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The Performance of Time in Fluxus IntermediaNatasha
Lushetich
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 2011
(T212),pp. 75-87 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Birkbeck College-University of London (30 Mar
2013 12:07 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v055/55.4.lushetich.html
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75TDR: The Drama Review 55:4 (T212) Winter 2011. 2011
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
The Performance of Time in Fluxus IntermediaNatasha
Lushetich
If the phrase the performance of time sounds slightly odd, the
suggested action being both vaguely possible and, quite likely,
impossible, it is because time is most often conceptualized as a
flowing substance, an organizing principle, or a container in which
events occur. In all of these cases, as indicated by the oft-used
phrases time flies and can you squeeze me in? when refer-ring to an
appointment or meeting, time is thought to have an existence
independent of the human observer. As an externally observable
phenomenon it can either be perceived by the
Natasha Lushetich is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter
and a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is also a
performer, director, and interdisciplinary artist. Her publications
include On the Performativity of Absence ( Performance Research,
March 2010), Ludus Populi: The Practice of Nonsense ( Theatre
Journal, March 2011), and The Event Score as a Perpetuum Mobile (
Text and Performance Quarterly, forthcoming).
[email protected]
Figure 1. Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch, Barton, Vermont,
1967. A residual object from one of Knowless noontime meditations.
(Photo courtesy of the artist)
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human subject if the subject chooses to avail herself of the
time sense, the way she would avail herself of the sense of sight
to look at a stone, or, it can be ignored. On this static,
substantialist view, time cannot be performed but is a measure of
performance, that in which performance occurs. I would like to
suggest what might be called a processualist approach whereby time
is the expressive activity of any given thing, being, or
phenomenon. Instead of occurring in time, an event or an activity
produces time in its occurrence, which further means that there can
be no position outside of time since all things, beings, and
phenomena are always already temporal-ized by the very nature of
their existence. Rather than observing or measuring the movement of
time statically as a progression from a static point A to a static
point B the processualist logic operates from within the process of
perpetual temporalization, continuous change, dif-ferentiation, and
mutation. Although difficult to grasp as well as perceive,
continuous change can be likened to the process of aging as opposed
to that of growing. While the process of growing is marked by a
clear beginning and an approximate end, the process of aging has
nei-ther a beginning nor an end since it is not a passage from a
fixed point in ones youth to a fixed point in ones old age, but a
gradual process of continuous change whose starting point cannot be
determined and which continues well after ones death in the form of
decomposition. This process, rendered imperceptible to the aging
subject by the very gradualness of change, encom-passes change on
all fronts: it is not only the color of ones hair that changes but
also the pos-ture, the smile, the texture of the skin, the voice,
and not least of all, ones consciousness. It is in this context of
perpetual processuality that I propose to focus on Fluxus
intermedia.
Variously characterized as the most radical experimental art
movement of the sixties (Harry Ruh1 in Armstrong 1993:16), a
singularly strange phenomenon in the history of the arts of the
twentieth century (Doris 1998:91) and an active philosophy of life
that only some-times takes the form of art (Friedman 1998b:ix),
Fluxus is a loosely knit association of art-ists whose activity
ranges from concerts, films, performances, and sightseeing tours to
games, sports, instruments, and gadgets. It includes such names as
Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Takehisa
Kosugi, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Ken
Friedman, and spans the period of almost five decades. Intermedia
is a term coined by Dick Higgins to refer to works that fall
conceptually between media such as visual poetry or action music,
as well as between art media and life media (Higgins 1998:222). The
latter dis-tinction (or rather, contamination) is of particular
importance to this discussion since the per-formance of time occurs
at the intersection of pervasive temporalization produced by a
divergent range of Fluxus works and the percipients musicalized
mode of attention. This is made possible by the fact that all
Fluxus works, including intermedial compositions, film, and
durational per-formance the focal points of my analysis exhibit two
fundamental characteristics: pres-ence in time and musicality
(Friedman 1998a:250). As Friedman elucidates in Fluxus and Company,
presence in time refers to the works gradual deployment,
impermanence, and ephemerality while musicality refers to the fact
that many Fluxus works, whether objects or performance
instructions, games or puzzles, appear in the form of scores (250).
That the works appear in the form of scores means that they can be
realized by anyone, anywhere, in any num-ber of ways the only
common denominator being musicalized duration (251). But, despite
the fact that musicalization and temporalization have much in
common, musicalization is not a mere extension of temporalization,
as music stands in an ambiguous relationship to time.
Deep Listening
In The Time of Music, the musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer
engages with the philosopher SusanneK. Langers notion that [m]usic
makes time audible (in Kramer 1988:1), which could be interpreted
to mean that music generates time in its expressive, and thus
temporaliz-ing, activity. However, this statement refers to a
particular species of time, operative in the seg-
1. Harry Ruh is the author of the 1979 uncirculated exhibition
catalogue FLUXUS, the Most Radical and Experimental Art Movement of
the Sixties. The exhibition was held at A-Gallery, Amsterdam.
