EASTER SPECIAL 1/3

It’s Easter Sunday, tiresome stage 3 of restrictions, and I start losing my focus. I start running out of my referential low hanging fruits, too. Or just getting slow. But I am still keen to blur the imaginary dividers between art and life, cause and consequence, intention and chance. So my plan for today it to pick three heaviest art books I have on my desk, open each of them at random page and present a work from that page as pertinent to my practice. In case that artist would already be represented on this blog, I would keep randomly opening that book until I bump into someone still unblogged.

This is Easter Special entry 1 of 3, based on Sound Art as a Medium of Art, edited by Peter Weibel. The book opens at spread 254-255, artist Max Eastley whom I’ve never heard of before.

Max Eastley (b. 1944, UK)
A Procession of Ghosts, 2000

A sound sculpture consisting of suspended steel wire scratching a sheet of paper underneath. Eastley shares the story of how he woke up from his night dream about a spiritist seance where spirit was mediated to scribble messages on a sheet of paper – the sound of scribble coinciding with the sound of this sound sculpture in the adjacent room.

This certainly has quite a few parallels with my own sonic explorations. The most direct one involves me waking in the middle of the night to a particularly sonorous wind outside my window. I immediately rigged my recording equipment and later processed my sonic catch into a rather ghostly piece. On the other hand, I also have quite a minimalistic piece “Small Sounds” based on recordings made by placing some contact mics on a thin ice – sound made by wind and gravity causing the mics, the ice and the water underneath to brush against each other. I did not think of it in terms of sound sculpture at the time, but can easily envision it now and would be willing to re-stage it as such (and not necessarily on ice, which is interesting, but also somewhat problematic).

Eastley is described as being interested in relations between music, art, nature and chance. I would not choose same words myself, but I think that there is a significant overlap between our interests. For me music is a variety of art, and I am more interested in sound than music, but in terms of relations between various artistic media, it’s definitely on my list. Nature is also a problematic concept for me, as it suggests existence of unnatural things which can only emerge on a basis of arbitrary classifications. But in terms of nature as the world, the physical reality we live in – and that I am trying to engage with and explore through art, that kind of relationship between art and nature is at the centre of my practice (field recordings being a particular subset of it). And chance – sure thing, even if I am not so sure whether chance exists, it’s a matter of definition. Thinking of agency in terms of actor-network theory I find intentionality very much chance-like and vice-versa. And I do explore it a lot, being more interested in emerging rather than intentionally encoded meanings in my work.

So what were the chances that I would open that book at an entry on an artist of such a relevance for me? It boils down to definition of chance again.