacelli Press, 1997.
Tschumi, B., Tschumi Park De La Villette, London: Artifice Books, 2014.
…enclosure, partition, screen, divider, party wall, panel, bulkhead…
…shelter, guard, garden wall, dam, fortification…
…load-bearing wall, decorative skin, Four Walls…
…off the wall…
…mûre, mûr…
…undermining…
…with/out foundations…
Complicated things walls, and if we step into this stream of thought, who knows where we’ll end up? Maybe we’ll be washed off our feet and land on our heads…or crash into a wall?
Rather than immediately breaking down any walls, consider what it could mean, instead, to be between or within walls, to question them, to pick at the mortar, to make their foundations tremble a little, perhaps. But how to go about this process? Deconstruction seems a good place to start; examining the joins, quoins…penetrating the fabric, initiating the process of interrogation, of weakening, of the ‘perhaps’. So, let’s attempt to open our eyes and ears to the unfolding of deconstruction within and across domains, drawn from the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Tschumi (I could equally bring in Simon Hantaï and Valerio Adami), focusing on two main areas of concern: the pharmakon (and undecidability) and the virus.
There are a number of apparent contradictions or oppositions in the opening list (shelter/prison, connecting wall/dividing wall, load-bearing wall/decorative skin). Walls can seemingly occupy two or more apparently opposing states simultaneously, and as such, could be seen as pharmakoi. So, let’s consider a work of ‘music’ where these walls, these pharmakoi, these possibilities for foundation shaking and boundary dissolving, these apparent contradictions and blurred edges, these instances of aporia (or perplexity), are integral to the performance, and where the performer/creator (the ‘wild card’) can strive to deconstruct, or push, the ‘rules’ (walls) of the ‘game’ to breaking point.
John Cage – Four⁶
Four⁶ (1992) for four performers, rather than ‘musicians’ or ‘players’ specifically, or rather, it is for four ‘performers’ on the front cover and four ‘players’ on the parts (does this play at games, at the theatre, does it play with play?) is one of John Cage’s time-bracket works, so named because during performance each player should
Play within the flexible time brackets given. When the time brackets are connected by a diagonal line they are relatively close together. (Cage 1992, p2)
Thus, player one opens with:
0’00” ↔ 1’15” 0’55” ↔ 2’05”
2
Cage also gives us two pieces of information about the types of sound he has in mind, I should mention here that there is no given ‘filling’ for the time brackets, that is for the performers to provide, because the work is
for any way of producing sounds (vocalization, singing, playing an instrument or instruments, electronics, etc.) … (Cage 1992, p1)
And Cage further tells us to
Choose twelve different sounds with fixed characteristics (amplitude, overtone structure, etc.) (Cage 1992, p2)
So, within the walls of the ‘rules’, within the boundaries of the work, we have creative contradictions or opportunities in the work from the outset. Cage offers us a less obvious pharmakon in that the sounds are apparently both fixed and free. We assume that Cage intended that each of the twelve sounds should have fixed characteristics, but why the first sentence in that case? It is redundant, it opens up the possibility of aporia. Why not just say ‘produce twelve sounds with fixed characteristics (amplitude etc.)’? That would make perfect sense to a musician.
He also gives the performers complete agency regarding where, i.e. from what domain (if any), they come[1], as well as a certain amount of flexibility within the overall ‘structure’, in-as-much as the time brackets (containing walls) allow for variability in start and stop times for each ‘event’. Those time brackets are empty shells of course – waiting to be filled, waiting to be inhabited by events (what Derrida calls ‘the emergence of a disparate multiplicity’ [Tschumi 1996, p257]). In other words, their ‘programme’ is unfixed. The composer/performer relationship or hierarchy is completely unsettled (another pharmakon), for who is actually ‘composing’ the performance here: composer, performer(s), both, neither? Oh yes, and there’s no ‘master’ score either, only parts. Each player is independent, in a sense walled off from the others…perhaps?
Could the pharmakon be useful in overcoming boundaries, changing (challenging) the wall’s structure and function? If a binary opposition (included/excluded, free/trapped, etc.) can be overturned, i.e. have its function cast into doubt, then walls can become thresholds, conduits, zones of connectivity, not barriers. The pharmakon is one of the key concepts to be found in Plato’s Phaedrus, so let’s consider Derrida’s explication of the pharmakon, as found in Dissemination, “Plato’s Pharmacy”.
This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philtre, which acts as both remedy and poison… (Derrida 2004, p75)
and
This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be – alternately or simultaneously – beneficent or maleficent. (Derrida 2004, p75)
and
If the pharmakon is “ambivalent”, it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.). (Derrida 2004, p130)
So, the pharmakon is a space where oppositions can be overturned; a passage or movement of conjoining and interpenetration, the either/or, neither/nor, the ‘and’. The overturning of oppositions is not solely confined to speech and writing (although that is what Derrida is referring to here): it is equally relevant to other fields, e.g. architecture, the field par excellence of walls, the bastion of apparent solidity and structure, and yet also an important area of collaboration for Derrida with Peter Eisenmann and Bernard Tschumi during the 1980s[2]. Derrida was somewhat dubious about such a collaboration initially, telling Tschumi “But how could an architect be interested in deconstruction? After all, deconstruction is anti-form, anti-hierarchy, anti-structure, the opposite of all that architecture stands for.” ‘“Precisely for this reason,” I replied.’ (Tschumi 1996, p250). Tschumi also remarks that deconstructive strategies in architecture were developing momentum throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, when architects began to
…confront the binary oppositions of traditional architecture: namely, form versus function, or abstraction versus figuration. However, they also wanted to challenge the implied hierarchies hidden in these dualities, such as “form follows function” and “ornament is subservient to structure”. (Tschumi 1996, p251)
And Tschumi’s ‘radical’ pedagogical practice at the Architectural Association and at Princeton in the mid-1970s exploited the merging of domains (e.g. architecture and literature) from the outset:
I would give my students texts by Kafka, Calvino, Hegel, Poe, Joyce and other authors as programs for architectural projects. The point grid of Joyce’s Garden (1977)…done with my AA students at the time as an architectural project based on Finnegan’s Wake, was consciously re-used as the organising strategy for the Parc de la Villette five years later. (Tschumi, 1997, p125)
So Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette project (1982-98), the redesign and development of a large urban space (the former abattoir complex in north-eastern Paris), exploited cross-programming, a reappraisal of the ‘event’, the play of the ‘trace’, and various other deconstructive strategies in its composition of lines, points and surfaces. It is probably best known for Tschumi’s iconic bright red folies (multi-programme or programme-less structures within the park): one of the folies could be either a restaurant or a music venue, neither a restaurant nor a music venue, or, a restaurant and a music venue. So, the folies are pharmakoi, they are undecidable; they reject the ‘walls’, the containment, of pre-determined ‘programme’. They are empty shells – time brackets.
How does this plurality of undecidables play out in Four⁶? What is undecidable in the work, and what implications might this have for overturning walls in pedagogy and praxis? To explore further, let’s turn to a recent performance of Four⁶ which I instigated.
A partial list of the undecidables in Four⁶ could include:
Forces – who can perform the work?
Content – what will inhabit the time brackets?
Hierarchy – who is the composer?
Score – who is in control?
Four⁶ – ART: Abu Dhabi, April, 2018
The art version was conceived as a way of stepping away from music, while still acknowledging its trace within the work (figure 1). Each performer was asked to individually design twelve art related actions. Time bracket execution could be either pre-planned and notated on the score, or chosen/performed ‘live’. I asked the performers to interpret ‘art’ in any way they liked, which resulted in a mixture of performance art, sound art, fine art, theatre, performance-poetry, etc; and I also asked the performers to devise their ‘events’ in isolation, so that the live performance would be unrehearsed and all reactions would be spontaneous, potentially surprising to executors, co-performers, and the audience ̶ (a nod towards Cage’s definition of the ‘experimental action’ as ‘one the outcome of which is not foreseen’, Cage, 1961, p39).