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regated realm of ideality, since, as Langer notes music [...]
suspends ordinary time and offers itself as an ideal substitute and
equivalent (3). Kramer affirms this distinction and defines musical
time as the time the piece evokes and ordinary time as the time the
piece takes (7). He also states that the category of deep listening
gives primacy to musical time over ordi-nary time. Although Kramer
does not offer an explicit definition of deep listening but instead
refers to T.S. Eliot who describes it as music heard so deeply that
[...] you are the music (in Kramer 1988:7), deep listening could be
defined as an attentional configuration of height-ened auditory
susceptibility caused by a high degree of concentration and the
correspond-ing emotional involvement, the combination of which
allows the listener to transcend the time the piece takes and enter
the time the piece evokes. The term has also received much exposure
through the work of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros,
whose investigations into the awareness-heightening powers of sound
began as early as the 1970s. In Deep Listening: A Composers Sound
Practice Oliveros defines deep listening as an art in itself, a
composers prac-tice as well as a meditational act intended to
heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of
awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible
(2005:xxiii). Although in many ways concomitant with Oliveross, my
use of the term does not refer to a sus-tained, intentional
practice but remains concerned solely with attentional
configuration.
One of the reasons why this particular attentional configuration
may be said to have the capacity to suspend ordinary time, as
Langer claims, is its attunement to the nature of the medium, which
tends to solicit an extremely temporalized mode of attention, since
music is never given all-at-once but is in a continuous process of
disappearing. Indeed, in Structure and Experiential Time, Karlheinz
Stockhousen, a figure of considerable influence on a num-ber of
Fluxus artists, defines the relationship between music and time
along the axis of perpetualdisappearance:
If we realize, at the end of a piece of music quite irrespective
of how long it lasted, whether it was played fast or slowly and
whether there were very many or very few notes that we have lost
all sense of time then we have in fact been experiencing time most
strongly. (1959:65)
This sort of listener involvement comes from the interplay of
direct perception, memory, and pattern recognition. According to
Kramer, these three cognitive processes are related mostly although
not solely to musical linearity and tonality as exemplified by the
Western cultural tra-dition, which is predominantly goal-orientated
(1988:25). The main characteristic of such music is that it
involves the listener in the pacing, timing, and articulation of an
intricate vari-ety of shaped musical events that create what could
be termed temporal content. However, the notion of musicalization,
as operative in the Fluxus works, does not refer to an attempt to
implant a teleologically driven temporal content in a nonmusical
medium and in this way elevate the work to the realm of ideality by
suspending it from the realm of ordinariness and corporeality. On
the contrary, it refers to the percipients very corporeal and lived
mode of attention, which does not segregate the work from its
surroundings. Deep listening is thus an attentional configuration
that renders ordinary time performative.
A case in point is Takehisa Kosugis 1964 score:
South No. 1 (to Anthony Cox)
Pronounce SOUTH during a predetermined or indetermined duration.
(in Friedman1990:36)
Or, his
South No. 2 (to Nam June Paik)
Pronounce SOUTH during a duration of more than 15 minutes. Pause
for breath is permitted but transition from pronunciation of one
letter to another should be smooth and slow.(36)
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Both compositions are monostructural and consist of a single
sound as well as movement. They have no phrases, no
tension-building or tension-releasing progressions, variations, or
goal-direction and are as such unlikely to have a captivating
effect on the listener that would transport him or her to a
different world. However, it would be inaccurate to say that these
compositions do not alter the configuration of the listeners
attention, since their monostruc-tural consistency both permeates
the listener and acts as a platform for numerous other
devel-opments. Such listener engagement can be compared to the
spatial experience of viewing a sculpture, which, apart from being
visual, is also deeply kinesthetic, possibly tactile, and even
olfactory. When viewing a sculpture, our body negotiates the pacing
of the experience: we walk around the sculpture, draw closer to it
to inspect a particular detail, walk away, come back to take in the
whole space, the coming and going of other visitors, the billowing
of the curtains, the smell of coffee coming from the cafeteria. In
contrast to viewing a small painting, which confines the
circumference of our attention, viewing a sculpture expands and
texturizes it. Likewise, the experience of listening to minimally
varied, monolithic compositions amplifies the temporalities
inherent in the environment. This amplification is made even more
explicit in works such as Kosugis 1963 Theatre Music whose score
reads: Keep walking intently (in Nyman 1974:68), or La Monte Youngs
1960 Composition No. 2, Build a fire in front of an audi-ence; or,
his 1960 Composition No. 5, Turn a butterfly (or any number of
butterflies) loose in the performance area (in Nyman 1974:70).
