Myself

Having begun to perform with objects, or to call them objects, seven years ago, I used to play by the hour. Now the more I practice the less I hear, feeling the great distance of cold repetition. Now I consider myself, as much, an object. I hope the ground is leveled, a plateau where one only ever starts, where a single object in hand is an expression of all things.


‘Zitherist’

Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga performed a solo improvisation in Oxford some months ago. The whole business left me with an incessant tic. An immutable possession to colour, to write about objects lines volume relationships.

An object-object improvisation is primarily tangential, boundaries moving, in all forms, not solely visual / auditory / baldly stated my ideal resides in a paradox in a failed residence.

Do such objects, (see list compiled by Chatzigoga), begin to assume the familiar roles of recognition, that say, my relationship with a saucepan, my relationships with the food (an affair in constant need of renewal) placed into the saucepan, and my relationships with the cutlery and plates? Can the roles of objects in improvisation assume those worn relationships of familiarity?

What of the percentage of an audience not familiar with such means of expression? When a performer improvises in front of any audience does her approach revolve around attempts to create a state of surprise inside a means to highlight subliminal sensorial tendencies and assumptions through the objects they choose to surround them?

Assuming the performer wishes to talk and the audience to listen.

As I wonder what a person will read or hear in these words I wonder what a person hears or reads of a performance.

To remind myself, to say a few words about Chatzigoga’s performance that night.

Before I continue, asking questions and asking answers.

I come in at jutting angles of intervention, a pair of considered hands all, the intensity of a rounded volume, sanding a disposition of form.

“Each state is always complimentary to its predecessor,” thus, Georges Braque, nods, “One must always have two ideas, one to destroy the other.”

The swarming patina of his ‘Still life with a metronome, 1909’, a visualisation, of the bristling surge of Chatzigoga’s ‘steel ball’ as it is prompted to traverse the monotonous steel tightrope of strings, an indeterminate introduction hammers out a strata of typography.

Perception is undone unwound and the slightest of tools, a steel ball, an e-bow, the measure, straddle several conversations, echoed in the collected larynx of observers.

A prism darts and saws and the steel ball ploughs fields of harmonics as they themselves excite objects into further states of motion. Sound sticks to a surface. Branching-thread-like-elisions. The concentric rings of tonality crushed underhand to/and. For only oval moments of a-centre outwards, germinates, the transient hint of life a product of an absorption environment. In many ways the performance transcended a need I often have for ‘value’.

The woodpecker. The parent of twins, falls, conjunct, and we hear –twice–once– Picus bores a hole in the square of horn beam without a consideration for the wind –once– in the listened forth completion, the considered end-point. The heartwood sings of burial. A dun coloured little bird, a Nuthack, shows us the tangents of its face and the echo of annihilation.

In need of a renewed terminology, in need of nothing at all the moment the concept was obliterated. Rumpled, I recall the air of certain objects on table. One of many frames. But this, I shall say, roundness, now we must get away from it!

Avoid having to do this all over again. Re-cast and melt down the nets.

In the instances of performance, objects were everything. I fall short of asking myself to consider the differences beyond the seemingly obvious. Between performer / audience / instrument et cetera, so for now I shall call everything an object, as contained in the grain and the composition. I do not wish to imply that Chatzigoga was seeking anything as grand as a reclamation of objects, though of course I do not speak for her, but the heightened sense of play, of discovery and willingness, left all objects without shield, reintroduced to themselves. Through all of this, I seek to understand what it is I mean when I say, again and again, object – how do they make their way to us, if they arrive, what do we do with them, what differential recognitions live inside performance?

Chatzigoga was playing with the speech of objects, no one letting anyone speak for long, and listening for something else, rumours perhaps, the validity of distraction, the light reflected from bodies and space.

This is the beginning of an awareness, as I step away, for now, from improvising, at least to the extent to which I have been involved, I again attempt to experience objects differently, and as such, this writing, surrounded as it is by fields upon fields existing in their own languages, will always be purposely and unintentionally incomplete.

Chatzigoga’s performance causes me to write about certain performative objects of my own keeping, as if I were performing, but at the same time wholly removed from this premise. I have in my mind various histories of linguistic potential and their necessary disregard of each other.

Compartmentalisation | Nomenclature.

Geography | Objectism.

Imagism | Et cetera.

Garcia’s hands | Olson’s shoulders.

Surely I will fail. It will be I hope an honest failure.

In parallel clusters of wet sounding-objects first draw ears downwards

If we were to listen all at once to the jutting angles of the Old Norse, spraki, now residing in the throat as, ‘a murmured noise or rumour’, simultaneously observing the Latin, spargere, ‘to strew or sprinkle’, a word closely related to the Sanskrit, Sparega, ‘to branch’, a chance projection is drawn up from the present as a scattering of words as objects as occurrences. We open our mouths and that which falls out evolves beyond our conceptions into the throats of others. Listened to out of control as fields open and close in a variety of compositions.

Whilst writing preparatory notes for this article I often found myself walking with my notepad. Halfway through one particular stroll I came across a Song Thrush deftly slapping an acorn on the soaked and busy gravel, its innards eventually propelled to spinning clusters into and away from various bushes and shrubs. I draw up such inference from the veins of speech, an utterance that contains water from those geysers of the past and its present. Speech and its reception, in this case of an improvisation, is borne of a language that can box back and forth between memory, association, placement, orientation, categorisation, finding its innards, its, coyteledones, scattered beyond the confines of its seed coat, the acorn of grammar fractured as an individuals comprehension of process, a ones own, peculiar perception.