A 6X3 foot canvas sheet was used, mounted on a wooden frame and supported on blocks (to allow space for cutting) on a large table. The following items were available to all the performers to use if they so chose: tubes of paint (acrylic) in white, black and blue, tubs of paint in the same colours, chalk, charcoal, knives, glasses of water, glass bottles, pencils, screw drivers, paint brushes (varied sizes), knife sharpeners (steel), rags (for erasing/painting, etc.,). One performer also brought a light -sabre to paint with. Performers were free to use any part of the body during the work’s realisation. The choices made by players 2 and 3 were:
1. Tacet, 2. Shred score & add to canvas, 3. Rattle brushes, 4. Splatter with brush, 5. Paint tube thrown squirt, 6. Charcoal writing, 7. Water splatter, 8. Bottle & jar percussion, 9. Erase, 10. Knife sharpen, 11. Shove other performers, 12. Slash canvas.
Figure 1: portion of the canvas immediately after the performance (April 2018),
showing wet paint and shredded performance part (centre).
Pharmakoi
The first pharmakon concerns the forces involved: who can perform this work? Does the work have walls that prevent participation and access? No, the boundaries of performance are very open. In other words, anyone can perform Four⁶; no classical or formal music training from any tradition is required. Four⁶ is music and is not music; it will accommodate performers from any artistic domain, from anywhere in fact, who are perfectly at liberty to stay within their own domain (although these domains will bleed into one another): artists, musicians, scientists, actors, historians, philosophers, vets…the list goes on. The wall regarding discipline ̶ the ‘who?’ is the work for ̶ is unstable and weakened; the performance can be a hybrid, a mixture of domains, a two (or four) way viral infection in every moment of performance. There are social and political implications here; there are no barriers (walls) to access, no hierarchy, and no pedagogical foregrounding is required.
If the players can come from anywhere, any domain, then the ‘content’ or ‘programme’ of the time brackets will be equally open. That is: the programme does not have to be ‘music’. The version I have outlined above has a rough focus, but no ‘theme’ is actually necessary, it is a container for events to take place in. The performers were drawn from the fields of music, visual arts, psychology, and classical Arabic, so we have a work that is music and is not music. The time brackets are like Tschumi’s programme-less folies, described by Derrida as ‘a writing of space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event’ (Tschumi, 2014, p115). The folies have a number of shared traits with the time brackets: a time bracket is a mode of spacing in time, and it can be filled with anything, with any ‘event’ that creates sound, drawn from each player’s lexicon of twelve, just like a folie has an undefined and open ‘programme’ with a variable lexicon of possible events[3]. The combination of the time-bracket events (programmes) allows the individual domains to merge, to infect, to overwrite, to hybridise, like our earlier example of a folie, which interbred a performance space and restaurant. In the ‘art’ version, the domains of music, art, theatre and philosophy all occupy the same time space.
Events have afterlives too, cinders, if you like. As the canvas dries out, the art version continues to change long after the performance is finished; it is not confined within those 30-minute temporal ‘walls’. It continues to evolve through changes of colour and texture (figure 2). The drying process both reveals and conceals writing (on the canvas and the additional shreds of the parts) and the modes of application and addition (charcoal pieces below). As the paint cracks and falls off, yet more traces of the performance’s own history appear, while the pages of the individual parts can become art objects in their own right (figure 3): an archaeology of performance. The cinders are carried along in the flux.
Figure 2: portion of the canvas one month after the performance (May 2018),
showing changes of colour and texture,
small shreds of parts (bottom left) and charcoal (centre right).
Figure 3: player 4, part with paint additions
acquired during the 30 minutes of ‘performance’.
Cage explains variable structure very succinctly, in the form of a mesostic:
These time-brackets / are Used / in paRts / parts for which thEre is no score no fixed relationship / … / music the parts of which can moVe with respect to / eAch / otheR / It is not entirely / structurAl / But it is at the same time not / entireLy / frEe (Cage, 1993, p35-6).
Note that Cage says the ‘parts of which can move with respect to each other’ (my italic), not that they must or should. And what could respect mean here? Literally that they respect each other’s space, each other’s boundaries (walls), that they do not interfere, overwrite, erase, infect or cross-programme; or the opposite, that they can move because the others allow free passage, permit themselves to be infected, erased, grafted, hybridised or overwritten, that they allow interpenetration because there is ‘no score, no fixed relationship’, no controlling hand?[5] Again, the wall is weakened, it’s function is heterogeneous, open to change, but its trace, its ghost, is still there.
If there is no score, only parts in a timed dance drawn from a variable lexicon of forty-eight moves, then who is the composer? Who has overall control? Who holds the key that allows passage through the walls (if they exist) of this work’s creation, of its direction? It is another pharmakon; John Cage is the acknowledged author (his name is on the front cover), but is he really the author, the author of the content? We only have parts, no score, and our parts have no substance; as yet they are unformed, except in terms of variable lengths and their order, e.g. player 1 starts with sound event 2. It’s like a drama without a unified script, with characters who do not know their relationships to the other characters (back to actions with unforeseen outcomes), and dialogue that is both secret and disordered. In Four⁶ we have ‘stage directions’ (instructions), and we have a variable temporal ‘choreography’ which tells us approximately when to put the things that we, as performers, have found. But wait a minute, aren’t the fillings of the time brackets ours? We found them, after all, we devised the sounds, and we decided precisely when and where we were going to put them, we decided that sound event 12 was going to be coughing or canvas slashing and we decided when we were going to cough or slash the canvas within that time bracket – so perhaps it would be better to say that John Cage is an author of Four⁶ rather than John Cage is the author of Four⁶?
So, the hierarchy is undecided, there is no single controlling presence in the performance, there is no ‘master’score. The performers have a very considerable amount of agency as long as they play by the ‘rules’ (for Cage was never one for a free-for-all). Even so, it’s a very generous and egalitarian way of composing, always remembering that rules can be outmanoeuvred (whilst still remaining within them), interpreted in new ways[6]. All those hierarchical ‘walls’ that can block (or at least make it one way only) the passage of communication between performer and composer are open; the walls are porous (are they even walls anymore?), so neither the composer/performer interface nor the performer/performer interface is fixed. In the art version, the audience/performer interface is also more open – paint can fly everywhere. The performer is a composer/performer hybrid interpreting within a composition, composing within an interpretation; the composer (Cage) has opened himself up to the viral communication of the performer; the performers have opened themselves up to independent/not independent forms of grafted praxis; all interact while retaining their individuality, all can overwrite each other’s work (in sound and/or paint), all can graft gesture and expression, opening themselves to the virus, conversing in many ‘languages’ across domains, allowing themselves to be penetrated at a quasi-cellular level.
As Derrida says
…all I have done, to summarize it very reductively, is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things…The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding (Brunette and Wills, 1994, p12)
The virus unsettles things, makes them tremble, and shakes them up, disorders communication (messages get lost or ‘wrongly’ delivered, they are open to a multiplicity of interpretations), makes a space for unpredictable interventions, introduces aporia. In Four⁶ we can see the evidence of this virus through its trace, the way it leaves marks (imprints) behind in the dust, in the ashes (charcoal), in the paint, in the sound. So we have a viral melding of actions in performance (altering another’s actions which leaves a mark), of ‘persons’ (performers/audience/composer), and domains (art/music/theatre, etc.): in the art version of Four⁶,art, music and dance are all present, as is theatre[7].
