SWANS

February 11, 1994

From the first exhibition in October 1993 until February 1994, we had managed to mount a constant variety of events at the FLAT. With these precedents set and funding from outside sources, we felt an acute need to keep the momentum going. Our principle policy at the FLAT was to allow “anyone to do anything in the space”, and so testing this premise I decided at that time to orchestrate a minimal audio event.
My basic idea was to install large speakers in the gallery, publicize the event, and subject the audience to the loudest, most disturbing music that I could find; in this case, the aggressive band Swans. (Hence the title of the exhibition.) Though others in the FLAT, particularly Barry, were opposed to this plan, posters were made and displayed, none the less.
However, about three days before the event a disagreement occurred between Barry and I over the logistics of the evening, and this friction catalyzed a decision to orchestrate our first group event. This conflict in the group was in retrospect positive, for it created the energy for us to explore a new genre of art: performance art (or ‘happenings’). In an e-mail conversation with Barry he described the motivations for SWANS in this way:

Allen:               How did SWANS come about?
Barry:              We came back from the NSA after hanging an exhibition. I picked up a joker card at the gate of the Botanic Gardens. It started raining. I think we were a bit depressed about the show we’d just hung, and:
A: we hadn’t had a show for a while,
B: we wanted to maintain the record breaking amount/run of shows we’d notched up,
C: it was an idea,
D: none of the above.
Allen:               How did it then develop from there?
Barry:              We talked about it, then we did it, wait its coming to me… I think it was something like this: “We don’t have anything for next week yet, ohmygod, lets just play music... Let’s just play SWANS until everyone leaves. We can’t just play music so let’s have a restaurant. We can just photocopy some food. We can make menus. Then people order, but they don’t know what they’re getting... I can’t write... Jay can write. Yes, good… Well, we can use body parts and play the music very loud… OK… Good let’s get to work.[1]

Our collaboration began when we agreed to all work together on a performance for that evening using the working title of SWANS as our theme. It was determined that we would build this performance around the original Swans noise music. We decided that it would be a multi‑faceted event, in which we would each be doing different things around our individual interpretations of the central theme of ‘swans’.
A unifying idea, however, developed and this was the notion of converting the ‘swan’ into a consumable food. This then evolved into the idea to make the FLAT space into a faux-restaurant for the evening. Tables and chairs were laid out, with the plan that the audience would enter the space like restaurant patrons and sit down at set tables while the noise played on. In a subtle reference to the common practice of providing refreshment at openings, here ‘waiters’ served wine to the ‘customers’. A ‘menu’ (the only surviving document of the event) was created by Jay Horsburgh and Barry.
The text for the menu, provided by Horsburgh, was laced with Barry's drawings and diagrams. Formatted to resemble a menu, the content addressed what was more poetic than edible, an example of poetry created through the process of ‘cut-ups’. The cover read:

...once having dissected a bird, long (remember) its nautical confirmation: the ease with which every‑thing about a ship is mimicked, with the thoracic cage in the form of a hull and the assemblage of the ribs upon the keel, the stem or the ships bow of the breastbone, the scapular girdle where the wing’s oar slips in, and the pelvic girdle where the poop erects itself... [2]

Horsburgh, who had just returned from Canada, where he had been living for the last seven years; was introduced to us by his neighbor, Melissa Marrins. Though only twenty years old at the time, he was very well informed about many historical avant-garde movements, and engaged in reading a number of literary texts. He became an active participant in the gallery at this stage. The texts that he brought to our attention on the Dadaists, the Situationists and the writings of the Beat poets amoung others, proved to be highly influential in the continuing evolution of the FLAT project.

Horsburgh, who saw himself as both a writer and an actor, had a particular interest in the work and the literary strategies of William Burroughs. With Barry, he re-visited the surrealist technique of automatic writing and worked with another experimental writing process known as ‘cut-ups’.
Burroughs, in an essay titled, The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin speaks not only about the cut-up method, but also its historical precedents with the Surrealists. He describes what may be seen as its birth in performance:

At a Surrealist rally in the 1920s, Tristan Tzara, the man from nowhere, proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued and wrecked the theater. Andre Breton expelled Tzara from the movement and ground the ‘cut-ups’ on the Freudian couch.[3]

He goes on to follow the historical development for the ‘cut-up’, and to assert that this seemingly random method results not in ‘nonsense’, but rather in some new ‘meaning’. He writes about Brion Gysin, an artist working in the late 50s:

