Objet a

‘Love has many guises’

A recent article by The Guardian asked ‘experts in fields from science to fiction’ to respond to the question ‘What is love?’ The pyschotherapist Phillipa Perry offered an sideways perspective on the subject, looking back to the mercurial emotions of the ancients who manipulated the inflexible, singularity of language to instead come up with a variety of terms and definitions.  

“Unlike us, the ancients did not lump all the various emotions that we label “love” under the one word. They had several variations, including:

Philia which they saw as a deep but usually non-sexual intimacy between close friends and family members or as a deep bond forged by soldiers as they fought alongside each other in battle. Ludus describes a more playful affection found in fooling around or flirting. Pragma is the mature love that develops over a long period of time between long-term couples and involves actively practising goodwill, commitment, compromise and understanding. Agape is a more generalised love, it’s not about exclusivity but about love for all of humanity. Philautia is self love, which isn’t as selfish as it sounds. As Aristotle discovered and as any psychotherapist will tell you, in order to care for others you need to be able to care about yourself. Last, and probably least even though it causes the most trouble, eros is about sexual passion and desire. Unless it morphs into philia and/or pragma, eros will burn itself out.

Love is all of the above. But is it possibly unrealistic to expect to experience all six types with only one person. This is why family and community are important.”

• Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and author of Couch Fiction

Beatrice Gibson: Apparent Positions

First draft of a transcript of an ‘in conversation’ with the artist Beatrice Gibson, discussing her films ‘A Necessary Music’, and more recent works ‘Agatha’ and T’he Tiger’s Mind’. Recorded on Thursday 30th November at the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Art, Norwich, on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Apparent Positions: Beatrice Gibson’, 17th November - 9th December, 2012. 

Adam Pugh: […] Agatha is based on a dream by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew, who had a dream about a planet without speech, and because of that, and because of Beatrice’s work in general it, circles language, speech and voice. And as I see it anyway, the idea of the name and the nameless, and then from there the idea of being able to un-name things, to have things that are nameless. And I think the film taps into wider interests in Beatrice’s work about language in general, about words, but more importantly about voice and speech, and about how voice shapes place, and about how place can be spoken into being. And also about collective production, models of making work and collaborating and the sense of collaboration peculiar to music as well, as a model […]

AP: I think first of all to stick with this film (A Necessary Music), there’s a lot going on there and upon first viewing, I think it’s something that you don’t really take it all in. There are different layers and this is what intrigues me.

Beatrice Gibson: It’s quite fractured, it’s quite dense.

AP: Yes, and there’s this idea of thee several narratives as well. The narrator, Robert Ashley, speaks passages taken from the book The Invention of Morel, which is a book by the Argentinean writer Adolpho Bioy Cesares, there’s that there, and there’s the real collaboration of the real residents. They collaborated by writing their own script, didn’t they?

BG: Yes, but not the ones speaking, so it was a process of gathering words and speech beforehand, and then casting other residents, who then form an edited version of the words collected for the script.

AP: So creating a fictionalised version immediately places things at a remove?

BG: Yes, sort of redistributing words, detaching words from particular bodies and redistributing them amongst the wider community.

AP: And so you said in the synopsis, as well as elsewhere, that it (A Necessary Music) becomes a tale of representation itself, the difficulty of representation itself. Is that always this kind of plan, that you detach these words from their origins?

BG: Yes, well, it’s actually the first film that I ever made, and it’s very much a part of it. It’s really because about my relationship through the process. It sounds rather simplistic, but that representation… this film will only ever really be a fictional document of the process it’s trying to represent, and that representation itself is only ever a copy of something. It isn’t a thing in itself, it’s only ever a copy, and that’s picked up by The Invention of Morel. That’s why the story is used, because of the major themes in the novella. But it’s like a sort of, the first film revelation. What I’m presenting here is not really an island (Roosevelt Island), it’s always already fictional and always will be in the mind, and that’s where it goes.

AP: And did you pick up on that text after you made the film?

BG: In the middle, it was in the middle. [The Invention of Morel] is an island tale.

AP: I think one of the key things here is the idea of this kind of model for collaborative production, working with real people. But to do something very interesting with it, not to just leave it raw as some kind of documentary in a sense. And there’s something, it seems to me, that cuts across all of your work, and particularly looking with Agatha, looking at avant-garde music as a model. I wonder if you could say something, in terms of this work, but also more generally in terms of the way you work. Why this model, why this inquiry into methods of producing work collaboratively? You want to unpick this model, as much as you want to use it.