The virus infects the moments when the the surface of the canvas is created, when colours blend to become new colours, are overwritten, are grafted, are erased; it leaves its mark through the accretion and revealing of layers, through writing and overwriting, through deconstruction as the knife slashes through the surface, exposing the underside of the canvas which in turn becomes a new surface, through the intentional alteration of another player’s ‘event’ by physical interventions – shoving, scrubbing, cutting and covering. So, Derrida’s parasite destroys (or should one say it ‘fixes’?); but it only destroys a moment’s possibility, an eye-blink of the painting’s ‘history’ (of this performance’s canvas). It forces a change, a mutation, and who knows where that will lead?
There are other traces in the ashes too; ‘il y a là cendre’ (Derrida, 2014, p3), intertextual traces, hypertextual traces, of other works (in multiple senses: the current canvas’ own history, its possible history that could have been, the history that is yet to come, and the histories of the domains to which it now aligns itself). The lexicon of 48 sound events is a net of traces; of the Greco-Roman muralists, of baroque religious painted interiors (whose collective endeavour will always raise questions of authorship[8]), of Fontana, Kiefer, and Hantaï, the Situationists, Vienna Action Art, early Fluxus, Heiner Goebbels, Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, the traces of post-dramatic theatre, of the dance-theatre of Lindsay Kemp, and other works by Cage of course. These traces refer to other traces, in chains of infinite resonance. The traces of our own experiences will always be present in any endeavour as well – how could they not be? Walls are omnipresent, for good, for ill, make of them what you will, but they are not merely barriers. Perhaps it is better to acknowledge their functional heterogeneity than to attempt to break them; to strive for weakened versions (as nets), to allow their transfiguration, to embrace their undecidability, for then walls can be barely perceptible, almost transparent, they can be s[wall]owed.
1. This is equally applicable to the sounds themselves.
2. Cage found a new appreciation for the city and new ways of looking at its constructions, its traces, its interactions, after taking a walk through Seattle with the painter Mark Tobey. (Cage & Charles, 1981, p158)
3. In one sense they could be considered heterotopias.
5. Derrida’s use of ‘Animadversions’ in texts such as Glas, Cinders and Tympan (Margins of Philosophy) are another way of looking at the presentation of, and commentary (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes silent) on, simultaneous, parallel and sequential actions across the same surface, i.e. the canvas.
6. As Cage said: ‘We are not free. We live in a partitioned society. We certainly must take those partitionings into consideration. But why repeat them?’ (Cage & Charles, 1981, p90)
7. Regarding theatre, one of my co-performers almost cut the canvas in half at one point during the performance, and I was quite shocked – wondering if there was both enough surface left to work on, and whether the whole thing would unravel-, but on the other hand, I thought it was very funny and had to stifle my desire to laugh for the rest of the performance, and that brings another trace into play, that of the theatre’s tradition of making co-performers ‘corpse’.
8. As early as 1934 Cage found the group endeavour of what he termed medieval or gothic art appealing. (Kostelanetz, 1993, p.16)
References
Brunette, P., & Wills, D., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cage, J., Silence, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
Cage, J., Four⁶, New York, NY: Edition Peters, 1992.
Cage, J., Counterpoint (1934) in Kostelanetz, R. (ed), Writings about John Cage, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Cage, J., Composition in Retrospect, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993.
Cage, J., & Charles, D., For the Birds, New York, NY: Marion Boyars, 1981.
Derrida, J., ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, London: Continuum, 2004.
Derrida, J., Cinders, trans N. Lukacher, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Derrida, J., ‘Points de Folie – Maintenant l’architecture’ in Tschumi, B., Tschumi Park De La Villette, London: Artifice Books, 2014.
Kostelanetz, R. (ed), Writings about John Cage, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Tschumi, B. Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Tschumi, B., ‘Introduction’, in J. Kipnis and T. Leeser (eds.), Chora L Works, New York: Monacelli Press, 1997.
Tschumi, B., Tschumi Park De La Villette, London: Artifice Books, 2014.
On November 2, 2015, the Study Center of the Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes[1] and the Collective PaaLabRes[2] organized a discussion session on questions related to artistic research. The theme of the imaginative and dynamic evening, was based on two questions: how to define, conceive, develop artistic research? And why?
Two texts were proposed to the participants before the debate: a) a summary in French of the book by Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn, A Manifesto (CRCIM, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium, distributed by Leuven University Press, 2000); b) Jean-Charles François, “La question de la recherché artistique dans le cadre de l’enseignement supérieur musical” (“The Question of Artistic Research in Higher Music Education”), November 2014 (unpublished).
Were present in the debate:
Jean-Louis Baillard, writer, director of research at the School of Architecture in Saint-Etienne.
Sophie Blandeau, collective Polycarpe.
Samuel Chagnard, musician, teaches at the Cefedem AuRA, member of PaaLabRes.
Marion Chavet, visual artist.
Dominique Clément, clarinetist, composer, adjunct director of the Cefedem AuRA.
Jean-Charles François, percussionist, composer, retired director of the Cefedem AuRA and member of PaaLabRes.
Hélène Gonon, lecturer in Educational Sciences at the Cefedem AuRA.
Laurent Grappe, electro-acoustic musician, member of PaaLabRes.
Aurélien Joly,jazz musician and improvisator.
François Journet, administrator of the Cefedem AuRA.
Gilles Laval, musician, director of the Rock department at the ENM of Villeurbanne and member of PaaLabRes.
Noémi Lefebvre, in charge of the Study Center at the Cefedem AuRA, writer and researcher in Political Sciences, member ofe PaaLabRes.
Valérie Louis, lecturer in Educational Sciences at the CNSMD of Lyon, formerly Freinet primary teacher.
Ralph Marcon, in charge of the Documentation Center at the Cefedem AuRA.
Jacques Moreau, pianist, Director of the Cefedem AuRA.
Pascal Pariaud, musician, clarinet teacher at the ENM of Villeurbanne and member of PaaLabRes.
Didier Renard, professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Lyon, director of a laboratory at the CNRS.
Eddy Schepens, researcher in Educational Sciences, formerly adjunct director of Cefedem AuRA, chief editor of Enseigner la Musique.
Nicolas Sidoroff, musician, teaches at the Cefedem AuRA and member of PaaLaBbRes
Gérald Venturi, musician, saxophone teacher at the ENM of Villeurbanne, member of PaaLabRes.
Introduction
The concert that serves only to concert, who does it concern? Concentrate! Because one centers the concert on the works served “in concert”, They have to be conserved in served concerts, they are serried in severe terms and serve only for the purpose of concerts. To serve works in concerts in front of consorts, serves to conserve, and to converse, but the conversation is already a concerted activity for those concerned, a concerting concern. The concerting concern serves to concentrate oneself on the concerts served to consorts, the concerting concern is the raison d’être of the concert, it serves in gathering consorts in concert of concepts more or less disconcerting. The concerting and disconcerting concern concentrates action and reflection. The concerting and disconcerting concern is the research on action and reflection. The concerting and disconcerting concern is the research on action and reflection about the concerting concert and object of concerting actions. The research is not concerned in conserving converts, but it conserves, it converses on the health of concerts served as concerting concern. The research without which there is no higher education, the research concerns us.[3]
In order to open up the debate, a certain number of questions were formulated by Noémi Lefebvre in the name of the Study Center of the Cefedem AuRA, and by Jean-Charles François in the name of PaaLabRes:
Even if the European reform of higher education “LMD” gives a strong institutional framework, with injunctions made to conservatories and art schools to develop some research, the intention of this debate is to formulate the problems as if we were starting from nothing. Thus, two aspects of artistic research need to be distinguished: a) the real content of actions, what is happening within the given different groups and b) where can it be happening, to what extent are these actions allowed and recognized by institutions.