Apart from emphasizing extended duration as well as the
multisensorially perceptible musi-cality of natural processes,
found in a burning fire or the flight of butterflies, these pieces
point to another element, crucial to the transference of deep
listening from the segregated time-space of a musical composition
to that of the world around it, namely concretism. Although usually
associated with the more violent Fluxus compositions such as Nam
June Paiks 1961 One for Violin Solo in which a violin is raised in
a distended movement lasting several minutes, then sud-denly
released downwards and smashed to pieces, or George Maciunass 1964
Piano Piece No. 13 in which piano keys are nailed down with a
hammer, concretism plays an important part in dis-sociating music
from ideality and associating it with concrete reality. In his 1962
essay Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art, Maciunas
asserts:
A material or concrete sound is considered one that has close
affinity to the sound pro-ducing material thus a note sounded on a
piano keyboard or a bel-canto voice is largely immaterial, abstract
and artificial since the sound does not clearly indicate its true
source or material reality common action of string, wood, metal,
felt, etc. (Maciunas [1962] 1993:15657)
This way of approaching a musical instrument as a total
configuration, to borrow Michel Nymans expression, can be traced to
John Cage and his prepared piano, among other tech-niques, which he
began experimenting with in the early 1940s by inserting a variety
of objects between the piano strings. As Nyman points out in
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, this practice exploited an
instrument not as a means of making sounds in the accepted fashion,
but as a total configuration the difference between playing the
piano and the piano as sound source (1974:17) thus extending not
only the traditional function of the piano but also that of the
performer. However, Paiks One for Violin Solo and other Fluxus
works differ profoundly from Cages work in that they perform the
most elusive and yet most essential quality of ordi-nary or
corporeal time, not to be found in the ideal species of time (which
is repeatable and changeable): irreversibility. As Paik aptly
points out: Once you break an expensive piano, it cannot be put
back together. Once you throw water on the ground, you cannot scoop
it back up (in Kaye 2007:41).
The Process of Time and Time as Process
While touching on the only uncontested point in a wide array of
mutually exclusive theories of time, Paiks One for Violin Solo
performs time as process, in other words its quiddity, and the
pro-
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cess of time, in other words, its additivity. In doing so the
piece offers for experiential con-templation or indeed enact-ment
the paradox of time as evidenced by the parallel but mutually
exclusive existence of two contrasting theories of time, aptly
named the A-theory and the B-theory. As the time theorist Heather
Dyke eluci-dates in McTaggart and the Truth about Time, according
to the A-theory, or the so-called tensed theory of time, time is a
real feature of the world. Despite the fact that the past and the
future can only be accessed through the present moment, which is in
perpetual motion and thus in a continual process of passing, the
present moment is nevertheless a real loca-tion in the world.
According to the B-theory, time is not a real existent. Events in
space occur tenselessly, unrelated to the notion of present, past,
and future and can only be spo-ken of in relational terms, such as
earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than (Dyke
2002:13739).
By being both of time and being time, One for Violin Solo
embodies as well as performs both of these views. Due to the fact
that it disrobes ideal musical time of its rhythmically and
melod-ically created multidimensionality and confines it to
material time, in other words, the unidi-mensionality and
unidirectionality of a moving body in space the violin One for
Violin Solo simultaneously inhabits the zone of the A- as well as
the B-theory. Once the violin has reached the point above the
performers head and is on the verge of beginning its journey
downwards, the temporal experience can be separated into three
different categories: (1) the present the violin raised and held in
an axe-like position; (2) the past the violins position seen as an
accu-mulation of past-presents congealed into a concrete form; (3)
the future the violins spatial direction, its imminent downwards
journey which forms the notion of the future as a prospec-tive
addition of not-yet-presents. The moment the violin reaches the end
of its journey and is smashed to pieces is the point at which the
mutually reinforcing conditions of additivity and congruence, which
form the progression or the process of time, have been brought to a
logical conclusion with regard to the initial arrangement of the
violins component parts. Paiks One for Violin Solo embodies the
tripartite division of time into distinct temporal aggregates,
since the state of the violin at the end of the composition is
radically different from the state of the violin at the beginning
of the composition.
