High Performance, Spring/Summer 1982

RPM The Art Record

“Means are, then, media when they are not just preparatory or preliminary…A phonographic disc is a vehicle of an effect and nothing more.”

– John Dewey, Art as Experience ( 1934)

The image of a spiral is a marking in relation to time. It represents both the containment (storage) and the processing (retrieval) of coded information. It has literal as well as allegorical connotations in high technology. In the present circumstance, phonograph records contain sets of spirals pressed into a hard plastic vinyl. These spirals store electromagnetic signals in a linear sequence which, when properly activated, will produce sound.

Throughout history—in fact, a record of time—the image of spirals has recurred in various forms and in different symbolic contexts; it is one of our most potent and primitive signs, indelibly pressed on the human consciousness. The significance of the spiral can be found in numerous representations of natural and cultural life. It usually appears in the gestural imagery of children somewhere between two and three years, a period when many children begin to draw by rotating the arm or wrist in a steady rhythmical motion. These “scribbles” and other spiral markings are observable in both abstract and concrete permutations throughout the natural/physical sciences and in the social sciences as they apply directly to everyday objects and events.

For the philosopher John Dewey, phonographic discs were regarded as a technological media capable of reproducing sound effects. Contingent upon the listener’s discretion, of course, any record which manufactured these effects could incite various impulses and sensations which, on a superficial level, had all the attributes of a genuine experience. According to Dewey, such a response to a sound removed from its originating source could only produce a surrogate experience for the listener. His essential concern was that mimesis should not be confused with art. Indeed, the reality felt in experiencing a work of art first-hand was a reality that went beyond that of effects. To touch or hear or see or feel this reality, one had to experience the phenomenon directly as part of being in the world. A real experience was one which unfolded in time. Yet the vitality was such that it could be felt much beyond the time of the actual encounter; ideally, it would become part of the beholder, fully absorbed into consciousness.

In spite of the mind-boggling, computerized sound-splitting divides routinely used in recording studios of the 1980’s, the concern for a meaningful aesthetic posture, of a human sort, is no less of an issue today. The problem as to how one experiences reality—regardless of the terms applied to it—through a qualitative sensory/mind process never ceases to be a viable concern. Today it appears as a shared universal concern. Communications technology has made information about the “good life” increasingly more apparent to everyone. (Corporations still make profits, even in a severely recessionary economy.) Yet the reality of art as a truly heightened experiential encounter with life in the present environment seems far removed from the notion of reality currently acknowledged by the status quo, including educated people whose careers have advanced concomitant to the advances of the most recent technology.

One indication of this separation between art and everyday life is the recent retreat to purely decorative and imagistic motifs. Formerly embedded within a functional context in late Nineteenth Century artisanry, these updated motifs have been revived as relics of a post-modern redundancy. Instead of attempting to synthesize profound individual feelings with a shared sense of everyday reality, artists are encouraged to fill the vapidity of technolopolis with mindless adjunctive euphoria. Ideologically, this resignation toward aesthetic detachment disguises art as something both “safe” and visually commodifiable. Yet if it is to remain viable in our culture, art cannot be removed from the reality of today’s world. There is a certain privilege involved in recognizing this reality; from the fact of global consciousness, there can be no turning back.

Given the current priority toward absence of intentionality in serious art-making—wherein the content of emotional expressivity is exuberantly detached and self-effacing—the belief in an essential human experience becomes ever more crucial and necessary. With the manipulation of various media—electronically, economically, and politically—often beyond immediate comprehension, the challenge to our perceptual modes of cognition and our sensibilities has become imminent.

The fact that records are capable of transmitting a variety of sound effects with ultra-precision in reproductive quality had made it increasingly difficult to differentiate a “real time” event from that of a recording. This issue, in particular, is addressed on the album with Piotr Kowalski’s “time machine” in which spoken phonemes are reversed in time a fraction of a second and then laminated beside the forward progression of time: a concept most appropriate to the fantasmagorical configurations spoken by William Burroughs. In essence, the sound industry has been able to achieve mimesis with uncanny accuracy. The delivery of reproductive effects is utterly convincing.