It is therefore important in this debate to put forward the following questions: a) “who speaks” about artistic research today? b) “from where does one speak”, from which institutional context or from outside the institutions? And c) “in what circumstances does one speak” about it? Who has something to say about it? Artists? Political representatives?
Another dimension of artistic research concerns the fact that many people who carry out artistic research do not speak about it, either because they do not feel the need to, or because they deliberately refuse to. Who are they exactly? Where do they work, these anonymous researchers? What are their objects? What are the ideas linked to their research acts?
In this first series of questions, a strong tension appears between on the one hand the institutional frameworks, what they allow and do not allow, and on the other hand the real topography of the actions realized here and there claiming the term of research, or also the more frequent number of actions that do not pretend to deserve such qualification:
Is there then an obligation to develop artistic research as an answer to the requirements imposed by the European or national instances? Nothing would be more absurd than to simply obey the injunctions to conform to a single model of higher education, if the conditions are not fulfilled in a given discipline to create a meaningful context.
The question of the different disciplinary fields is complicated by the fact that they are not stable entities, they constantly evolve. There is a tendency to consider the disciplinary fields as fixed objects. In these conditions of instability how does one contemplate the question of the signification? If it is possible to envision research as seeking to find sense in actions, the question arises of how to create meaning? How to highlight the meaning of the actions?
There is no higher education in a determined field without the presence of a definition of research linked to that domain. Is it really the case? Is it necessary in the artistic domains? Symmetrical question: is it possible to contemplate research outside university study programs that lead to it?
Artistic research is considered as concerning in the first instance the elaboration of artistic practices. The still dominant thought is that practice is separated from theory: practitioners do very well what they are doing, they do not have to think about what they do. Higher education is still divided in the mind between professional training on the one hand, and theoretical tracks on the other hand. Are the artists capable of a specific thought when they practice their art?
Another strong representation maintains that only those who are placed as onlookers from outside a practice are able to analyze what is at stake in it. The practitioners tend to be blinded by their own objects. In what conditions could the arts practitioners have access to reflection on their own actions?
Is artistic research an internal necessity for today’s artistic practices? Does the situation of the artist in society impose on whoever is practicing the arts a capacity to carry out systematic reflection?
The question of temporality seems essential. During the 1970s, it is striking to note, musicians had time at hand: the public grants allowed the development of long term projects, the fundamental research was at the center of university activities. Do we have time today? Without a reasonable amount of time, has artistic research any sense?
The question of the usefulness of research should be considered in an artistic context that strongly refuses to carry particular utilitarian purposes. What is the purpose of art? But above all what should be the purpose of artistic research? Here there is a subsidiary question: isn’t it a fact that the very notion of research is linked to the concepts of progress and modernity? Would artistic research be yet another way to measure the degree of innovation of a given practice?
In the text that follows, the totality of the persons present participates in the debate. The selected option is to not mention in the text the name of the speakers, and to classify what was said in well-identified chapters. The contradictions that are expressed from time to time in the text reflect a constructive debate respecting the point of view of each participant. The text has been established on the basis of the excellent note-taking by Jacques Moreau in collaboration with Nicolas Sidoroff and François Journet.
Definition of Research
To define the term research is difficult, and consequently even more difficult to define artistic research. Is it a question of any manifestation of a cerebral activity, or of what is well delineated by the framework determined by universities? In the course of elaborating curricula, it is easy to create education cells that can be qualified as “research”. Facing certain courses you think: “in this case it has definitively something to do with research”. We could refer to the doctoral program at the Lyon CNSMD (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse), exclusively modeled on the existing university model. Yet, it is possible to begin to reflect on the notion of research specific to the arts outside the higher education institutions. It is a matter of defining, in the framework of the internal aspects of artistic creation and of its transmission:
What is artistic research?
Who is concerned by it?
How can this type of research exist in social environments?
The places in which it makes sense.
The ways by which it may succeed.
In summary, it is a matter of defining on what basis artistic research is capable of developing larger paradigms, which would justify its legitimacy within higher education. What is the breeding ground on which this legitimacy can be built? And incidentally what is happening in the universities?
The term “research” is perhaps too much loaded with precise references, linked to the professional status of researchers. It can be considered as a false nose for a posture that can be qualified as “reflexive”. The idea of the “reflective practitioner” seems to offer more democratic perspectives, allowing a great number of persons to find in it a framework less imposing than the one implied by the term “research”. This is a posture that anybody can assume as part of his/her activities. This idea is inspired from the work of the American philosopher John Dewey, around the practice of the enquiry that any citizen should be able to carry out in order to develop an awareness of the stakes inherent to a particular field of investigation. The reflexive posture would allow consideration of all the contributive approaches of the diverse artistic practices.
But there is something much more important than a precise definition of what exactly the terms of research or of reflexivity entail: it is the indispensable presence of places, of circumstances, of structures that gather people together, and the presence of production tools the nature of which is necessarily composite, hybrid. The criteria for defining the reflexive or research activities have to be determined after the fact. To start with the very meaning of what research could be seems an inauspicious way to give any result. The most important task is the capacity to assemble – cf. the winemakers’ assemblage or blending – people who are in a reflexive posture, but who work often in a great solitude. How to assemble them together?
Some years ago the French Ministry of Culture organized a conference on artistic research, inviting above all some philosophers, and a few art practitioners, scrupulously avoiding posing the question of teaching and learning the artistic things.[4] What were the criteria developed by these philosophers? It was above all question of confronting the ideas of one chapel in connection with those of other chapels. It did not give us viable tools to proceed further.
It is established that in order to find a place in the actual system of research, there is no other choice than to tackle questions, which in advance have already been resolved. This phenomenon should not be underestimated. To counter this, we should propose the idea of something existing, which is determined in the course of its elaboration. And it is also perhaps for this reason that, with the term of research – taken now in the sense of combat – it becomes important to affirm alternatives to practices that are instituted in some too peremptory manner.
The Research Institutions, the Institution of Research
Should we completely refuse to be situated outside the arbitrary impositions of the LMD process (Europe imposing Licence-Master-Doctorate on all Higher Education) and of its normative institutional injunctions, or on the contrary consider that it is an ideal occasion to tackle the issues of research in order to invent new situations? The Ministry of Culture tends to launch some watchwords without defining what they imply as possible directions to take. This gives an opportunity to take up the ideas in order to adapt them to situations going in a different direction than the intended one.
Two debates should be distinguished: on the one hand the institutional debate that concerns acknowledging activities as legitimate research, allowing to access grants. All institutions have to face the problems of recognition of research. Such debate has nothing to do with the one, on the other hand, which poses the question of the reflexive attitudes that one can have starting from one’s own practices. In the first case, in order for a research activity to be recognized, we are in presence of more and more violent criteria, over which the teachers-researchers have absolutely no control. In the second case, we find pockets of resistance that refuse the arbitrary injunctions of non-pertinent criteria, and then go on to seek alternative processes of gaining legitimacy. To stress the difference between these two debates seems absolutely essential. A book like the Artistic Turn, for example, is written by artists fighting to find a legitimate place in the university while preserving the specificities of their art. This book, however, is very preoccupied with the institutional rationalities for evaluating artistic research, and not enough with an intellectual content, which would be completely independent from them. When we read this book, it is necessary to make a keen distinction between these two positions.
One of the preoccupations of The Artistic Turn is to attempt to position artistic research in relation to the dominant model, which automatically assimilates research to hard sciences and to their criteria of truth. This reduces the reflection to a prebuilt modality, since artistic research has always to be placed within criteria that are elaborated elsewhere. It should be noted that a part of scientific research tries to be inspired by artistic experimental situations.[5] Bringing artistic research closer to that of social sciences, which also has to deal with subjective elements difficult to stabilize, seems a more propitious way to develop the understanding of many things in the domains proper to artistic activities.