However, apart from revealing the additive aspect of time, or in
other words its manner of unfolding, its processuality, the same
composition also reveals time as process. In this regard, the
arrangement of the violins constituent parts at the end of the
composition will be different
Figure 2. Nam June Paik, One for Violin Solo, Neo-Dada in der
Musik, Dusseldorf, 1962. (Courtesy of George Maciunas Foundation
Inc. All rights reserved, 2011)
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enough to mark a category shift from the notion violin to the
notion no-longer-violin or non-violin, (in other words from the
category of being to the category of nonbeing), only if change is
seen as a purely transient alteration in the spatial distribution
of essential traits. If, however, change is seen as a continuum and
not just a rearrangement of essential traits causing an object to
become a nonobject the moment it loses its stable identity, then
the passage from the state of violin-ness or violin-wholeness to
the state of non-violin-ness or violin-smithereens is revealed to
be heavily dependent on the frame of reference. If framed by the
human observer, the process of change will be seen as corresponding
to the notions of past, present, and future only on account of the
triadic composition of human perception consisting of memory,
direct perception, and expectation. The moment this frame is
removed, the smithereens-condition of the violin is revealed as no
more than a relational coordinate, a later than if compared to the
earlier than of the wholeness-condition of the violin. But,
regardless of the difference in the percipients temporal experience
of One for Violin Solo, the composition reveals the one undis-puted
sine qua non of time and that is irreversibility. For, whether
regarded through the per-ceptual lens provided by the A-theory or
the B-theory there is only one temporal direction accessible to our
perception within the sphere of lived, material reality; the
reverse is not. The temporal unidirectionality of lived
corporeality and materiality, which, unlike the reversible temporal
structure of musical time, cannot be experienced from a different
angle in other words, externally testifies to the fact that as
living beings we are internal to time, as are all other things,
phenomena, and occurrences. The experiential appropriation of the
notion that we are always already involved in the processual
transition called time, but which could equally be called
existence, and which, unlike musical time cannot be stopped,
rewound, or restarted at will, has profound implications. Not only
does it collapse the binary opposition between musi-cal or ideal
time on the one hand, and ordinary or material time on the other,
but, as Paiks, Kosugis, and Youngs compositions aptly demonstrate,
it exposes the impossibility of the very notion of ideality since
ideality hinges on purity, the unattainable state of untaintedness
by things material and corporeal. By transferring deep listening,
which makes time move [...] not an objective time out there, beyond
ourselves, but the very personal time created within us as we
listen deeply to music (Kramer 1988:6) to the realm of concrete
reality, Paiks, Kosugis, and Youngs compositions sensitize the
percipient to time as existence, that is to say to time as
processuality and expressive activity always already underway in
all things, beings, and phenom-ena. However, this work of pervasive
musicalizing temporalization, which renders concrete, mate-rial
time performative, is not only operative in Fluxus compositions but
can also be found in a medium whose relationship to objective time
is considered to be much more rigorously deter-mined, and that is
film.
The Production of Lived Time in FluxFilms
In Time and Free Will as well as Creative Evolution, Henri
Bergson likens scientific, objective, externalized, and spatialized
time to cinematographic time (1960:81; 1911:329). The reason for
this is the illusion of continuity created by the rapid succession
of static frames only 1/24 of a second long, which, although static
cannot be discerned as such by the naked human eye and are
mistakenly perceived as a single, uninterrupted and continuous
image. Bergsons refer-ence is not directed solely at the
cinematographic projection but encompasses the entire cin-ematic
procedure in which movement is filmed as continuous in real life,
then mechanically broken down into a series of static single frames
and subsequently projected as an illusion of continuity, imitative
of the original continuous motion. In Creative Evolution Bergson
compares this contrivance of the cinematograph (1911:332) to that
of scientific and objective knowl-edge in general and objective
notions of time in particular, which place the observing sub-ject
outside the phenomena or processes observed: Instead of attaching
ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves
outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We
take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality (332). In
contrast to the notion of divisibility into discrete and equal
units or instants, exemplified by the succession of static
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frames whereby cinematographic time is understood to mean time
placed at the service of the mechanics of the cinematic narrative,
the Bergsonian concept of time is that of indivisible dura-tion
withoutextensity.
Variously called duration, pure duration, and true duration,
time is for Bergson a nonquantifi-able multiplicity, inseparable
from its multiple states by an imaginary instant (1960:218). It is
a permanent flux of qualitative change and as such permanently
pregnant with creative potential. It is also characterized by
interpenetration, or endosmosis the inward flow of a fluid through
a permeable membrane toward a fluid of greater concentration of the
different states of con-sciousness in which the past becomes
immanent in the present, memory flows into perception, fantasy into
reality, and the virtual into the actual. This is also the reason
why time cannot be objectively conceptualized, externalized,
divided into a series of smaller units of equal magni-tude whose
divided state veils the continuous inner process of endosmosis.
Like the successive notes of a tune (104) that both succeed one
another and are perceived in one another (100), a comparison
frequently used by Bergson as a way of avoiding spatial metaphors,
pure duration is an inextensive multiplicity, a succession of
qualitative changes which melt into and permeate one another,
without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize
themselves in rela-tion to one another (104).