In the summer of 1959, Brion Gysin, painter and writer, cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. ‘Minutes to Go’ resulted from this initial cut up experiment. ‘Minutes to Go’ contains unedited unchanged cut-ups emerging a quite coherent meaningful prose.[4]

The connection between collage and cut-ups is here noted, and this is important when one considers the use of ‘cut-up’ as a process that can operate across media. At the FLAT, artists had for sometime engaged in various practices that employed collage of visual images. Marrins had in her work, for example brought Madonna and Venus together with her own contemporary image. De Menezes had cut up found logos and signs from an ordinary phone book. In both, images were isolated and recombined to create new meanings.
But it was the introduction of the ‘cut-up’ as a literary tool that brought even more radical possibilities to the FLAT. This was important not only in the ‘literary’ works such as the SWANS Menu, but in the application to later sound material. Many of the sampled sound works that were to follow were created with variations on this basic ‘cut-up’ technique.
Burroughs addresses the connection between collage and ‘cut-ups’: The cut up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable, spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.[1]

The power of the ‘cut-up’, however, goes beyond its assertion as a new process and even its claim to be a tool for accessing new meanings. There was implicit in its methodology (or lack of one) something that seemed resonant with the spirit of the FLAT. Indeed, for Tzara, this process speaks to the idea of ‘anti-mastery’ and hints at some almost political egalitarianism; an art for everyone as Burroughs points out.

Tzara said. “Poetry is for everyone.” Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being ‘something to do’. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about.[2]

For the SWANS performance, Barry, Moe and I dressed as waiters in tuxedos and offered the audience/diners the ‘cut-up’ menu. When each made a selection, we then brought them photostatted, cut‑out body parts. These ‘starters’ included hearts, lungs, and kidneys, etc. The chef’s specialty was a concoction made up of a plate of chains (posing as pasta) and a show‑room dummy dressed like a cooked pig. The disturbing sounds of Swans created an audio equivalent to the implicit violence of this ‘cannibalistic’ event. Later in the evening, in keeping with the disjointed unpredictable nature of the evening Moonlight in an impromptu participatory act changed the ‘sound track’. Barry recalled:

Moonlight arrived late in the running with a jazz cassette and insisted on playing it, the evening had acquired somewhat aggressive overtones, and I think this helped to dissipate the energy in quite a positive way, but this could be a substance induced delusion.[3]

Meanwhile, Horsburgh and Yvette De Bruin, an artist visiting from Pretoria, sat in opposite corners of the room facing each other. Jay, half-naked, had combed peanut butter through his hair, while De Bruin was dressed as a nurse. Above Horsburgh’s head hung a Vermeer painting and a hot bulb. The heat from the bulb made the peanut butter burn and smell. De Bruin, in contrast, was cooled by a small fan that steadily blew air. Each sat silent and still for the entire ‘performance’. It was as if scenes from different plays had been ‘cut-up’ and collaged; presented simultaneously in order that they might collide and therefore create a new narrative.
All at the same time, wine was consumed, viewers were served (with ‘images’), two performers engaged in some private acts unmindful of the audience, and a deafening music roared. In an assault on the senses, these combined to create a kind of ‘total’ experience.

In the book, Total Art - Environments, Happenings and Performance, Adrian Henri discusses the importance of Richard Wagner’s idea of Gesamkunstwerk, or ‘total art work’

Such a work like one of Wagner’s music‑dramas, sets out to dominate, even overwhelm, flooding the spectator/hearer with sensory impressions of different kinds. It is not meant as information but as an experience.[4]

Writing about the redefinition of ‘theatricality’ in installation and the happenings/performances of the 1960’s, Nicholas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry also make reference to Richard Wagner’s notion of Gesamtkunstwerk. They point to the connection between these contemporary art forms and his ideal of some creative synthesis of poetry and music. However, though they locate the roots of contemporary installation/performance within the, “visual and dynamic framework of the operatic stage” articulated by Wagner; they seem to regard his conception as incomplete and the term “theatrical” as inadequate. Instead they employ the term “carnival”, a notion explored in some depth by the Russian Linguist Mikhail Bakhtin.
Linguist, Julia Kristeva in the context of an essay on Bakhtin, spoke to this conception of the ‘theatrical’ that spills out of the stage. And defines the carnival as:

a spectacle, but without a stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking…The scene of the carnival, where there is no stage, no ‘theater, is thus both stage and life, game and dream, discourse and spectacle.[5]

Indeed, the multi-faceted aspect of the SWANS event, with several actions going on at once, was not unlike a three-ring circus. Though operating as a total sensory event, the idea of the ‘carnival’ perhaps provided a more appropriate model than the ‘staged’ opera, in which to describe such examples of performances that operated outside the domains of conventional theater.