BG: I guess I’ve always been interested in… well it comes from modernist composition and that’s a model for trying to rethink about how authorship might be complicated, or a bit more layered. And so Cardew comes into it, and graphic notation in general, from the 60’s in particular. The kind of scores that were being produced at that time, and Cardew is a particularly politicised example of that, are all about challenging the hierarchies between performers and composers. So when you have conventional musical notation, you have a symbol that equates with a note. And in graphic notation you have a symbol that could mean anything, the performer could interpret it in any way that he wants, and in that way becomes more of a co-author of the work. And I was interested in that kind of model for how the multiplicity of authorship might be applied to something like film production, which seems something very like top-down instruction.

———————-

BG: This film in particular references the American version of that I suppose, as the narrator is Robert Ashley, who’s still around. One of the last living composers of that era, I guess he’s around 80 now. And his work more specially is about the musicality of speech, and how speech approximates song, or can be more like music. And he coined the genre of American video operas, and his operas were constituted by a voice of American landscapes, and they’re quite madcap, they’re really amazing actually, they’re all on ubuweb. They’re all vernacular stories culled from the American landscape, and then retold musically.

AP: I was thinking about this idea, as I see it, of relatively. And you touched on it then as you talked about the multiplicity of meanings, and characters of stories or whatever. It struck me in The Tiger’s Mind, the show that you have on at The Showroom in London at the moment that was based around a Cardew score of The Tiger’s Mind, as a narrative score. It’s just two paragraphs, with basic narrative, with characters and behaviours. So it sets out these characters and sets out these behaviours. And one of the things that he said was that each performer should chose a character, and they should each know what the other character is doing, and who is playing each character. But after a while, as they got better and better and they had done it several times, they could chose the character of the Wind, for instance, and assume that person B was the Tiger. But then person B might think that they’re the Wind, and someone else is the Tree. There are no absolute positions any more; there are only relative positions. Are you working to undermine this idea of authorship?

BG: I don’t know. I’m constantly trying to work out my position in relation to authorship. I think its often quite contradictory. At one level I’m trying to instigate colletcive models of authorship and on the other hand I end up rebelling against my own set of references and sort of violently asserting authorship. I think this one actually (A Necessary Music) has the same kind of logic as I’m working on later. But the addition of the narration makes it coherent in a way, as a kind of linear structure. It’s very much an authored editorial decision that comes after a more utopian attempt to create an egalitarian mode of production. But in the end, this is ultimately what The Tiger’s Mind ends up being very much about, is that in the end somebody has to take responsibility for actually authoring the work. Because there is a tension in all of the films between the individual and the collective, and at what point authorship is asserted, and I guess that’s the contact conversation I’m having with Cardew, and also where we go down different paths. As he had the same problems, he very much wanted, and the people he was working with in the end, they very much wanted his authorship in the end. And he ended up rejecting the avant-garde and making folk ditties in village halls. And I end up rectifiable becoming an author.

AP: So in a way you’re using that associative process as part of your process. I wanted to think about the voice as well, as obviously this is really key to your work in general. And it seems to me, you said something about it before that you want to treat voice as music in some sense, and looking at the sonority and musicality of speech, and the importance of words as sounds, or words as things in themselves. So I suppose you’ve already answered this, but its around Robert Ashley and people like Meredith Monk, and is it at once can it function as narrative, but you’re looking at the sounds of them, and words placed in relation to each other.

BG: I think that comes out of a relation in my head between, or trying to make a relation between the composition and scripting, and the idea that the voice becomes an instrument, just teasing out that idea formally in relation to that, really. As opposed to being music, and having a drum or guitar or whatever, and the voice being something to play with, and that it can just veer towards just sound as well as music.

AP: You have this relationship with music, where it slips in and out of phase with it, where sometimes the words mean what they ostensibly mean, and sometimes you can kind of unpitch them, so they don’t mean that anymore. You mentioned in an email exchange Gertude Stein, and I thought that was interesting. Could you say something more about that, the words placed in relation to each other, and how it becomes another thing.

BG: Well yes, but voices, rather than words, placed in relation to each other. Gertrude Stein, as far as I understand it, she defines landscape as voice and things and objects in relationship to each other. And she is very much imaging an emotional, a perceptual landscape, and the viewer is placed in relationship to that. The viewer becomes a really active part of that, which I think is something score is trying to achieve in relation to authorship. Because it’s more of a perceptual landscape than it is a linear of narrative landscape, so these things or voices in relationship to each other, that the viewer is in the centre of.