Although both Bergsons absolutistic terminology and his notions
of spatial perception remain firmly bound by the early 20th-century
zeitgeist, as not yet marked by phenomenol-ogy and its experiential
self s concern-orientated conceptualization of space wherein an
object an individual is looking at may be described as closer than
the glasses they are using to look at the object, Bergsons notion
of the spatialization of time denotes a fixed and ordered
arrange-ment of clearly delineated units, reminiscent of a closed
circuit. Thus visualized, spatialized time, of which
cinematographic time is a variant, is closed, static, mechanistic,
and teleologi-cal. To borrow a metaphor from Creative Evolution, it
resembles a picture puzzle, which regard-less of how many times it
is assembled and reassembled does not offer a change of content.
Granted, there will be a change in experience accompanying the
varying degree of speed and proficiency in composing the puzzle but
the time permeating this action will remain inciden-tal, or, in
Bergsons words, an accessory (1911:369). To contrast this notion of
time reduced to mere time-length (372) with that of pure duration
which is creative and productive and thus elevated to
time-invention (372), Bergson uses the example of an artist and a
blank can-vas where time is no longer an accessory [...;] it is not
an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content
being altered (370). The reason why cinematographic time is inert,
according to Bergson, is because it does not produce pure duration,
by which is meant an unpredictable interpenetration of images, but,
instead, presents a mere succession.
Despite the fact that Bergsons views on cinematographywhich
could be seen as lacking in breadthwere shaped by the early cinemas
lack of formal complexity, whereas the evolu-tion of the cinema was
to take place through montage and the elevation of the shot to a
tempo-ral category, Bergsons point still has some validity. For
although operative in the intertwining and permanently changing
zone of the viewers lived and phenomenal time, film as a medium
never theless remains contained in and by objective time,
comparable to Bergsons puzzle. The notions of lived and phenomenal
time are derived from two different sources: the phenom-enological
accounts of temporality, such as those articulated by Edmund
Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the Zen Buddhist views, as
formulated by the Zen master Dogen and the Zen philosopher Kitaro
Nishida. In Beyond Personal Identity, a comparative study of the
phenom-enology of no-self, Gereon Kopf articulates the notion of
phenomenal time in the following way: phenomenal time is posited by
the experiential I who acknowledges its own temporality (2001:171).
In other words, phenomenal time is constituted as the subjects
external continu-ity, marked by the notion of finitude within which
the subject relates to its past as to its factu-ality and perceives
its future as its possibility. Lived time, by contrast, is the time
established by the creative activity of the self (173) and refers
primarily to the body. It is time experienced
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somatically that manifests its past and future by continually
changing its relationship to its surroundings. However, while both
phenomenal and lived time could be said to be in the sub-ject;
objective time, most often conceptualized as a linear temporal
progression from the past to the future, is placed outside the
subject, or rather, the subject is placed outside of objective
time. This means that while with each respective viewing a film may
manifest or give rise to an entirely different phenomenal as well
as lived temporality, depending on the viewers psy-chosomatic
disposition and engagement, there still remains an element of
unchanged objective time, fixed and made inert by the films length,
tempo, and the structure of its internal, content- determining
relationships.
In the cinematic production propelled by the cinematic
narrative, it is also the objective tem-poral relationship between
the speed of recording and the speed of projection that remains
unchanged. The most striking feature of a number of FluxFilms is
the fact that they temporal-ize the fixed and inert ratios between
the recording and the projecting speed. In distorting one of the
constituting features of cinematographic time, these films subvert
the very notion of objective time.
Disappearing Music for Face is based on a 1964 score by Mieko
Shiomi, which reads:
Performers begin the piece with a smile and during the duration
of the piece change the smile very slowly and gradually to no
smile. (in Friedman 1990:49)
It was performed in 1966 by Yoko Ono and shot using a high-speed
slow-motion camera. The effect of this was that Onos disappearing
smile, filmed in eight seconds of real time, resulted in 11 minutes
of screen time when projected at normal speed. Because of the
colossal dispro-portion between the duration of the action
performed in real time and its highly temporally extended
transposition to projection time (the proportion being 1:82), as
well as the extreme close up that frames Onos lips, chin, and cheek
in a way that temporalizes the spatial dimension of the shot by
magnifying it thus creating a temporal stretch Disappearing Music
for Face manifests extreme temporal thickness. The term temporal
thickness is often used in time theory to refer to the rich texture
of the temporal dimension composed of complete specious presents.
As Francisco Varela explains in The Specious Present: A
Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness, the specious present,
which is the smallest unit of temporal thickness is itself composed
of multiple temporal streamings (1997:n.p.).