Some despair is apparent today among those who work in French higher education. They deplore the recent development of savage evaluation rationales, centered perversely on research in quantitative terms (publications, participation in conferences, quotes in books, etc.), which does not at all go in the direction of an opening of research to the instability of results that cannot be predicted. Research, devoid of its intellectual qualitative content, becomes solely an instrument of normalization, in order to align universities on a single conception and above all in order to hierarchically compare them. The notion of excellence turns into submission to a certain number of injunctions dictated by centralizing policies. This is what allows funding appropriations to take place. Another important injunction concerns the requirement for research to be only occupied with what is considered as useful to society, notably in encouraging establishing privileged relationships with industry and the market place.
These approaches announce the programmed disappearance of Social Sciences and Humanities departments. A certain number of disciplines in the social sciences, literature and arts find themselves caught between the necessity to conform to criteria that are external to their essence and to constantly justify their usefulness to society, which considerably weakens them and directly threatens their existence. Consequently, there is a tendency today in universities to align research on the lowest intellectual educational level. The researchers are therefore strongly encouraged to turn their attention towards practical domains, but this has nothing to do evidently with artistic concerns.
The race for quantitative recognition in research produces also the recourse to “ready-made thinking” and to “ready-made evaluation”, which soon become the obliged pathways to which everybody has to conform and in which many participants find reassuring and comfortable situations. The association of domains that are deemed subjective, such as the arts, with scientific domains that are deemed objective, such as for example the neurosciences, suggests at the same time that research envisioned in this way contributes to the progress of humanity and that it allows the access to undeniable proofs. The scientific method falsely applied to the arts becomes an obligation without which nobody can pretend to claim legitimacy in research.
The injunctions coming from European instances carry with them many constraints, but they have also the merit to open new spaces. In architecture, the doctorate has been put in place only very recently, one does not know yet what it exactly entails. A Canadian attempted to describe what is a thesis in architecture. He studied forty theses and mapped them out according to the elements that orientated the research. This is the kind of approach that creates some openings towards the spaces of creation: how to create your own great book on architecture. On the condition to not fall into the elaboration of a between ourselves sub-culture, as it is often the case when the methods and the language have primacy over the contents. On the condition also to respect the small objects of research, as much as the ones with larger perspectives.
All the same, one has the impression that the race for control could well collapse on itself: with the increase in criterization rationales and a society going ever faster and faster in combining things and matters, have we not arrived at a point of rupture, at the end of a system? By definition, it will be more and more difficult to continue in the same register of normalization and controls, because the system in itself generates a capacity to get out from the boxes, to surpass the imposed frameworks. For reasons of efficiency, and the social issues raised by the system, it is difficult to imagine that the university can continue for a very long time in this way. Even if the technocratic imagination can make these absurd systems last for a very long time, it is conceivable that some dynamic reassessments are about to emerge inside and outside the institutions.
The Models of Research in Tension
1. Relationships to other Disciplinary Fields
Artistic research seems to make sense only in the perspectives in which art is not considered any more as autonomous in relation to the banality of its ordinary environment. To continue to consider art as preserved from the conditions in which it is produced (art for art’s sake), is an ideal that research cannot fulfill. In this posture, the artist does not need to devote attention to research, since this could threaten the purity of the creative act, research in this context should be considered as external to art, it should content itself with the contemplation of its high achievements. Only in perspectives opening enquiries about the way to practice art can one approach in an internal manner the field of artistic research: how do artists and other (human or non-human) beings or entities contributing to artistic practice interact to obtain their results. This central idea of interaction opens the field of artistic reflection to fields such as sociology, psychology, educational sciences, technologies, cultural policies, mingling artistic domains, literature, philosophy, etc. Artistic research seems to make sense if – within artistic practice itself – other elements are contributing, coming from other fields of practice (outside the arts). But in the case in which a disciplinary field outside the arts comes to influence research, it is not normal that the artistic research should conform in all aspects to the rules that apply to the imported discipline.
There is one positive aspect of the process linked to the obligation to develop research in sectors of higher education that until now were oblivious to it: collaborations with other research groups or entities become absolutely necessary. For example, concerning the Schools of Architecture, the corollary of research is a partnership in the framework of the creation of the UMR (Unité Mixte de Recherche, Mixt Unity of Research). A Mixt Unity of Research is a federation of laboratories. The objective is, in order to remedy the difficulty of being confined to ones’ own questions, to look for issues aroused by others, and to build collaborations. The projects involve the presence of funding and partners. For the Schools of Architecture it offers very interesting questions: who should we turn to? Towards the Schools of Architecture? Or towards the researchers who exist in close vicinity, but who are very different, that is Schools of Engineering, University Schools, Schools of the Arts? These partnerships lead to interesting fields. In the Schools of Architecture, the architectural project remains at the center of the study program and is nourished by four domains: engineering science, imagery, arts’ history, and philosophy/ethnology/sociology. This program of study lacks a course on writing. Architecture and writing have things to develop in common, for in research the capacity to write is indispensable.[6] All these issues lead to alterity, within domains that until now were confined to a certain insularity.
2. Theory and Practice
The separation between theory and practice remains a dominant representation in the arts.
Artistic research is thought as being primarily concerned with reflection on practices. In this context, the still dominant idea is that the practice (tacit) domain reserved to artists, remains separated from the theoretical (explicit). The theoretic thought is considered as an analysis realized after the fact, made preferably by outside observers. In the Schools of Architecture, for at least twenty years, the separation between practice and theory was dominant: separation between the architects and the engineers, separation between professional practitioners and teachers. Today, because of the State’s injunction, this separation is called into question in the requirement of a double competency to which research has to be also added. However the status of teacher/researcher still does not exist. Since last year the Schools of Architecture have a double tutelage, one from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, and one from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.
In the case of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lyon, up to now there was no training for practitioners. Here, the violent injunction of the State is that it is now necessary to train some practitioners, that is to give the students some perspectives of professionalization. For example, some courses on entrepreneurship are now organized during the first year at the Lyon II University. We are facing a delicious paradox linked to research: at the University, a stronghold of theoretical studies, there is the injunction to train practitioners, and in the Schools of Architecture and Arts, strongholds of practices, theoreticians should be trained. In the two cases it is a matter to start doing what one was not used to doing, and what one does not know how to do.
3. The Status of the Written Text
There is an astonishing uncertainty in the fact that the transposition into words, the writing of a text, is a practice that can be either creative, or be content with being an explanation tool. Is the transposition into words directly an integral part of the research processes or of artistic production, or is it only the tool for a descriptive or speculative presentation of this research or artistic production content? In the usual conceptions of university research, the transposition into words of the results tends to be exclusively considered as a process that is separated from the content and from any creative elaboration. The mechanical application of the concepts borrowed from scientific research, in order to justify the existence of artistic research, creates a strange state of mind: the artistic act is innovative, creating something new that will be directly injected into intellectual circles. What cannot be explicated by words creates some forms of distance, of exclusion, certain modes of innovation becoming in this way excluded from the field of research. The discourses around the conditions of artistic practices, notably with Bruno Latour, overshadow innovation forms that cannot be articulated with words; the words come after and outside the fact. In this scheme of thought, if someone does some research grounded on artistic practices, the language (putting into words, taking up a pencil, or using a computer) comes after, and in this way does not take part in the research process, but only in its restitution.