To consider oneself as an object is a state of proprioception that the poet Charles Olson believed bolsteed ones ‘advantage’, and use, ones sense of humilitas, leading to dimensions larger than the man. Not that any object relies on such anatomical assertion to premeditate intention, though it is beneficial to be aware of the relationships that can develop between what is heard and what is seen, what is perceived, as regardless of intention, reception is what I am concerned with here. As the objects coincidental properties are fashioned into a something else entirely, a something else in part arisen from the assertion of language.

A trace is felt, stray lines and curves, of the objects professions temporarily reassigned in performance (I often think of a piece by John Cage entitled, Water Walk, whereupon Cage attempts to create a fascinating composite of blandness within the everyday attributes of objects still living in the roles we have originally assigned them), an echoed death rattle prolonged by the whims of its owners. Its fleeting symmetry is at once a house, an ornament in the house, an organ, a cupule, a steel ball, and as such, shifting as the Song Thrush, the performer, the audience, sees fit. Objects continually seek to move away from the name. A quasi comfort and familiarity slipping past the traps of affirmation and continuing to explore the scattered eyes of the Song Thrush.

The modern notation of Hindustani, North Indian classical music, primarily an oral tradition, contains in its vast boughs a complicated system of various Kaida’s, literally, rule, which are a type of Tabla composition often incorporating improvisations upon which one can generate variations. I posses many fond memories of the concerts I attended during my time in India, and I was very often fortunate enough to witness the many endearing and learned forms of play between soloist and audience as the musician began to play, enunciating the various syllables at various speeds, announcing the gharana before attempting to fox the audience in a series of improvised nuances, resulting in a baffling and truly humbling experience, placing my uninitiated and inexperienced pallet onto a plateau of delicate and warm overtones of communication. The announced syllables are notated through the interpretive sonorities of combinations of anatomy–rice starch–copper–wood–goat skin– and are a means of conveyance that through hundreds of years of study and considered observation that can elucidate a tautological language, a stratum of anthropic ingenuity and mimicry. As an example:




Each of the syllables above pertain to a section of the Tabla skin and a corresponding part of the musician’s hand or fingers. A notation of an age-old oral tradition that is itself a mutation of an already alchemical language. A means of taming an object’s pre-destined voice that begins to allude as soon as it is named, deriving new patterns from old.


The French poet, and a good friend of Georges Braque, Francis Ponge, taught himself to speak, or to deduce, a language of what he called, raw objects. He sought to create a distance between himself and his ever-occurring poetry, to return to the object, the poem’s object, regardless of an absence of logical form. I now seek to return the environment of objects to my throat as I attempt to write of those which I have chosen, things, I have utilised for many years, learning less and less of them the more I perform, in mind of the totality of language they have been forced to speak in their thrust upon convention or their re-appropriative roles in improvisation. Such typed-writing is a continuation in any direction of my relationship with these things through an object-based approach - moving between thing as words and words as things, and thus, as I write thusly I cannot comprehend results. I think of how many times I have read, gleefully dumbfounded, but lost nevertheless, over Gertrude Stein’s 1914 publication, Tender Buttons, her so-called Cubist descriptions of a piece of coffee as a ‘place in no new table’, of eye glasses as ‘a colour in shaving’. I listen to wire brushes crinkling the well worn skin of a drum, a drum circling the rocky ground, amplifying upon contact, and in light of this I touch  plurivalence. I understand nothing of things as they coalesce into part empirical part logical part something else understanding, full of poetry, of acceptance, of a lack of poetry. When worn together. When worn apart. I see Stein’s words and I hear young Tadpoles chewing the doughy wood strewn around ponds, I hear stones and snares and I read of blind imagination / cribs of bending symmetry.

In a field nothing is both not and a necessity

A border of improvisation engenders the sensory state of the amnesiac, a quasi ideal in which memory tears itself apart the moment it registers its presence. I remember Keith Rowe stating, somewhere, no doubt more than once, that the moment he sits down and looks at his table, he feels utterly lost, terrified, and as he moves his hands down towards his objects, the familiar foundations of his guitar, as much an object as much as the objects surrounding it (it’s rare to think of a moat without crocodiles), slowly slowly a sloth like concrescent perception begins to take hold, forming new relationships of beneficence, constant permutations and transient hierarchies of noise. Now, whether this is true, I also remember him saying he never practices, is immaterial, I believe such things should be sought, though not actively, as that will surely petrify existing thought. Through this perhaps one may find the necessity of virtuosic improvisation as zero, made and un-made simultaneously.

Objects. Then

Seek to move beyond the limits of control

How long would it take to walk around the face of Janus? As I walk I discover that I am falling prey to that which I am discussing because I am discussing it. But the familiarity, which I was formerly inspecting, causes a sedative response. Paradox, there is always paradox, and always I come back to this. Here’s to words! Here’s to Maurice Blanchot, and his oblivion, each trace of each letter its own object, its own omnipresent face. No letter cannot see in all directions of objects at once,


As we move limits adjust

The eight objects of this article are the start of an ongoing series. Many thanks to Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga for her kind help. The list of her objects is in my own hand.

Dr. Patrick Farmer is a writer, composer and sound researcher.