Although Varela resorts to a spatial metaphor that of a field
with a center representative of the now moment, bounded by a
horizon or fringe of what has just past, also referred to as
retention, and the horizon or fringe of what is about to happen,
also referred to as pro-tention he insists on the mobility of these
horizons, the texture of the movement, and the integration of the
different frameworks of temporal perception (1997:n.p.). The effect
this multi dimensional streaming has on perception in general and
the perception of objects in particular is that it isolates and
magnifies them in the sense of bringing them closer to the
observer. As Midori Yoshimoto points out in Into Performance:
Japanese Women Artists in New York, the original intention of
Shiomis score was to visualize a diminuendo of music by human
action (2005:145). In other words, the intention was to transpose
the gradual and extenuating nearing of the threshold of audibility
(often accompanied by the minute tuning of the listeners aural
attention to the subtleties of liminal sound), to a simple movement
human beings perform on a daily basis. In the film version of
Disappearing Music for Face, this diminuendo is effectu-ated by two
intertwined cinematic elements: a tempo just quick enough for the
movement of the disappearing smile to remain discernible throughout
the film and a shot just long (far away) enough for the shapes in
the shot to remain discernible as belonging to a human face. Both
the fact that the movement of the disappearing smile is almost
imperceptible but never quite per-ceived as static, and that the
features of Onos face appear abstract but never melt entirely into
a nonfigurative composition, point to a threshold phenomenon, a
state of permanent oscillation. For Varela, the
retentive-protentive temporal integration produced by the specious
present is a
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83
permanently oscillating, perma-nently slipping process. While
retention retains phases of the perceptual act by causing a
pro-gressive slowing down of the velocity of perception or a
slip-page (Varela 1997:n.p.); pro-tention links this slippage into
affection. The parallel work-ing of retention and protention thus
slows down the velocity of perception while producing an affective
coloring that feeds back into retention and in this way produces a
cumulative decelera-tion, a gradually distending dis-tension. By
distorting the ratio between recording time and projection time,
Disappearing Music for Face introduces what could be called a
creative warp into objective cinematographic time within which the
affec-tively colored mellower, softer, looser distension of the
spe-cious present occurs. The colos-sal discrepancy between the
average duration of a disappear-ing smile in real life and 11
min-utes of cinematic duration causes a progressive temporal
swelling and alters the viewers sense of lived time by slowing down
her breathing and bodily movement. What this means is that
Disappearing Music for Face effec-tively perpetuates the production
of time within the films objective duration and does precisely that
which Bergson accused cinematographic or inert time of being
incapable of doing.
The Continuity of Discontinuity
In a similar fashion, Nam June Paiks 1964 Zen for Film, engages
the viewer in the produc-tion of time as a simultaneously
continuous and discontinuous phenomenon. However, unlike
Disappearing Music for Face, it does not belong to the category of
slow films. Consisting of a roll of 16 mm film, a clear leader
whose objective or closed running time is approximately 30 minutes,
Paiks Zen for Film exposes the cinematic medium the blank celluloid
and the projection apparatus to the cinematic gaze, devoid of any
recorded material or any cinematic narrative-created temporal
content. Instead, the film discloses what Paik has termed abstract
time: time without contents (in Kaye 2007:52). This notion, as the
Fluxus scholar Bruce Jenkins points out, is not only in sharp
contrast to the pastness of filmic representation, with its
indexical claims to capturing actual, pre-existing phenomena, it
also
posits a concrete present in its moving-image tale of the
celluloids journey through the transport mechanism of the projector
[...,] a tale unique in each telling as Zen for Film was visibly
changed by each viewing and maintained on its celluloid surface a
record of those observations and screenings in the form of
accumulated scratches, dust, dirt, rips and splices. (1993:137)
Figure 3. Mieko Shiomi, Disappearing Music for Face, 1966.
(Photo by Peter Moore Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC)
This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.
Please refer to the print version.
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Paradoxically, the temporal structure of Zen for Film seems to
be both continuous and discontinuous.
This structure is best understood through the prism of Kitaro
Nishidas notion of the con-tinuity of discontinuity (1970:6), part
of his Zen- as well as Bergson-influenced theory of tem-porality.
This theory is rooted in the logic of basho whereby basho means
that in which and is permanently engaged in a dialectical
relationship with that which or in other words, the content of
basho. The present is, according to Nishida, the basho of time and
so is the self (67). Continuous time, flowing from the past to the
future is both determined by discontinu-ity and is located in
discontinuity, discontinuity being the basho of continuity. In
other words, every new moment is different from the previous
precisely because it is discontinuous. Each present is severed from
the past present by a non-present, which means that continuous time
disappears and is determined again in the next present.
This discontinuous time is located in something Nishida calls
the eternal present: The past flows while turning to the present,
whereas the future flows while turning to the present. Our world
comes from the present and returns to the present (117). The notion
of the eter-nal present as the basho of time, or that in which time
turns ought to be understood in the context of the Zen tradition
where the word eternal does not refer to transcendence. Not coming
from the two world heritage characteristic of the Western
metaphysical tradition in which immanent time is a linear
construct, a sequential progression of instants, while eternity is
placed entirely outside time, Nishidas eternal present is a
dialectical concept rooted in the Zen Buddhist notion of
momentariness and impermanence. This notion suggests that all
exist-ents without exception are nonsubstantive and nonpermanent
events, which, instead of mov-ing in time, are temporal in nature.