For the majority of artists represented here, the record’s primary function is that of a tool. In most cases, the content is less involved with mimesis or effects, and more directed toward communication. Although different in spirit and content, Edwin Schlossberg and Douglas Davis—two of the record’s contributors—are interested in communicating ideas and feelings on an intimate one-to-one scale. Records have opened up another possibility for their narrative works: a direct channel for the spoken word. Davis is interested in inhabiting the listener’s space, of forming a dyad with the listener, and thereby to appropriate the feeling of being in the present-tense. Schlossberg sees the recording medium as a convenient technology for contemplating poetic language aloud and for projecting “metaphors” into time.

As a group of performances, this record/exhibition carries a certain iconoclastic underpinning: this is metaphorically stated within the album’s title: Revolutions Per Minute. Not only is the exhibition an accessible one, existing outside as well as inside the gallery location, it is also an exhibition which can be played on a turntable almost any time of day or night. It can be heard simultaneously by people in various parts of the world. In theory, there are no spatial or geographical boundaries—other than political ones.

Rather than decry the missing “aura” of art, Revolutions Per Minute celebrates the potential of art as a means transformed into a media. To echo Dewey’s idea, the record has the potential to move outside the preparatory or preliminary stages and toward a sense of inspired communication with the listener; this is not a condition, however, which can be imposed. Inspired communication can only be suggested through the way the medium is used. Whether we are listening to Buckminster Fuller discuss his economic and evolutionary rites of passage or Margaret Harrison’s brilliant recitation of opening lines by various women authors situated over a history of two-hundred years, we are getting information on a first-hand basis. It is not an attempt at documentation so much as a prepared situation in the studio or home transformed into a reality of its own; each message is unique to itself and is received on a different level of comprehension by each listener.

Inevitably, the question will arise as to the real distinction (if any) between an “art record” and any other type of record. (It is curious that the term “recording artist” has by now become common fare in the industry.) Records by artists—other than musicians, composers, and comedians—are by no means a recent phenomenon in the history of the avant-garde. There are Dada records, Bauhaus records, and post-war Nouveaux Realistes records—to name a few—so what makes Revolutions Per Minute all that “revolutionary”? Is there, perhaps, some new criteria at stake involving issues of formal/technical restraint in relation to the art world and the commercial recording industry? (The final issue is indirectly related to Duchamp’s restraint in his choice of Readymades.)

In listening to this particular record, one might consider the following three interpretations:

1)Literal Interpretation—The phonographic disc revolves in time and space as we hear it (Moholy-Nagy: time + space = motion). The purely mechanical operation is not any different from the operation of other records. The only distinction is a theoretical one—that the album’s title compels us to consider the “literal” means of the record more openly. In doing so, a plethora of investigations move into the realm of creative/communicative possibility.

2) Instrumentalist Interpretation—The infrastructure peculiar to “art records” may defy the notion of any category given to traditional aesthetic modes. Instead of isolating “the arts” according to a mediumistic definition, the experience of art evolves through the interaction of various disciplines in which psychological, social, economic, and political interactions are clearly apparent. As Joseph Beuys has remarked on several occasions: either art exists as inclusive of the whole social structure or is holds no relevance. Of course, not everybody wants to participate in art. Even so, a person’s decision to abstain from art should be an open choice, not one of social exemption or coercion. Records are informational media with the potential of exhibiting art ideas across broad socioeconomic strata and in many types of situations.

3) Contextual Interpretation—Each artist on this album has used the medium as a context in which to apply a specific locus of ideas. In other words, the album is not made up of “recording artists,” but of artists who have discovered a possibility for appropriating a standardized technology to meet their terms of work.

A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world.

––Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Both as a political/social/artistic tool and in terms of specific content, Revolutions Per Minute functions on many levels. Some artists regard the medium as a carrier of metaphors, while others prefer to deliver more explicit ideas and information. There are essentially five types of recordings (categories of intentionality) on this album:

1) Sound Work Compositions—These tracks emphasize properties of abstract (“concrete”) sound. Terry Fox and David Smyth perform works without any spoken text, while Jud Fine and Piotr Kowalski rely specifically upon verbalized information. Vincenzo Agnetti uses both instrumentation and text in a composite form, playing one against the other sequentially.

