Ellen Fullman on her sculpture ‘Streetwalker’
In my last semester of art school I built and performed in my Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture, a landmark piece in my career because it worked on many levels.
It was funny and provocative, and produced simultaneous rising and falling glissandos simply through the mechanics of walking. Four guitar strings were attached to the edges of the skirt that extended down to the toes and heels of my shoes.
As each leg stepped forward, the back string stretched out while the front slackened. A contact microphone on the skirt amplified the sound of these strings through a small battery-powered amplifier that I wore strapped over my shoulder as a handbag. The restriction of the metal construction mechanised and exaggerated the sway of my hip motion. I looked like a cartoon cutout wearing armor. I walked on the street where the prostitutes worked and called my performance, literally, Streetwalker.
I decided to take the “push and pull” theory of Hans Hofmann literally in creating my “Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture.” I had just discovered the Judson Church Group and the post-modern dance practice of appropriating everyday actions into performance. I turned myself into a mechanical marionette figure, where the simple act of walking produced the sound of simultaneous rising and falling glissandi through pushing and pulling strings attached to my shoes and the edge of the skirt construction.
Illia Rogatchevski on
William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops
When I was ten years old, I purchased a little transistor radio. It was cheap and small enough to fit into my pocket. Although I was slightly embarrassed by its pink plastic casing, this thing kept me company on my thirty-minute walk to and from school. I remember taking the radio out with me to the playground one day and turning it on in. Each station, it seemed, was preoccupied with transmitting the same news. I didn’t know what the World Trade Centre was at that point, but the magnitude of what had just happened dawned on me very quickly.
In the 1970s, William Basinski sat in his Brooklyn loft making tape loops. His radio antenna was powerful enough to capture transmissions from the Empire State Building. These broadcasts relayed muzak cover versions of American popular standards. Basinski recorded them, capturing ethereal snippets on magnetic tape. This was sampling before such a concept really existed. Knowing that these recordings were good, but not yet having the confidence to use them in their own right, the classically trained composer boxed them up.
In the early 2000s, when Basinski finally came around to digitising the loops, he discovered that the tape had degraded to such an extent that bits of it would flake off every time it passed the tape head. This meant that the recordings would slowly disintegrate as they were being played and soon became ghostly versions of their former selves.
On the morning of 9/11, Basinski rushed up to the roof of his building and watched the second plane hit the South Tower. As the smoke billowed, he turned on The Disintegration Loops and listened. Beautiful, haunting melodies swelled up around him, mapping their own decomposition. They were at once both hopelessly melancholic and surprisingly resilient.
Unlike the moment with the pink radio, I don’t know where I was when I first heard William Basinski’s music. Most likely, it was a YouTube recommendation; a full-album stream of Watermusic II. My appreciation of his work had been gradual, much like his music is gradual. Things that at first appear static soon reveal themselves to be filled with dynamism. There is a wealth of possibilities in chance, simplicity and repetition. Basinski’s work showed me that you don’t necessarily need to ‘go anywhere’ with a piece of music. It can stay in much the same place and your mind can wander.
Guy Sherwin on
Annabel Nicholson’s ‘Reel Time’
Reel Time 1973 performance by Annabel Nicolson: for sewing machine, 16mm projector with film loop, slide projector, performer (Annabel), two texts, two voices. There are many things that influenced me, but certainly the performance Reel Time by Annabel Nicolson is one of them. I’m sure it was an inspiration for my own performances such as Man with Mirror, which I made a few years later.
Annabel doesn’t perform it any more and it was never properly recorded. There are only a few photographs and written records.
In 1973 we invited Annabel to North-East London Polytechnic where I was teaching. The main photograph shown here, taken by Ian Kerr, is from that performance. It needs describing.
Towards the bottom right Annabel sits at a sewing machine (the long shutter-time of the camera has captured its intermittent mechanism). You can see the shadow of the sewing machine on the screen in the centre of the picture, along with part of Annabel’s shadow - cast by a slide projector used as a light source. On the main screen, to the left of the picture, is another shadow of Annabel, this time cast by a 16mm projector, and on the screen you can make out a few moon-like shapes. These shapes are from holes punched through the 16mm film as it passes through the sewing machine on its way to the projector, from where it travels back to the sewing machine in a long loop. The film depicts Annabel sitting at a sewing machine (not visible here); thus in the performance Annabel is perforating her own image. The performance ends when the loop eventually breaks.
Throughout the performance two people are reading (they sit beyond the edge of the picture, to left and right). One reads from an instruction manual on how to thread a sewing machine, the other from an instruction manual on how to thread a projector.
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The second photograph, of Annabel at her sewing machine, was made directly from a scrap of the film loop left on the floor after the performance. In addition to the holes made by the sewing machine you can see how the sprocket holes (that help transport the film through the projector) have been torn. This is caused by varying tensions in the film loop as it passed through the projector.
Aj Holmes on
Max Eastley
I love his use of ‘natural’ sound and naturally occurring sound phenomenon.
He designed a building with many sound features, aeolian harps in the windows and wind flutes running through the building and did a talk at Westminster University in the 90s - when I was a student there - it was one of the works he talked about. He explained the building in detail, showed us the plans. I was so impressed, I asked him the location of the building. He said 'Oh no it hasn’t been built'. I somehow loved it even more when I learned this. He'd spent about 30 mins talking about the building and didn't mention that it hadn’t been built. I notice that for him it was really somehow enough to have made the plans. It’s like it already existed to him. I think it taught me something very important about artistic imagination; ideas are paramount.
It looks like some of the ideas for the building where used on this project:
