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Vocals

by Ian Breakwell
Loughborough University, School of Art & Design, England, 2003
4-CD-ROM Boxed. Edition of 500, $90.00; signed edition of 50, $270.00
ISBN: 1-900856-51-4.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney, Australia


mike.leggett@uts.edu.au

"My Diary records the side events of daily life which are often overlooked, by turns mundane, curious, bleak, erotic, tender, viscous, cunning, stupid, ambiguous or absurd. Observed by chance by a person or witness, me. On rare occasions, the chance encounter finds me caught up in an event conventional of journalistic importance. Mine is one of many individual viewpoints of the same event, seen from the edge of the main action." Breakwell phoned me not long after such an occasion: He had been recording a phone conversation when there was an enormous explosion in the neighbourhood. It was the infamous unannounced bomb attack in 1970 by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on the Old Bailey Courts of Law in the City of London at the commencement of a bombing campaign across the British Isles that was to run for the next 20 years or more. It was heard from the same window from which he was often to observe and photograph during the same period, the more bizarre comings and goings of Londoners. Amplified by his training and experience as a visual artist attuned to the juxtaposition of images from the shocking to the ordinary, he would work in whatever medium was to hand, whether pencil, paint, photo or film––we worked together on several of those––performance or audio tape.

The profession of storyteller, as in speaking, is a mode where the receiver of the story is relieved of any activity save that of conjuring the images described into the magical realm of the ‘mind’s eye’. The listener is the complement of the storyteller in oral culture––without one the other is useless. Plato, at the cusp of the wider adoption of the technology of literacy, was concerned to protect the oral tradition of the School of Athens and developed an argument questioning the real value of reading and writing, the new media of the time. As an ‘early adopter’ of the technology, he lumped painting and the new technology of writing together, querying them with the observation: ". . . but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence." In an oral culture, the presence of the creator of the work is important, for presence allows the pursuit of verification, disputation, and debate. In the Phaedrus, Plato used the new technology, writing, to preserve the old technology, oratory and ars memoria, by reproducing the dialogues of Socrates in a hybrid form, ‘the book’, a hermeneutic space where an interrogation of the text by the reader could occur. As Derrick de Kerckhove has observed, literacy and the technology of printing moved the story out of the realm of sound and into the domain of the object, the written text (de Kerckhove, 1995).

Breakwell’s story objects, based upon the oral tradition of observing and reporting, overlap and abut: as text in performance, text on a page, on a canvas, on sound and video tape, the CD and DVD. Most are short and pithy like a well honed story encountered in the pub. Many have the quality of an aphorism, suspended between the real and the imaginary. Aphorisms, besides being economical with language, impose that moment of reflection that allows the individual reader’s personality to explore and extract a full meaning, if not several. Listening to the fixed time-base of the spoken word, the listener has only the option to spend more time ‘in the mind’s eye’ should the story momentum lapse briefly. Such interaction is at the core of Breakwell’s craft, by directing us away from the prescriptive tendency of the literate ear, (when we read the narratives in one of his several previous printed editions), toward the associative of the oral ear, differently but more satisfactorily encountered on this CD audio publication.

Included are several earlier recordings. The Hidden Cities of Durham made during a river cruise through the northern English city, include references to the last public hangman in Britain before the abolishment of capital punishment; a bus driver’s ‘road to hell’; some walled up students; Orlando Gibbon’s 18th Century wood carvings; and so on. Other recordings were made specifically for radio and for television, two distinct mediums with separate aesthetic considerations and, in the context of restricted transmitter spectrum and British broadcasting regulations, the hurdles and impediments of the dead hand of conservative politics. It took radio pirates operating offshore to eventually crack the radio monopoly, firmly in place until the 70s, of the BBC, whose motto, Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation, was clearly not so concerned with adventurous domestic culture or advocatory opinion. The tradition of public service, if not entertainment, in radio broadcasting was nonetheless well engrained, with the 1940s generation in particular familiar with, (and during periods of sickness, grateful for), a wholesome diet of talks, music appreciation, news, current affairs, plays, quizzes, variety shows, interviews, (definitely not chat shows), and childrens’ programs.

‘Listen with Mother’ (by courtesy of the BBC) begins the first of the four discs in the Vocal collection, the first of many archive recordings played by Breakwell, interlaced with his stories, as guest DJ on the recently licensed radio Resonance. A low power FM London station that he observes is nonetheless able to reach 80,000 people in one hit, or the maximum number of people who would attend an well-publicised exhibition of visual art over a period of months. The series editor, Prof Colin Rhodes, in an informative brochure essay, added that in reality it took a phone call from a listener on the internet in New York City to hearten the artist that people were listening! The interactive possibilities of sound art is a bonus realisation.

What is disseminated in the vocal field is a state both ephemeral and timeless. The stories will be remembered and repeated. They will also as recordings, like the books, become embedded as social memory and the creative output of an artist. John Sutton has discussed exograms, objects that embody memory: "Certain formats do freeze information, allowing it to be held up to multiple scrutiny in future, transmitted more widely across a variety of networks, altered and then re-entered into storage; and these properties of exograms have had essential roles in the development of artistic and theoretical culture" (Sutton, 2002).

The essence though in Vocal is to avoid any notion of progression and to instead delve imaginatively beneath the surfaces of appearance, to explore the unexpected encounter, out of time, mindfully. As W.G.Sebald has observed:

"And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis rules by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in undiscovered continents overseas." (Sebald, p 143)

de Kerckhove, D. (1995). The Skin of Culture. Toronto: Somerville.

Sebald, W. G. (2002). Austerlitz. London: Penguin Books.

Sutton, J. (2002). Porous Life and the Cognitive Life of Things. In D. Tofts (Ed.), Prefiguring Cyberculture. Cambridge, MA: Power Institute & The MIT Press.

 

 




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