A common heuristic method is to look for an object that is similar to another in one respect but entirely different in most other ways in order to discover something new about the two objects. Traditionally artists have not employed highly elaborated heuristics because they presumed that their practice was not scientific in nature (although, as every dandy knows, it is possible to perform excellent experiments with one’s own intuition); however, the attitude toward heuristics and experimentation changed with the paradigm shift that brought us Conceptual art. This shift was not a single turning point, one that took place only or predominantly in the 1960s, but a series of turning points – that is, a true historical development (but that is another subject).
Conceptual artists in the broadest sense, then, are interested in music because while it too is an art, it is the most distant of all art forms – invisible, temporal rather than spatial, usually collaborative rather than solipsistic. Moreover, music is often fleeting, dependent on the moment, and less immediately available than the visual arts, literature, or other tangible media. Technical reproducibility, especially digital, has resulted in the increased availability of all arts, both as material and object. This has led to a de-emphasis on the specific characteristics of individual art forms. Within Conceptualism, however – whether it be semiological, sociological, historical, or aesthetic – generic distinctions continue to be decisive, especially where they are technical in nature, because they touch upon the antagonism between two notions: the irreducibility of a given art form and the idea that art is, above all, socially determined or even autonomous. Irreducibility was a guiding paradigm of American modernism, and the idea of total convergence within contemporary postmodern culture also relies on a certain media-based or technological disposition.
Time and again in his work, Rodney Graham takes the current condition of convergence as his point of departure and then causes the postmodern continua – by definition unencumbered by history – to become tangled up with more traditional media and genres. In this way Graham reaches precisely that stratum of artistic production in which the precondition for art is not medium; rather, his work is organized around logical or formal principles like time, space, order, etc.
One fundamental characteristic of music is repetition, whether it be the repetition of a bar or phrase within a single musical composition or the repetition of the entire composition as one listens to it over and over. Invisibility is a second fundamental characteristic. Because it cannot be seen, music must rely on auxiliary objects, incidental constructions, and symptoms.1 Graham’s work concerns itself with both the production and reception of music. The logic of coincidence links his work with its thematic constellations. While Graham is evidently interested in internal processes, this interest is not limited to music. It was he after all who also conceived the idea of filming himself under the influence of LSD in “The Phonokinetoscope” (2001). His experiences on the drug are opulent internal visualizations that, for the viewer, are reduced to the experience of watching Graham ride through a park on a bicycle.
The third characteristic of music is its ability to encode socially significant developments that lie outside the dominant discourse within the cultural mainstream. Through music we become informed about all kinds of outsiders to society – Hungarian Gypsies, Welsh coalminers, African-American migrant workers – as their music is traced by those interested in it for ethnological or political reasons and then absorbed by the mainstream through the appropriation of musical forms such as czardas or the blues. (However, increased mainstream awareness of these groups through music does not necessarily afford them any particular socio-political gains.) In this way music functions as both a subcultural code and as a medium for preserving history.
These three aspects of music represent constants, as it were, that are independent of music’s various manifestations. However, when they are brought into relationship with the visual arts, as is the case in Graham’s work, they are subject to other systems that both contaminate and enhance them. It has been pointed out on numerous occasions that the circle or wheel and, similarly, the dual tropes of repetition and looping are the basic structuring principles on which Graham’s work is based.2 This has also been elaborated by the artist himself, who talks about these principles in relation to another one of his preferred methodologies: exposing the concrete and contingent aspects of representation.
Both repetition and looping are evident in Graham’s photographic series of upside-down trees, which are reminiscent of an illustration in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), the sacred text of semiotics. In his text, Saussure always uses the word “tree” to stand as the signifier, the linguistic portion of the sign, while a graphic representation of a tree stands for the signified – that to which the signifier, whether it takes the form of letters or sounds, refers in the outside world. (In semiotics, this relationship is commonly expressed as a formulation with signifier over signified, separated by a division bar.) The Saussurian graphic of a tree became famous, reappearing within the writings of Jacques Lacan and many others. However, its ubiquity was not due to its illustrative value, but the relation that it illustrated – one that Graham alludes to in his photographs. His trees seem to suggest an awareness of their own existence as contingent abstractions, shadows of the concrete. They are positioned upside down not only because they relate to the camera obscura (one of Graham’s themes), but also, one imagines, because as placeholders for the signified they occupy the underside of the semiotic division bar.