2) Allegorical Narratives—Less related to abstraction, these narrative works have a more accessible “literary” content; this category of recordings includes works by Margaret Harrison, Chris Burden, Conrad Atkinson, Eleanor Antin, Douglas Davis, and William Burroughs (with Piotr Kowalski)

3) Situations and Encounters—The emphasis is given to an event, either real or fabricated. In the work of Komar/Melamid, the event is staged in “real time” as a theatrical skit. In Ida Applebroog’s “Really, Is That a Fact?”, the party dialogues are manipulated electronically to simulate a situation which, in fact, never existed. With Beuys, Ed Schlossberg, and the architectural group SITE, the concern is not with fiction, but with actual documentation of an experience.

4) Songs—Three songs have been contributed by Les Levine, Tom Shannon, and Hannah Wilke. In the country-western style lyrics of Les Levine, a current topical issue is addressed in a humorous, straight-forward manner. Tom Shannon’s song reflects a counter-cultural position in current song-writing by using sci-fi lyrics and special sound effects. In Hannah Wilke’s “Stand Up,” the commentary is intended as an operative social metaphor; the implications are clearly sexual with a curiously obverse relationship to Duchampian iconography.

5) Heuristic Texts—These tracks include artists’ theories in action or theories embedded within some type of narrative structure. Included are contributions by Buckminster Fuller, Newton and Helen Harrison, and Todd Siler. Joseph Beuys and Ed Schlossberg overlap between this category and “Situations and Encounters” in that the heuristic content of their verbalizations is essential to the feeling of presence in their art. With Beuys, the ideas are structured in relation to a “Public Dialogue” which is the context from which he is speaking. With Schlossberg, his unrehearsed spoken meditation is an intensely private affair.

The purpose of this Introduction is not one of critical-historical commentary; rather it is to assist in the location of a theoretical framework which appropriately presents a method for addressing the works in this album. In recent years, with alternative networks allowing for air play of artists’ records plus the converging of mainstream electronic rock music with that of “new wave” concept albums, the energetic force of such ventures in the commercial marketplace has broadened the appeal of these works considerably. The likelihood of expanding the art networks into the commercial mainstream is dependent upon three important factors: promotion, education, and the willingness of major record companies to take the risk.

In spite of an uncertain economy, the decade of the ‘80s has brought a more open-ended structure of dissemination for recordings by artists both in Europe and in the United States. By seeking out avenues of financial backing, access to recording equipment, and expertise in advanced production techniques, experimental composers and performance artists have re-introduced a more significant use of recording media. Such outlets will continue to prove valuable among artists whose works are otherwise restructed to irregular engagements in lofts, galleries, colleges, and museum settings. Revolutions Per Minute is one example of how such exhibitions can be packaged. Undoubtedly, it will set a precedent for other related works to follow.

In addition to the twenty-four artists and artist-groups whose works are the components of this record/exhibition, there are five individuals who have spent many long days in the studio and man y months in the preparation of the result that is here. The project was instigated over two years ago by Jeff Gordon, the director of the Greene Street Studios and the technical producer of this album. The chief technician Paul Stevens proved insightful both in his engineering of numerous studio sessions and in all post-production phases of the producer of this album. The chief technician Paul Stevens proved insightful both in his engineering of numerous studio sessions and in all post-production phases of the project. Michael Rubinstein, the studio manager, worked closely with the artists in arranging studio time and in caring for the necessary details. Juanita Gordon, whose diligent support of the project became an indispensable ingredient to its success, provided the graphic lay-out and package design for the gallery staff, who supported the idea from its inception and who gave considerable energy in order that the project might achieve its realization. It is to the credit of all of these people that Revolutions Per Minute (The Art Record) now offers the medium a series of unconventional messages: a testimony, in fact, that art is accessible to all who care to listen.

–ROBERT C. MORGAN