Weekend Update: Book Expo Insanity, Part the Third

Shuffle by Christian Marclay

I am still recovering from the weekend that went on and on. And on! Friday and Saturday were jam-packed but merely the tip of the iceberg. After a brief post-BEA recharge at home, I headed downtown to Roulette for an Aperture event: a performance based upon Christian Marclay’s new book, Shuffle (published by Aperture, but of course!)

I hadn’t given much thought to the event beforehand. In my BEA-fixated mind, it was an Aperture event that I was excited to go to because of my pal (and Hey, Hot Shot! panelist!) Lesley Martin’s involvement. It wasn’t ’til I sat down and watched the musicians setting up that I connected Marclay with the recent dust-up over the Apple iPhone commercial that made its debut during the Oscars.

The commercial was based on piece Marclay did in 1995 called Telephones. Apple approached him for re-use rights, he wasn’t interested, so they simply made their own version of it. Homage? Rip-off? It was widely discussed in the blogosphere.

I doubt Marclay would be pleased at this specific association, but fact is I wouldn’t have known of him otherwise - perhaps this makes me a philistine, but video/conceptual/sound art is not a field I have a lot of knowledge about. (Aside: Art Fag City has an amusing review of a Marclay performance in her archives.) Anyway, point is: when I realized who he was I was psyched, because I’d watched an interview of him via a You Tube clip a while back and also checked out some of his work.

Shuffle is a deck of (over-sized) cards w. snapshot photos that are meant to be used as spontaneous musical score. The performance went like this: Marclay randomly dealt the cards to the musicians (Anthony Coleman, Okkyoung Lee, Peter Evans, Zeena Parkins, Elliott Sharp, Jim Staley and John Zorn) and they made music accordingly. Some of it was wretched and self-indulgent, a lot of it was funny and a few moments were just beautiful. (I was especially taken with cellist Okkyoung Lee.) There was a lot of tension in the room at first - so much squawking and so little sense, and it seemed like, as I, a lot of the audience didn’t come to the event with much preconception of what it might be like.

Speaking for myself personally, at some point I had to remind myself that there was no way I was going to figure out what it all meant to any of them, or all together. I just had to make my own meaning, and connect it to my own experience, in general and in the moment. So I thought about what it reminded me of (a concert I saw of John Cage music in the sculpture garden at MoMA, seeing John Zorn play in a tiny cafe years ago around the corner from my apartment) and I also contextualized it with the moment around me, the pattern in the guy’s shirt in front of me, what people around me were doing, etc. Then it was cool and I was actually able to listen more (except for when it was impossible to listen because it hurt my ears a lot and that just annoyed me. That particular aspect could’ve happened a LOT less, I’m just sayin’.)

I’m glad I went. And I’m glad I went up the street to a friend’s party afterwards, dragging an equally tired pal along, even though it was hot and muggy and it was late and I was exhausted. And I’m glad that I spent the better part of Sunday wrangling a sliver of my aforementioned Gmail archive down to a 100 messages. (I had approximately 1200 from April 1 forward, and left everything before that untouched. If you emailed me in the past two months and I haven’t gotten back to you: you’re in the queue!) And I’m glad that after a day of scowling at my laptop screen I ventured out to Brooklyn on a very rainy night to another great party. And I have plenty of things to say about all of this, but no time because this week is just about as packed full of stuff to do as my weekend was.