AP: And of course you’re dealing with a medium that is so kind of programmatic, and there’s a tendency to place meaning in one place, to place meaning in front of you. So it makes sense for thinking of music in that way,

BG: And Ashley also defines opera as characters in a landscape, speaking musically. And landscape becomes very much a character in his operas itself. I think in A Necessary Music, maybe it does as well, where the island tries to replicate that formally, that the island becomes a character alongside the characters that populate it.

AP: It made me think of when you said about Gertrude Stein as well, this idea of relative positions. That in a way her words, the words in the image or the voices perhaps. Because it seems to me with Gertrude Stein, that you have to almost voice it, you say it, you can’t read it, you’ll go mad if you try to read it. That in a way, it’s all relative positions, its all relativity. I was also thinking about one of your earlier pieces, The Great Learning, thinking about mnemonic devices.

BG: That was one of the first things I did around Cardew. It was a performance with nine male taxi drivers and one female taxi driver, based on a composition called The Great Learning, which is based on a Confucian text of the same name. And it’s a pun on the knowledge, where London cabbies have to learn the knowledge, the great learning, Cardew’s great learning, and the great learning of the London knowledge, which is this phenomenal thing. Theres like 320 routes within a 5 mile radius, and basically it’s like a crazy mental map in the mind, and they have to learn all of these routes. They study for these oral examines at the public carriage office, and the examiner won’t ask you one of these routes. He’ll ask you a random point-to-point configuration, and it draws a mental map of the city. It’s really bonkers. And in London they have all of these knowledge colleges, and they hold calling over classes where they go and do the routes on their Honda C90’s, and then sit in a classroom and practice calling over street names to each other. So I worked with a composer and we tried to borrow some of the compositional devices from [Cardew’s] The Great Learning and apply them to calling over as practice.

AP: There’s an idea of the voice as a practical thing, a way of remembering and mapping place without markers or word, and an idea of singing things into existence.  I wonder I there’s a way Robert Ashley comes into, this idea of folk memory, passing things down orally through history. Is this something that’s important to you?

BG: Yes, well, I guess it reappears in a documentary sense, as memory and archiving to a degree, but only to a degree.

AP: Actually I think I won’t go on for too much longer now. Perhaps it’s a good time for people to ask some questions. Does anyone have any questions about Agatha, or any of Beatrice’s other works?

(more general comments, on William Greaves’ 1968 film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, previously screened at The Showroom)

BG: […] Greaves film is a portrait of the same process, tropes of self-reflexivity, processes today. And what might be relevant today, as opposed to what was happening then, and the idea of Brechtian 4^th wall tumbling in the 60s. Which I think in a way Agatha actually deals with, but the idea that maybe a more relevant, self-reflexivity today might not actually be about the 4^th wall tumbling down, but telling stories, I think Agatha is quite an interesting example of reflexivity, because it’s this text about this narrator who goes to this planet without speech, and it’s sort of a utopian metaphor for improvisation as a language, as a way of communicating beyond speech. It’s basically about improvisation, hence it’s a very self-reflexive story, but would wouldn’t necessary know as it’s seemingly about loads of aliens. And that as an interesting model for reflexivity, that isn’t necessary just about actors going “boo”.

AP: So it was Agatha improvised essentially?

BG: Yes.

AP: In A Necessary Music as well in particular, and also The Tiger’s Mind, the way that speech is delivered, it’s obvious that it is about performance, and referencing The Invention of Morel in this film as well, it’s about the rehearsed performance, and things that are being re-rehearsed and re-performed. You’ve previously spoken about othering the voice and seeking to place it at a remove on purpose. Is it to draw our attention to the fact that it is artificial?

BG: Yes, I think in this film - I might have a different strategy today - but yes that film is very much about pointing to its own artifice in a way, which is in a traditional, modernist trope mould I think.  

AP: And what’s your strategy now?

BG: These days I’m thinking more about constructing stories, rather than deconstructing them.

Audience 1: I was going to ask about your use of literature, you have the Invention of Morel in A Necessary Music, and also Cardew’s dream in Agatha, which I don’t know if it exists as a literary text in itself?

BG: Yes, yes it does.

Audience 1: And the B.S. Johnson book that you’ve also worked with. Do you often tie your work to literature, I mean, how does it come into the films?