This separation between creative research processes and their communication by means of a text has to be questioned in two ways. On the one hand the creative transposition into words can become a tool inserted into the heart of the research process: one thinks of John Cage’s lectures,[7] which textually did not explicit much, but which described in their form in itself the processes of elaboration of the author’s musical compositions. Through these lectures, one has a direct access to the author’s experimental procedures, his modes of thinking, but without having to go through a narrative telling us how they could be explained. On the other hand, the communication of the research contents can use different medias other than text: films, videos, recorded speech, graphisms, sounds, images.
Behind the term research, there are many words that come to complicate its effective implementation: “innovation”, “scientific aspects”, “discourses”, etc. Is there a loss of sense when the discourse comes after the fact? The Cage lectures are no less, nor more research than his musical works. The criteria “discourse” is not sufficient to define research, nor the one of “science”, because a whole number of things should be summoned. One cannot therefore proceed with a single entry. What is complicated is to intertwine all the elements with each other.
Artistic Research – Avenues to Reflect
1. Research through the Elaboration of the Artistic Act
The principal enigma that needs to be resolved has to do with the situation of the artist in today’s society: is research an inherent obligation for the artistic act today? And, if the answer is positive, how can research be distinguished from the artistic act? In the perspectives of a coexistence of historical times, which is an important aspect of our society of electronic communication, it is quite possible to continue to consider that autonomous art – the one exclusively devoted to the production of works outside any circumstantial or contingent consideration – still plays an important part in the field of practices. But the possibilities offered by the new media fundamentally change the deal of artistic practices in considerably facilitating their access and in allowing amateurs to create their own means of production. These amateurs have time at hand – that professionals often have difficulty to find – for thinking through their own practice or for getting in a position favoring experimentation. The stakes of the obligation to present the work on stage – the living spectacle – are modified: processes limited to small groups, devoid of the objective to produce definitive works of art, devoid of the obligatory presence of a contemplative external public, become possible. In this type of context, it is possible to envision research as an integral part of practice, because the practice addresses at once the rationales of the production, of the interactivity between participants, and between the participants with the materials to be used.
Several factors contribute to identify artistic research to practical processes. The research linked to artistic education leads directly to practical artistic acts.: there is no pedagogical action without a direct effect on artistic practice, on ways to envisage the material production of the artistic objects, and consequently on their plasticity itself; and vice-versa, a given practice leading to particular artistic results always implies some methods of knowledge transmission in order to attain it. As soon as one is preoccupied by education, one realizes how until now effective practices have failed to concern researchers, that is the processes leading to artistic productions, everything that occurs before the emergence of the work.
2. Alternative Research Models
Other models should be considered that do not correspond to what is done in the world of the university, notably those already elaborated by personalities such as Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion and Isabelle Stengers. In spite of the fact that since about twenty years, we have been facing a movement, over the medium to long term, of normalization of research, other models can be envisioned if we limit ourselves to an independent intellectual content. But it is not evident how to adopt these models in order to realize, at the margins of the institutions, something different while using the same terms. There are no other alternatives than to create some pockets of resistance using a diversity of models. The pockets of resistance become necessary in face of the great complexity of globalization and the challenges it poses to the great democratic models. Deindustrialization has risen to unbelievable proportions, the working class movement disappeared in less than twenty years. There should be some places and circumstances that allow people to maintain a spirit of resistance for at least a certain time. It is necessary to have some kaïros, some reaction to opportune time, in seizing all the occasions that can occur.
The question of markets and their role in the control of artistic production is increasingly disturbing. At the same time, the markets succeeded in liberating and disseminating the techniques that allow alternative inventions, something the musicians from the elite could not achieve. It is important to be able to develop a reflective approach to the tools of dissemination, to software, to the issues raised by business markets, in order to develop possible rationales for alternative public policies.
An institution like the Cefedem AuRA remains determined by the professional context in which it develops its actions. In general, musicians are less preoccupied by research issues than the actors of the other artistic domains. We can see that musicians have a strong tendency to return to an outdated corporatism. Concerning the norms of the definition of a musician and her/his activities in the professional milieu, the development of the Cefedem AuRA as a place of questioning these norms was completely improbable. This pocket of resistance allowed many people to invent their own line of action. Today, a possible focus of resistance is not to limit the Cefedem’s program of study to teacher’s training, but to turn to the education of practicing musicians at the heart of their practices both of transmission and of elaboration of their art: a reflexive thinking on music and art, on accompanying amateur practices, on the double social and artistic rationale that underlies the actual role of musicians in society. One can assert a singular approach.
3. Administrative Obstacles
There is an astonishing paradox between the reality of the institutions of artistic education and the injunction to develop research and intellectual thinking. All the schools of the arts have to face budget reductions; all the sectors of practices have made great efforts. The incitation to research is developed in an environment that remains very rigid and without the means to provide adequate responses. As soon as new pedagogical projects are proposed, even if they are neither exceptional nor experimental, but that are near the realities of what it is possible to do, many obstacles and roadblocks appear. The arts schools lag behind in the use of new technologies (video, image rights, diffusion issues), and the few tools they are capable of developing are not available to students and teachers. In the domain of popular music (officially called in France musiques actuelles amplifiées, amplified actual music), there exists in Copenhagen an “incredible” department: spaces full of the newest technologies available to users. However, the department collaborates directly with the record labels that impose their criteria, this does not correspond to the role of public institutions. In the public service of music education, the participants are not there to obey the demands of the market place, to produce groups conforming to its rules and to release commercial products. The public service has to bring its own independent vision. People are encouraged to do new things, but as soon as a proposition is formulated, it comes up against the rigidity of the system. The only thing that we do not know how to do, it is to change the system.
4. The question of Research Spaces and Publications
One can see the importance of the existence of research spaces, precisely in order to change the rigid systems just mentioned. It is very important for a research group to have an adequate place and to be able to make it function: this is linked to the available time of the participants and their ability to attract some funding. In order for artistic research to be viable, militant approaches are not enough. It is also necessary to have the capacity to develop some forms of visibility associated with the public expression of the practices (the stage, education). How should we proceed so that what has been discovered, updated, can be heard somewhere as an element that cannot be ignored. In order for this research-resistance to exist, the conditions that would move the constraints imposed by the institutions have to be determined. How can we make sure that this research would be promoted and could cross the threshold of confidentiality, of self-confinement?
What is important is to build some traces. Resistance should be conducted through some existent things, through the “bringing to life”, it implies therefore publications that give full account of the different aspects of the place one occupies. The absence in the musicians’ world of an association that would be capable of defending something other than traditional (if not reactionary) objects is sorely evident. Why is it so difficult to federate the points of view that are not along those lines? How to get out of isolation? Making the path in life by walking would be a good start.
Those who exist in an institutional place often think that the things that are possible have to be envisaged outside the institutions. But those who are outside suffer from isolation and anonymity, from the plethora of information. A public place, whatever it might be, has the merit to exist, it gives a margin of possibilities. The Cefedem has had the good fortune to have been able to develop independently from the conservatories and the universities. The PaaLabRes collective hopes that the digital space paalabres.org being developed will be to some extent the equivalent of a place that seems up to now unavailable. Enseigner la Musique has been the essential tool for disseminating the practices developed at the Cefedem AuRA and other associated places.
Widening Research
1. Research Before the Doctorate
In the world of universities, real research starts at the doctorate level. Nevertheless, the idea that one can carry some research project from the very start of higher education, or even before that, is perfectly viable. Several places in Europe and in the world have been able to experiment this idea with success.[8] To introduce research from undergraduate level onwards is a way to refuse that the laws of the market place should define what could be expected of students at the end of their studies. The Rector of the Lille University said recently[9] that today the social sciences and the arts are no longer just tools to be acquired to shine in society, but are becoming completely indispensable to surpass the fact that machines in the hard sciences are going to be able to do all possible things replacing the humans. In music, the historical definitions of professional occupation are collapsing: we do not know to what we should train the students. The issue is not to train musicians to acquire a pre-established technique, but to do research would give them a more distanced point of view on their actions. They will be able in that way to continually reinvent their practices, rather than to reproduce fixed models. This creates another rationale for resistance: to imagine what will be the nature of the professional occupation tomorrow is not possible anymore, but it is also necessary to realize that the “professional occupation invented by contemporaries never existed”, it is invented along the way throughout history.