But I digress. What I really want to do is to explain how Graham responds to the widely held view that he is an artist of circularity and repetition by creating an almost accidental connection between the signified abstraction (the circle, or loop) and the concrete form that is suffused with everyday life, such as the bicycle, whose name denotes “two circles” or, more precisely, “double circle”. Thus “Weather Vane” (2002), an image featuring Graham sitting backwards on the handlebars of a bicycle perched on a weather vane, may be read as a reorganization of the semiotic hierarchy of signifier over signified. Consistent with the methods of a Conceptual artist, Graham confronts us with the fact that abstract notions are bound up with concrete forms and dependent on particular local, historical, and social dialectics and ideologies.
For the purpose of discussion we can take the subject of repetition as the starting point for our little tour of Graham’s musical output. It must be said that in his practice repetition by no means exists merely for its own sake – as a formal device uniquely manifested in music. Repetition is present in antagonistic relationship to its opposite: development, the idea that something changes over time rather than simply being replayed ad nauseam.
In “Parsifal (1882-38,969,364,735)” (1990), one of Graham’s most ambitious and humorous projects, the artist uses a loop structure to generate an open-ended and virtually limitless version of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” (1877-82) that, if performed in its entirety, would last almost thirty-nine billion years. This version of “Parsifal” is based on composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s so-called supplemental music, which Humperdinck wrote to accompany an unusually time-consuming set change that Wagner had not anticipated. Based on Wagner’s melodic lines, Humperdinck’s musical supplement is a thirty-three-bar loop to be played as many times as necessary for the set change to occur. In Graham’s version every instrument plays a predetermined number of repetitions and then starts over again from the beginning; the number of repetitions, however, changes with each instrument and is determined by an increasing set of primary numbers. In theory, when all parts coincide again, the opera may resume and the next act of Parsifal may be performed – that is, nearly thirty-nine billion years from now.
Whenever Graham performs “Parsifal”, it is as if his composition has been underway since the 1882 historic debut of Humperdinck’s supplement within the original. In other words, he presents the exact segment that would be played at this point in the score had it begun at that time; it is as if the piece has been playing continuously since 1882 and Graham simply decides to turn up the volume for the precise duration of any number of arbitrarily scheduled performances. Conceived in this way, “Parsifal” exists as a legitimate but largely unheard piece of music – one that shares its immateriality with all other music – and constitutes the longest musical composition of all time. John Cage’s longest composition, the performance of which has just begun in Germany, is only projected to last until the year 2640.
There are two possible ways to approach repetition in music. The first is the repeated presentation of that which the audience or composer finds to be beautiful, a kind of second-helping for gourmands. Strict theoreticians committed to music as an indivisible whole would condemn this practice as fetishistic listening, but it could also be read as an appealing figure of regression, a land of infantile subversion of the work’s obligation to grow and develop and of the advocacy of its beautiful moments and passages. This view is advanced by Michael Glasmeier, who has written on Graham’s fondness for loops and repetition. Notably, Glasmeier begins his study with a motto from Karl Philipp Moritz, an eighteenth-century German writer who opposed the Protestant notion that too much beauty arouses disgust by arguing that, in beauty, a trail begins that one only learns to travel upon by encountering it repeatedly.3
By contrast, the second type of repetition does not seek to repeat what was already beautiful, but uses repetition to constitute the very musical meaning that makes beauty possible. The bourgeois critique of repetition – an aspect of musical thought dating from the eighteenth century to Theodor Adorno – is the target of a rich jazz and pop music tradition. In practical terms, repetition of a beat in jazz and pop, most radically in early techno and pulse-oriented Minimal music, does not constitute repetition in the strictest sense of the term, even when it is driven by a computer-controlled sequencer. A series of identical beats intended as a sequence is not complete until a predetermined number of beats have been repeated, and only then can the sequence itself be repeated. Until that point, the repeated, identical beats also have immanent meaning as individual elements.
These two seemingly contradictory types of repetition are woven together in Graham’s Wagner-without-end. Because any synchronous relationships among the parts are very quickly left behind, the individual elements acquire an immanent musical meaning. However, this meaning is only achieved by repeating a self-contained compositional sequence: in the same way that a loop generates an infinity, a repetition of type one generates a repetition of type two.