BG: Yes, I mean it’s there a lot, in different ways. I mean the B.S Johnson is quite specific, because it’s me trying take an equation, or thinking about an equation between the sorts of formal experimentation that’s taking place in notation, and in literature of the same era. So B.S. Johnson is again about self-reflexivity, always trying to break out of his own narratives and say “hi” to the reader in order to activate the reader, and what that relationship that might have to notation, in order to propose a kind of more active spectatorship. So that’s quite specific, I suppose. And in A Necessary Music, it’s more deployed as a way, but it’s also self-reflexive I suppose, but it mirrors the discomfort of plotting to represent the island, which is affected through the use or narrative and fiction. And the dream, yes I suppose again, its self-reflexivity runs through that too. But the story of Agatha is quite funny as basically The Tiger’s Mind publication was produced from a series of week long conversations which were instigated using the score of The Tiger’s Mind. The first conversation we had in Stuttgart was always with the same 6 practitioners, and the first conversation in Stuttgart we decided to assign characters. So we decided to, so rather than just trying to speak the score, we tried to also score the process. We tried to play it (The Tiger’s Mind), in a very expanded sense of that. And so the first conversation was assigning who was going to play which character. So there were six characters, the wind, the tree, the circle, the mind, the tiger and a girl called Amy. Celine Condorelli who plays the tiger, and John Tibury who plays the mind – John Tilbury is the biographer of Cardew, and was Cardew’s great friend - they were talking about whether the tiger was masculine or feminine because in the interpretation notes to the score - each character comes with a set of interpretation notes to the score - it says that the tiger should be “on guard against manliness”. So we were thinking why manliness? Was there a relationship to feminism? Was Cardew a feminist? So there was a three-hour conversation about feminism, and then we realised it was a typo, and that it should read that “the tiger should be on guard against manginess”. So that’s why I came across the story of Agatha, because John said “well there is this story about this weird guy, a man or woman, who goes to this planet, and their gender is all shifting and the language maybe has something to do with his position in relation to feminism”. So that’s how I encountered the story of Agatha.

Audience 2: You talk a lot about these experimental format pieces of literature, like B.S. Johnson, which is very difficult, and Gertrude Stein, which is very distancing.

BG: Do you think B.S. Johnson is difficult though? Don’t you think one of the most amazing things about him is that he’s really readable?

Audience 2: Well, maybe more in his approach. He’s very confrontational in how he reacted in these texts. I’m thinking of that period more so. And thinking that a lot of the devices you use are very distancing, yet a lot of your images are very appealing. There’s none of the experimental formats, or experimentation in your visuals to match what would be happening at the time of Cardew producing the music, or B.S. Johnson producing the writing. I wonder if this is a conscious decision by you, because Agatha is a very romantic looking piece, and the one we’ve seen here (A Necessary Music) is formally very pretty or reflecting the architecture, very cool.

BG: I think maybe they come out of the same concerns; they end up in different places. Those tropes are about audience, and I tried to make things… I don’t think I intentionally tried to make something beautiful, but I tried to make it beautiful as I wanted to please, maybe not please, but I want the audience to be happy. John Tilbury always said, “there should be a reason why someone got out of bed to come and hear you play the piano”, and I think that’s got real value. So I think both directions, whether it’s formal austerity, or seductive aesthetics, it’s the same question of audience, and that’s the thing I’m concerned with and want to come back to in different ways.

Audience 3: How do you know if you please the audience? What do you do, to find out?

BG: Pleasing the audience strange way to describe it, but I’m interested in the idea of generosity. I think it’s the idea of opening up the films to a wider audience, rather than a bunch of highly educated avant-guardists who use sophisticated languages. What if somebody walks in off the street? Trying to make things, and work exists on many levels. Maybe it has complicated things that you struggle to grasp; maybe you can come in and just be struck by it. I like that idea, that it can do both things.

Audience 4: Does that also account for the choices of music?

BG: In this one? I can’t really comment too much, as Alex did that score.

Audience 4: So thinking of the soundtrack as a totality, he composed some of it, combined with popular pieces, by Django Reindhardt, etc.

BG: Most of the music is field recordings, I think. Any popular music was stuff that we heard, or residents had also composed or played. And there was very little that’s editorially placed on top of the images.

Audience 4: That’s really interesting, so you didn’t actually have authorship over the soundtrack of the work?

BG: No.

Audience 4: Do you go into a project knowing what it’s going to look like?

BG: No, no.

Audience 4: So you start with the music and the text, the collaboration, and then you just feel a natural way of how it works?

BG: Yes, everything mostly comes out of process. And it takes a long time realise, but often the biggest problem becomes the answer in some way. Whenever I’m suck, the piece becomes what I’m stuck about, I think. Which is quite productive. But every time it takes time to realise that.