In the process of widening the concept of research to contexts fairly different from the one limited to doctoral studies and accredited laboratories, three levels can be observed in the education framework: a) the formal research of university doctoral studies and laboratories; b) preparation to research that concerns higher education as a whole; and c) learning through research that can be done at any level, including at that of children beginners. Moreover, it must be realized that these three levels are themselves distinct from experimental postures that are in operation today in many domains. Numerous approaches of this type exist at the same time in education institutions, in working places, in everyday life and in artistic practices that can be qualified as “reflective practices”.
2. Research Before and Outside Higher Education
Within the music schools (specialized music education at primary and secondary levels) there is a surprising presence of high-level groups whose members do not particularly demand rehearsal spaces, or supports for technical production or advertising. They come to these public institutions specifically to develop research projects, outside any consideration for acquiring a professional trade. These projects are very often centered on meeting other aesthetics and different ways to practice music.
Today, in music schools, there are many study programs (in the process of experimentation) in which the students are solicited in collective situations to learn specific things in an active manner by trial and error, in a different temporality than the one traditionally used and by varying in diverse ways the learning situations.[10] In these programs, research is inextricably a corollary to learning, not only on the side of the leadership of the teachers who have to continually redefine their actions in relation to the contexts given by the students, but also on the side of the students putting themselves in research situations. The idea of research is a posture that is assumed on an everyday basis, it is not a pretentious access to formalism, and it changes completely the sense of artistic studies. The goal is to develop enlightened practitioners, capable of carrying out inventive actions in an autonomous manner.
Performers are often the butt of caricatures, incapable of carrying research on their own, but, to take an example, a model exists today in the revitalization of old music in which there is a collective work on interpretation, which can be qualified as a research in acts. It is then possible to start with an affirmative that what one is doing is research.
It is very important, even necessary, to be able to document these numerous new manners to envision teaching in music schools, the practitioners should be encouraged to write texts, producing videos, using all the possible media so that a collective knowledge can be developed, which would nourish the reflection on practices.
This documentation would help to see more precisely what constitutes artistic research; there is by the way a strong demand in the artistic world for the diffusion of such documents.
3. Research Outside the Norms
Many activities of research are carried out by people who never speak about it, who never write a single line about it. It does not prevent them from inventing things that do not inevitably correspond to the sense of innovation promoted by the governmental instances. How can we give full account of what remains a blind spot? To make these practices known would be a way to restore the meaning that one can give to democracy. In effect, there is an obvious unfairness in the large number of closures instituted to control access to research: in music, perfect pitch, dictation, standard sound, etc. It does not function in this way in reality, as there are many people whose practice does not correspond to these norms. The ones who feel they can legitimately speak about their practices, and who are willing to do it, do not do it for clearly argued reasons. They are willing to speak about them, and do it because they have some ideas in their mind. Behind their initiatives, some social strategies are in process. It is necessary to determine why one does things, to recognize what strategies are in place, to fully assume them, to make them known to the public. There is the need to break down some walls, of not thinking all this out of the blue, outside a context, without the presence of strategic objectives, to explicit what one is ready to defend.
Report realized and translated by Jean-Charles François – 2015-18.
English translation realized in collaboration with Nancy François.
Post-scriptum to the debate:
Exchange Forum PAALabRes “Artistic Research”
Following the debate organized on Novermber 2, 2015 on artistic research several questions remain to be clarified or discussed. We propose an exchange forum on the following questions:
To what extent do artistic practices today necessitate processes of research inherent to their acts, yet remaining distinct from them?
The issue of methods and criteria specific to research carried out by the practitioners themselves in relationship to their own artistic practices.
The issue of a strong representation in people’s minds of a dichotomy between theory and practice. Is it the case that the distinction between fundamental, intellectual or formal research (considered as theoretical) and professional training (considered as practical) introduces more confusion in this debate between practice and theory (practicing theory and theorizing implicitly the practices)? Is the questioning on artistic practices – professional or other – of the domain of theory? Can it be done without some references to practical examples?
Issues concerning the usefulness of research: the distance between the usefulness of a research activity for a given group of humans and the fact that if things are defined as useful from the beginning of a fundamental or artistic research, one refuses to accept that the results might be unpredictable. Is there the necessity to make a distinction between “usefulness” and “utilitarianism”?
Issues concerned with the status of written texts in relation to artistic research and creation: to what extent are they part of the research in itself? To what extent are they only tools for communicating the research results?
The contradictions between study tracks that are very often orientated towards individual work and the collective actions of laboratories.
Stories chronicling experiences would be welcome in connection with this notion of artistic research. The description of contexts in which disciplinary fields are in interaction, notably in the confrontation between arts and sciences, would be of great interest for this forum.
PaaLabRes accepts to consider for this debate very short contributions (6 lines for example) as well as more developed texts (one page). The research articles would be considered as potential contributions outside this “debate forum”.
PaaLabRes is in charge of the processes of presentation and of edition of the contributions in a spirit of exchange. Different types of encounters and interactions will be organized in order to continue working on these issues.
[1] The Cefedem AuRA, Centre de Formation des Enseignants de la Musique was created in 1990 by the Ministry of Culture in order to organize a study program leading to the State Diploma for Teaching Music within specialized music education (schools of music and conservatories). The Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes based in Lyon developed a research publication, Enseigner la Musique, and created a Study Center on teaching artistic practices and their cultural mediations. See the site: cefedem-aura.org
[2] The collective PaaLabRes, Pratiques Artistiques en Actes, Laboratoire de Recherches, was created in 2011 by ten musicians working in the Lyon region, with the objective to reflect on their own practices,including both the logics of artistic production and of transmission, the logics of research and free reflection.
[3] Informal text by Jean-Charles François, 2012 (unpublished).
[4] Voir La Recherche en art(s), ed. Jehanne Dautrey, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris : Editions MF, 2010.
[5] Voir Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Ghent, Belgium : Orpheus Institute, distributed by Leuwen University Press, 2013. This series of articles is centered on the research of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Director at the Max-Planck Institute of the history of sciences department, on the epristemology of experimentation.
[6] For example, the School of Architecture of Saint-Etienne is now developing a track with the Lyon ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon), mixing architecture and writing.
[7] See John Cage, Silence, Cambridge, Mass. And London, England: The M.I.T. Press, 1966; see also John Cage, Empty Words, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
[8] See notably The Reflexive Conservatoire, Studies in Music Education Eds. George Odam and Nicholas Bannan, London : Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Aldershot, England : Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005. The Cefedem AuRA in its program leading to the Diplôme d’Etat centered the curriculum on students’ projects in the domain of artistic practices, pedagogy and reflection (writing an essay); Jean-Charles François, Eddy Schepens, Karine Hahn, Dominique Clément, « Processus contractuels dans les projets de réalisation musicale des étudiants au Cefedem Rhône-Alpes », Enseigner la Musique N° 9/10, Cefedem Rhône-Alpes, pp. 173-94.
[9] Private conversation with Jacques Moreau, director of the Cefedem AuRA, 2015.
[10] The ENM (Ecole Nationale de Musique) of Villeurbanne is one of the very active places working in this direction, notably in the program EPO (Ecole Par l’Orchestre, Learning through Orchestra) developed by Philippe Genet, Pascal Pariaud and Gérald Venturi, and the one from the Rock department with Gilles Laval.