Similarly, in “More Music for the Love Scene, Zabriskie Point” (2000), a lyric from the song “Lot of Knocks” poses the question “How fuckin’ long can a song go on?”4 On the basis of Graham’s supplement to the soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970), it is possible to discover more about the difference between, as well as the convergence of, repetition and endlessness. In the film’s famous love scene, a seemingly infinite number of couples (in fact there are approximately six) make love in the California desert. Graham learned that Jerry Garcia, who recorded the music for this scene alone with a guitar, did so in real time while the completed film was running, and finished the score in four takes.5 Until his death in 1995, Garcia was the lead singer and guitarist for the Grateful Dead, a band that epitomizes endless concerts and endless improvisations. The duration of the Grateful Dead’s live performances, together with Terry Riley’s, hold a number of records that were probably unbroken until the advent of rave and techno. In Zabriskie Point we hear the shortest version of the Dead’s improvisatory classic “Dark Star”. This music, which is structured very little by the dramaturgical statements and caesuras of the film, is marked by the absence of forward progress. This absence, however, is not the result of repetition but of its conceptual opposite: a wholly unimpeded freedom of development, that notion of collective improvisation in which every step derives – or at least should derive – from the participants’ interaction: that is, from the social interaction within artistic practice and not from preestablished rules.
We encounter this same conjunction of freedom and the absence of progress – somewhat broadly interpreted – in an essay by Jeff Wall (Graham’s former bandmate in the UJ3RK5) on Graham’s work “Reading Machine for Lenz” (1998), which in turn refers to Georg Büchner’s literary fragment Lenz (1838).6 Büchner’s Lenz in turn represents a semi-fictional text by a nineteenth-century author about another author, the eighteenth-century writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, who wrote some of the most important dramas of the German Sturm und Drang, including Die Soldaten (The Soldiers, 1776) and Der Hofmeister (The Tutor, 1774). In 1983 Graham built a reading machine that allows one to read Büchner’s work as a loop. In doing so he made use of a repetition that is built into the text. In the English translation the phrase “through the forest” appears twice. The reading machine is constructed in such a way that, after the second “through the forest”, the reader is diverted back to the first (this was made possible in part by the fact that Graham had the text printed so that both occurrences appear at the bottom of the page), and hence driven around in a circle.
Lenz’s restless wanderings up and down through the mountains and his refuge at Pastor Oberlin’s house thus become caught in an endless loop. A French version of “Reading Machine” thirteen years later proceeds in the same way. Just like the English phrase “through the forest”, the expression “au long des forêts” occurs twice in the French translation of Büchner’s Lenz. Ironically, this procedure would not have worked with the original German text, because the passage reads “den Wald hinauf” (up through the forest) the first time and “den Wald hinab” (down through the forest) the second. Thus in the German version, the forest does not stand on a level plane (but Lenz’s restless movements seem to go on endlessly regardless). The relationship of Graham’s looped Lenz to Büchner’s original approximates Graham’s Zabriskie Point loop to the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”. Both are versions of non-arrival, of time’s inherent resistance to conclusion.
By contrast, the images and objects of the visual arts are always already finished – indeed even with respect to “process-based” works. Resisting conclusion would seem to be, then, the exclusive purview of music. However, this tendency has also been a principal project of literary modernity from Büchner to Samuel Beckett. By placing the loop and repetition at the forefront of my reflections, I, too, have used the loop – as both technical and abstract device, hence it is doubly objectified – as a fundamental reference point of Graham’s work (like those I mentioned earlier).
It seems to me, however, that when we consider Graham’s “Reading Machine” on the one hand and his meandering guitar music for the love scene from Zabriskie Point on the other, the philosophical phenomenon of a subject that has different ways of failing to find itself is much more important: whether it be a subject that goes round in circles or one that engages in an open-ended journey up and down, or whether it experiences endlessness as freedom (like the improvisations of the Grateful Dead) or as the denial of salvation or conclusion (like the unhappy and bewildered poet Lenz in the work of Büchner). For this reason, my reading would ideally not begin with loops and double circles and go backwards. Instead it would begin with Lenz’s failed liberation, which suggests an atheism that has not yet managed to come into the world, and go forward toward the art and thinking of today, both the pessimistic versions and those that theorize liberation, including their respective (usually implicit) philosophies of history.
