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
filmwe worked together on
several of thoseperformance
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 minds
eye. The listener is the complement
of the storyteller in oral culturewithout
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).
Breakwells 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 readers 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 minds eye should
the story momentum lapse briefly. Such
interaction is at the core of Breakwells
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 drivers
road to hell; some walled
up students; Orlando Gibbons 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.