All existents thus last only a moment they come into existence and
go out of existence immediately afterwards. If a perceptual object
m changes and from m mutates to m*, the state of m-ness will be
destroyed and replaced by the state of m*-ness, which will in turn
be destroyed and replaced by the state of m+-ness and so on ad
infini-tum. The rapid succession as well as gradual variation in
structure will make the states of m, m* and m+ appear identical and
continuous and each present moment or existent will both deter-mine
the percipients mode of perception and determine the next moment or
existent. It is this processual dialectics of the eternal present
or the continuity of discontinuity that Zen for Film brings
intofocus.
In revealing a vast amount of flickering visual detail, Zen for
Film resembles a microscopic view of a surface normally thought to
be homogenous and temporally persistent in its mono-lithic identity
if observed by the naked human eye but which turns into a flux of
swarm-ing micro life, full of incessant biological transactions,
when magnified. From the perspective of the Zen Buddhist notion of
momentariness the static film frames are moments or exist-ents.
Each subtly different from the next, their succession is translated
into continuity by the working of the projecting apparatus, much
like the momentariness of noncontinuous exist-ents is translated
into continuous time by the working of the human brain. Because of
the deteriorating nature of the material the celluloid as well as
the numerous textural altera-tions inflicted by multiple
projections, Zen for Film will in fact reveal the discontinuous,
per-manently changing nature of continuity if viewed several times
in a row. If, however, viewed several times over a longer period of
time, such as a few years or a decade, the representational
function of memory, which tends to freeze and archive the most
essential features (the rea-son why we remember the smallness of a
child we have not seen for 10 years, rather than the color of his
or her eyes, and are invariably surprised by the fact that this
essential feature has been replaced by another, contradictory
feature, that of bigness), might make the film seem unchanged. This
is due to the unifying nature of the subjects sense of phenomenal
time, which has the power to thingify occurrences, processes, and
phenomena experienced in order to turn them into milestones within
the subjects perception of its own deployment in time as a
tem-porally persistent, continuous entity. The temporal position
from which Zen for Film will appear unchanged, thus itself also a
continuous and temporally persistent entity, is that of a
perspec-
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tivally construed continuity, which testifies to the possibility
of alterity, namely discontinuity. As regards the immediate
temporal experience of watching Zen for Film, it, too, shows itself
to be woven entirely of the threads generated by the viewers
perception, whether her retentive- protentive or associative mode
of attention. Because the film has no cinematic content and because
the only content is indeed the viewers own virtual content, the
temporal dimension of Zen for Film is inherently performative. This
is to say that, unlike the films with a cinematic content, whose
tempo and narrative temporality operate along a mirror-like
actual-virtual axis, involving the actual images and the viewers
interpretative processing of these images, Zen for Film unfolds
entirely in the arena of the viewers virtuality, thus making her
inner temporality performative. The relationship between the
percipients performance of her virtual content and what Paik has
termed the abstract time of the blank celluloid reflects one of the
primary pos-tulates of Zen, which, as Nishida suggests in reference
to numerous Zen masters, is that form is emptiness and emptiness
form ([1987] 1993:103).
Zen for Film is a processual interaction between form and
emptiness the form given to emptiness by the viewing subject,
which, while becoming the object of the subjects contempla-tion
reciprocally gives form to the viewing subject. This dialectical
determination is the eter-nal present whose paradoxical formulation
indicates that while the fleeting existents can only appear as
momentary configurations of emptiness, emptiness can in turn only
appear in and asexistents.
The Braiding of Lived and Phenomenal Time in Durational
Performance
This continuous mutual configuration between form and emptiness,
between the already- existing and the not-yet-existing, created in
the present activity as a movement from the pres-ent to the present
and from the created to the creating (Nishida [1987] 1993:108), is
further deployed on two different but mutually configuring time
scales that of lived and phenomenal time in Fluxus durational
performance, most notably Alison Knowless Identical Lunch.
Described by Knowles as her noonday meditation (in Corner
1973:1), The Identical Lunch was first discovered as a temporal
objet trouv (an action Knowles performed every day), by her fellow
artist Philip Corner and subsequently elevated into a formal score
(1, emphasis added). The formal score read: a tunafish sandwich on
wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a glass of
buttermilk or a cup of soup (1). From the moment of its formal
inception in February 1969, Knowles performed the score for a
period of over a year, at exactly the same place, the Riss
Restaurant in New York, and approximately the same time of day.