In his essay on Graham’s “Reading Machine for Lenz”, Wall refers to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s distinction in the Science of Logic (1812-16) between a “bad infinity” – which Wall regards as surviving in Sigmund Freud’s “repetition compulsion”, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”, and Karl Marx’s notion of “surplus value” – and a “true infinity”, which in the Hegelian philosophy of history stands for the concrete substance of finite and infinite beings. Infinity is not an empty formal principle, but one related to a specific historical content, a concrete finite being. According to this view, bad infinity would be a loop-like repetition compulsion, while true infinity would be the unfinished state of liberation, which can be conceived in concrete terms and whose content is determinate but whose historical preconditions are not yet at hand. Graham’s work “City Self/Country Self” (2000) shows us how amusing bad infinity can be through the use of a loop that presents a form of class opposition as a timeless antagonism unable to grow and develop into a master-slave dialectic – that is, into full class struggle.
Graham is not simply a Hegelian, however. He is also a great authority on Freud and a great applier of Freud’s theories (see, for example, his 1996 work on monetary transactions in the Freud household, “Schema: Complications of Payment”). Thus he confronts Freud with precisely the kind of concrete historical dimension found in Hegel’s dialectic of true infinity. In part but not exclusively from a Freudian perspective, Graham is interested not only in the historical conditions of social liberation, but also (and especially) in the individual time of personal liberation, in the birth of the subject and its failure to be born – from a psychoanalytic and a political perspective. He seeks the moment when, to speak optimistically, the subject exits the loops and connects them like two wheels to a bicycle frame in order to move. In a direction.
Thus the question of “how fuckin’ long” a song can last acquires just as much significance in light of Büchner’s Lenz as it does in light of the kinds of problems that would have confronted a musician in 1983. As we’ve seen with the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd (who also appear on the soundtrack for Zabriskie Point), in the late 1960s and early 70s the song had become, in principle, indefinitely long. A musician in 1983 (give or take a few years) would have witnessed how music was then drastically compressed by the punk movement and its allies, who cut the average song back to two-and-a-half minutes.
In Büchner’s text, although there are many temporal indicators, they do not yield a continuum. Specific dates are mentioned, phrases like “next day” and “in the morning” stand before new journeys and developments, and evening and night cover the restless spirit. But all of these temporal signposts reside in a vacuum. This is especially clear in the work’s first sentence, which merely refers to the day that Lenz wandered into the mountains as “the 20th”, while both the English and the French translations purport that the day in question is the twentieth of January. Thus, there is a conscious sense in Lenz that the poor wandering poet can only be brought closer to his liberation by that objective external time that stands opposed to individual time, by a standard format (even if it is only that of the day trip, which was common in his time), just as the compressed songs of the punk movement, which resulted in the pop song being trimmed back to its traditional format, temporarily negated what was perhaps the bad infinity of free improvisation. In its turn, the cyclical recurrence of negations and negations of negation in pop music provides fuel (in my view incorrectly, but that is another subject) for the cultural pessimism of critics who refuse to see the development of the popular arts as development at all, who suspect that this too is only a bad infinity.
As a form, however, the song represents the symbolic possibility of conclusion both in time and with time, and it connects that possibility with real history, in the course of which the song’s form arose and evolved. (Graham speaks of this as his special interest.7) In this way the song is open on both sides: it brings individual time into relationship with a form, and it brings this form into relationship with historical formats and memory formations. If a song happens to tip over into an endless improvisation or a loop, that is something different than the form that has always harbored a tendency toward the loop. The song is not a historical accident; its form is a collective production. In the nineteenth century, the song emerged as a product of the rural population, especially itinerant farm workers; and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has been a product of youth and countercultures, as well as mainstream cultural industries.
Graham’s ten-inch record “Getting It Together In The Country” (especially the A-side) and his mini-CD “What Is Happy, Baby?”8 (both 2000) are both decisively marked by songs with acoustic guitar accompaniment. But Graham is also interested in the absolute antithesis of that type of song form: those highly artificial genres within 1960s garage punk, 70s disco pop, and above all early 80s new wave music that often had a futurist agenda. He discovers specific historical forms in precisely these genres. The transition between the artist-as-musician who meditates to the strains of an acoustic guitar (even if he grins laconically as he does so) and the nervous, new wave persona that plays with sound citations may perhaps be found in the two cover songs on “Getting It Together” and “What Is Happy”, respectively Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright”, a hippie sing-along anthem; and the Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way”, a drug-soaked hymn by George Harrison to the experience of losing one’s bearings in Laurel Canyon. In these cover versions, which add new ambiguities to already ambiguous songs, it becomes clear how, for Graham, pop songs – with their ostensible aesthetic of immediacy – actually drag around the undeclared baggage of cultural mediation. This becomes a declared and explicit subject in some of his other musical works.