Bakhtin’s description of the carnival and his explorations of the ‘carnivalesque’ define an essential aspect as being what he called ‘the material bodily principle’ which he says is connected to ‘grotesque realism’. Michael Gardiner in his seminal book on Bakhtin elaborates by saying:

This can be characterized as the incorporation of images depicting the material functions of the human body (eating drinking, defecation, copulation) into cultural or artistic texts.[6]

The SWANS performance, with its multi levels of experience, spoke to the intentions of ‘total theater’. Divergent as were the themes explored, all were unified in the locus of ‘the body’: The sounds and smells, the consumption of wine and ‘food’, the effects of heat and cool, the visceral and the assaultive.

Meijer in her Art Beat column described the event as “a graphic expose of the consumption of art, food and prosthetics.”[7] While Therese Owen, writing for the Weekly Mail, addressed the way in which the FLAT sought to engage with its viewers in a manner that was not passive; and captured the pandemonium of the evening:

There is a world going on underground, or in the studio flat belonging to Ledelle Moe to be more precise. Ledelle Moe together with fellow artists and best friends Siemon Allen and Thomas Barry have been holding some interesting and at times bizarre exhibits and there are no restrictions or boundaries in the gallery. People drink red wine, examine the art ‑ which sometimes examines them ‑ and generally a good time is had by all. The FLAT Gallery has become popular amongst the younger art crowd and is definitely working as an alternative to the more established galleries.[8]

The production of SWANS affirmed what would become now at the FLAT, a move away from the conventional presentation of sculpture or painting. The wall between viewer and performers fell, and it was in some ways indicative of our efforts to also collapse the barriers between our lives and our art. In the work that followed soon after this watershed event we continued to explore ‘life as art’ and to question the formal restriction of making studio-based work.
In conversation with Barry and then with Moe, each recalled the events:

Allen:               What do you remember about the SWANS performance?
Barry:              The playing of Swans only (except for Moonlight's cassette). Yvette in a green dress with a green wig. We (J S T) ran the restaurant (I think we even got tables from Sculpture) dishing up the photocopies randomly based on what people ordered, there was also the legs and a long chain billed spaghetti, and some vegetables. Do you have a copy of the menu? You’ll find some answers in there.
Allen:               Can you talk about the menu you and Jay compiled?
Barry:              Some of the images came out of my red book. I can’t remember exactly, maybe under hypnosis, possibly also a book Jay was reading at the time & some of his writing.[9]

Moe:                 SWANS was this impromptu evening. The name came from an album that Siemon played at the event, the entire evening. It was this hectic, grinding music. Between Jay, Thomas, myself and Siemon we organised this funky old pool table with some weird-arse, looking mannequin. It was some sort of a dinner-party environment where people would sit down as thought they were going to have dinner at this strange table.      
Allen:               Well, we converted the FLAT into a faux-restaurant.
Moe:                 So say you are looking at the FLAT, there was this table with a number of chairs. Everyone [the audience] was seated and there was this noise going on. And in the right hand corner was Jay on a chair. And in the left hand corner opposite Jay was Thomas’ friend from Pretoria, Yvette, in a nurses outfit. There was a dialogue between the two of them. And Jay had combed peanut butter into his hair in this stylized kind of…style. So we put a light on him which started baking the peanut butter making it smell. Right next to him was a picture of a Vermeer painting, of the woman pouring the milk. He was wearing the white like chef outfit. Yvette was in a nurse’s outfit with a fan blowing on her. What it meant, nobody really knew….                          
Allen:               They were like ornaments in the exhibition. They just sat there quietly while everybody engaged… It was like a participatory event where the whole FLAT was arranged like a restaurant. You would sit down and get a menu and you would be served wine like in a restaurant (or at an opening). You were then asked what you would like to choose from the menu, which was designed by Jay and Thomas… Somebody would choose for example number three and we would bring out prosthetics and weird stuff. Stuff that looked like food - photocopies of food. It was a really crazy event. The whole time there was this incredible noise [Swans]. Everyone got really drunk… We were all dressed up in tuxedos as waiters….
Moe:                 That was another thing, we really got dressed up for it. I think that night Thomas wore a dress for the event.[10]