What do we mean by “ecology of practices”? The term ecology affirms that living beings have some relations to their environment, in configurations of interdependence. Life and above all the survival of living beings depend on other beings, whether live or inert, in particular situations. Ecology has become an important preoccupation because of the threats to the survival of the whole planet today, precisely in relation to human actions. The ecological questions more and more pertain to important cultural domains and to the relationships between human beings; in going beyond a purely scientific preoccupation, they intrude on the political sphere.
In the arts, ecological concerns centered recently on awareness of natural phenomena, the disappearance of certain species, or on heightened attention to our urban environment in the perspective of a moralization of excessive uses and of a desire to create reasoned practices respecting the spaces of others and the environment in general. In the cultural domain, ecology is considered as the influence that the environment exerts on behaviors and mentalities of individuals immerged in it.
For the PaaLabRes collective, the utilization of the term of “ecology” has another meaning in its relation to practices. The term “practice” refers to concrete situations involving actions inscribed in some duration. Practice most often implies relationships between human beings in a collective, and also interactions of these same beings with objects, all this happening within a well-defined material, cultural and institutional environment. It is this particular agency of all the interactive unstable elements in duration that constitutes a “practice”. In artistic domains, the practices are defined at the same time by:
Some hierarchic relationships between qualified persons. The idea of hierarchy implies that there are more or less qualified people and that the qualifications might vary according to defined roles, certain roles having the reputation of being more prestigious than others. Hierarchies can be more or less affirmed and more or less controlled by democratic rules.
Relationships between persons and objects resulting in particular actions. The objects influence the actions of people as much as people exert their craft on the objects. Some technical gestures are developed according to how tools of production behave.
Usages that are more or less fixed by rules. The rules come from established traditions, or can be invented for determined contexts. They are more or less explicit, and when they are implicit, there is often the impression that they do not exist. In order to create the absence of rules, one has to invent mechanisms, which in order to be efficient have to be organized like sheet music.
Relationships with the external world, notably with the public through particular media. But also the relationships with other neighboring practices, in order to be different from them, to be influenced by them, or in order to disqualify them.
Practices can then be thought of as beings, as living entities in themselves, which interact in various ways with other practices. The interaction between practices is precisely what is interesting for the PaaLabRes collective as a fundamental concept to be developed.
The concept of “ecology of practices” has been developed by the philosopher of sciences Isabelle Stengers, in the Tome 1 of Cosmopolitics.1 In an interview published in the magazine Recherche2, Stengers, talking about ecology in terms of relations between individuals and between populations, describes them as offering three possible options, which vary according to circumstances: a) the individuals can be preys; b) they can be predators; c) they can be considered as resources. One of the favorite examples for Stengers, inspired by the practices introduced by Tobie Nathan, gravitates around traditional pre-modern or non-modern psychotherapy practices. Most of the time these practices have some difficulty to coexist with scientific approaches that disqualify all the others in the name of rationality, and that tolerate them only reluctantly as part of a museum-based survival of cultures. However, the keys to success of therapies can often be found in the belief systems and cultural environment of the concerned individuals:
In ecological terms, the way in which a human practice chooses to present itself to the outside world, and notably when it proposes to enter in relationship with the general public, is part of its identity. At present, the identity of physics is at the same time made up of all the beings that it has created, the neutrino among others, and of its incapacity to present itself to the general public. For me, to try to create new links of interest around physics and other practices means making a proposition, not of radical change but of a mutation of identity. (…) The physicist would no longer be this being who, suddenly, intervenes in the name of rationality disqualifying all the others. (…) In my speculation, this physicist could become an ally if we would decide, for example, to take seriously the traditional psychotherapeutic practices that bring into play djinns and ancestors. He would know that in saying that, one does not pretend that the djinn is of the same nature as the neutrino: he would know that one is going to be interested in the risk of these practices, in what they are able to achieve. In this world in which the practices are present through their risks and their requirements, the physicist can coexist with the traditional therapist.3.
In the arts, in particular in musical art, because it is so much linked to identity problems, the disqualification of the practices of others is the rule rather than the exception. The genres or styles are more often preys or predators, rarely resources. The disqualification can be manifest in four different ways and often simultaneously: firstly it can be made on the basis of competences or of technical artistic expertize, either for example that someone would not be able to read musical scores, or that someone could not improvise during a social gathering; secondly the disqualification can be measured according to a presupposed authenticity, either for example by blaming a practice for not respecting a tradition, or on the contrary by accusing a tradition of being the source of a lethal stagnation; thirdly, disqualification is induced in relation to a public success, either in accusing the artistic form of being commercial to the point of not belonging any more to a legitimate art, or in blaming it for being too far removed from public understanding to the point of being completely marginalized; and fourthly disqualification can manifest itself in relation to official learning institutions, either when a given practice would be excluded from them, or on the contrary when this same practice strongly asserts its existence by staying outside any institutions, considered in this case as the source of too confortable existences.
The issue of attempting to get rid of the infernal logics behind the disqualification of the practices of others, in order to replace it by a pacified ecology of practices, is far from simple. The solutions lie not in putting an end to conflicts or in forcing cultures into an idealized “melting pot”, but in seeking rather to organize the confrontation of practices on the principle of mutual recognition and equal rights. The main difficulty of this political program lies in that it is not sufficient to let cultures coexist in a given space, even if it seems pacific at first: the multiples enclaves in a shared institution (or a common territory) remaining in mutual ignorance of their respective raison d’être and simply limiting their relationships to their juxtaposition, or even to their superimposition, do not create the conditions of a viable democratic contract likely to pacify fundamentalist antagonisms. The effective confrontation of practices in mechanisms that have to be invented, which oblige them to interact while respecting their own existence, without compromise, becomes a necessity in order to face (at least partially) the difficulties in which our societies tend to sink. Only the existence of public institutions dedicated to this effect could arguably avoid the permanent danger of more or less violent civil wars.
The ecology of practices takes the form of the continuous emergence of new practices stemming from the already existing ones and continuous disappearance of other practices. This phenomenon seems to have been strongly reinforced since the advent of electronic media’s instantaneous communication. The onset of these numerous practices implies in each case, as noted by Isabelle Stengers, the “production of values, (…) the proposal of new modes of evaluation, of new meanings ».4In the perspectives of the ecology of practices, the issue is not to think anymore that these values, evaluations and meanings should replace the old ones in the name of a truth that one would have finally discovered, but that they “are about the production of new relations that are added to a situation already produced by a multiplicity of relations ».5 The extraordinary multiplicity of practices that emerge and disappear, through the very varied content of the meanings they express, results in a calling into question of normalization processes that led to universally recognized truths imposed on all. To ideas, the source of imposed “undeniable facts”, is opposed the resistance of practices that confront the instability of realities, and their values relative to contexts.
Consequently, the idea of ecology of practices is not only about the contents of the works or of artistic approaches in relation to sound ecology: that is on the one hand the issues relative to sound pollution in our societies, and on the other hand the enhancement of diversified sound environments. The ecology of practices involves a complex ensemble that gravitates around notions of interaction between human beings, and between human and non-human beings, in particular with inert objects and technologies. In this context artistic practices are confronted, like any other practices, with difficult dilemmas having to do for example with issues such as data hacking, respect of author’s rights, advertising power of the media, cultural industries economy and the funding of alternative practices, free or paid access to information, facilitated access to learning (notably about specialized techniques) and to critical thought, access to employment, in short anything that contributes to influence the environment, its unstable and uncertain future, and the beings living in it.
Jean-Charles François – 2015
Translation Kerrie Szuch and Nancy François
1. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010).