Numerous other performers have also performed the score since then,
at the Riss and elsewhere. As Jim Maya puts it in the Journal of
the Identical Lunch (Knowless collection of her own and other
per-formers observations): The identical lunch food demands little
or no thought: the surrounding activities take all your thought:
The waitress, her hair, her lips, the napkins. Their embossments or
lack of embossments. The stools, the chairs, the heat. When youve
finished You hardly know youve eaten (in Knowles 1971:n.p.). This
view, essentially expounding the transparency of habit which, once
practice-ingrained and sequence-locked, no longer requires the
per-formers full attention and frees it up for the unforeseen, the
marginal, and the accidental is shared by numerous other
performers. Knowless own entries reflect her engagement with time
as a process of becoming a continuous elaboration through
differentiation and range from observations about the varying
quality of the fish: tunafish is very watery; it is mid-week (11);
the shape of the sandwich: for the first time the sandwich comes
uncut (12); the difference in staff who serve her: L is young and
Greek (13); to the impact she has on others, such as when a burn on
her cheek makes those sitting opposite her eat hurriedly and leave
(16).
By thematizing the continuous emergence of continuously
proliferating differentiations, The Identical Lunch renders
palpable the Nishidian notion of the eternal present. Here, the
phenomenal continuity of the noonday lunch situation, part of the
performers own continuity
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and thus history as well as narrative identity, is determined
always anew in the discontinuity of disparate moments of which the
performers lived time consists her physical disposition, the smell
of the soup coming from the kitchen, the sogginess of the sandwich,
or the absence ofnapkins.
Although determined by the performers past experiences, her
perceptual frame is man-ifested in the present, and it is in the
present that the prospective framing of futural events occurs.
Every past and every future is in this sense manifested in the
present and occurs always and only in the present. This means that
the performers phenomenal continuity cannot be a preexperiential
given but that it becomes apparent or, is constituted only in
situations that frame the disparate sequence of events as
continuity. Both situational continuity and per-sonal continuity
are very closely linked to what might be termed experiential
velocity, the speed with which we process experiences and relegate
them to the rank of sameness or usu-alness. In perceptual terms,
this rank equals background. Much like Cages 1952 49330 which
requires the performer to remain silent for the duration of 4
minutes and 33 seconds and in this way draws attention to all
events in time-space framed by this duration The Identical Lunch
draws attention to the fact that there is no silence and no
background. Rather, it amplifies the transparency of
habitualization, which, paradoxically, is only felt when disrupted
by an irregu-larity, which in turn gives rise to a change in
affective coloring. In this sense, the score initiates the
durational performer in a de-transparentization of the process of
habitualization by collapsing the opposition between lived and
phenomenal time. In contrast to lived time, which is essen-tially
an interaction between the environment and the somatic self as
expressive of past habit-ualizations and futural anticipations;
phenomenal time is constituted as an externally viewed, larger
scale amalgamation of the same habitualizations and anticipations.
Phenomenal time forms the horizon of the subjects past and future
within which a narrative identity is produced. Within this horizon
the subject comes to view herself externally, as a coherent whole,
a person who always fights injustice or laughs in the face of life.
However, if phenomenal continuity is viewed from the perspective of
lived experience that temporalizes and unifies past-and-future
inside the present (Nishida [1987] 1993:137), phenomenal time is
always already part of the temporalization and cannot posit the
subjects past and future as some sort of external other.
Habit formation is thus the structuring activity of
temporalization in which the past configures the present and the
present simultaneously configures the future, thus creating new
perceptual matrixes and consolidating old ones. In this sense, The
Identical Lunch performs the braiding of lived and phenomenal time,
which, like the continuity of discontinuity, does not denote two
opposed processes or species of time, but exemplifies unification
through perpetual differenti-ation. In involving the performer in a
close examination of emergent affective tonalities active in the
constitution of her lived temporality, which further leads to the
formation of attitudes and personality, The Identical Lunch
sensitizes the performer to the process of personal becoming. This
process relates to the performers phenomenal continuity in the same
way that temporaliza-tion relates to time. Much as time is
temporalization and not its externally viewed and atem-poral other,
phenomenal continuity is personal becoming the formation and
differentiation of likes, dislikes, emotional and cognitive habits
and not a congealed whole personality or identity. It is thus not
only the elaboration and differentiation of the world around the
per-former that takes place within the durational temporal activity
of Knowless score, but also her own individuation.
In this sense, The Identical Lunch, like One for Violin Solo,
Disappearing Music for Face, and Zen for Film, performs time by
involving the percipient/performer in listening deeply to the
dialec-tical, ordinary-musical, actual-virtual, lived-phenomenal
production of existence, the only dif-ference being that of scale.
Whether lasting several minutes or a year, these pieces produce
pure duration, a qualitative, multisensorially texturized,
musicalized immersion in the thickness ofexistence.
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87
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