Like many visual artists of his generation, Graham started out in a band.9 The UJ3RK5 sounded like a typical post-punk group, the kind that in those years (1978-80) might have been carried by the British Rough Trade label.10 Lyrics predominate in their songs, and their fast, hectic drums never get “groovy”, but often in their nervousness they place a higher priority on the tautological doubling of the singer’s emphasis than on building an independent rhythm of their own. Songs produced by bands like these represent a number of hard-fought negations. By negating the playfulness and aimlessness of hippie culture on the one hand and its commercial and bombastic variants on the other, punk had discovered a form that, in a certain sense, reconstructed the song as an authoritative form. An old, traditional form had suddenly become the goal of a movement that in every other respect consisted of fractures and leaps out of history. The futurism of punk and new wave, which the UJ3RK5 also embodied, could only function by means of a purposeful and targeted reference to the past. Only by way of a break with the continuous lengthenings of hippie musical culture and its naive relationship to seamless and continuous growth could there be history – a past and a future – once again. A song title like “Eisenhower & the Hippies” is only too characteristic, not only of the UJ3RK5 but of the entire philosophy of the new wave of the early 1980s.
In some of his more recent musical projects, Graham emphasizes the limits of historical formats. In his recordings of old and especially new pieces on The Bed-Bug, Love Buzz, And Other Short Songs In The Popular Idiom (2000)11, one is especially struck by the fidelity and precision with which he hones in on a number of now-obsolete conventions that were each fashionable in their day. The fact that in the ephemeral reality of everyday life there lurks a very special form of eccentricity is one of the essential findings of the album. By definition pop music is specific to its temporal moment, and Graham and his collaborators work to re-create the eccentricities of early 1980s Euro-disco pop and the sophisticated variants of 70s American adult pop (as typified by early Steely Dan), as well as the brilliantly clumsy stumbling of new wave music – Graham’s enduring love – at the turn of the 80s.
Graham has this quotidian and familiar aspect in mind when he says, “The idea that any one of my works, or songs, might remind you of something you’ve seen or heard elsewhere is basically the highest compliment you could pay me.”12 Against this familiarity and historical signposting, however, there always stands a truly cold and cosmic gesture toward the purely material aspect of the work, even if it is usually a lightly ironic one: for instance, when Graham describes the songs on his “Getting It Together” as “Some Works with Sound Waves” or when he creates a composition intended to outlast the earth and the solar system, namely his “Parsifal”. And precisely such figures as Garcia and John Fahey, to whom Graham alludes in his Zabriskie Point work, have at one and the same time taken a special interest in the history of American song formats and their character as the products of historical development (Garcia played banjo in a jug band and Fahey studied American folk and blues) and also worked with extremely unbounded formats. Graham’s recourse to the acoustic guitar must therefore also be seen against this backdrop.
Our discussion of folk formats versus other, more open-ended formats would not be complete, however, if we did not confront the issue of time. The former is based on a notion of time in which meaning is derived from the historical processes informing the creation of that format, whereas the latter is marked by individual time, the subject of the endless, meandering solo. On the one hand, individual time is shaped by an internal process that cannot be objectively represented by the concrete objects of music, such as scores and recordings—music’s symptoms, as it were. On the other hand, the historical time of an established musical format can be deduced from the historical conditions that brought about its production.
In “How I Became A Ramblin’ Man” (1999)13 a number of these questions are woven together. Graham, with an acoustic guitar, moves about on horseback. For all intents and purposes, he is already a “ramblin’ man”. This ramblin’ man is, of course, a topos of American folklore, appearing in countless blues songs; he perfectly parallels the itinerant young Lenz. On the poster for the German film adaptation of Lenz (1972) by George Moorse, who later directed several episodes of the socio-democratic soap opera Lindenstraße (Linden Street, 1985), the title appears beneath the famous first two lines of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked.” The rebellious, romantic identification of the roaming bourgeois son who has run away by choice with the individual who is homeless by necessity is also a topos of the cultural history of liberation of the last 250 years. From Lenz to the beatniks, bourgeois sons have often identified with itinerant laborers at precisely the moment when they leave their sheltered childhood in the parental home for the first time.
Between these two versions of the ramblin’ man, however, Graham interposes a process of “becoming”. A wandering journeyman of one kind or another is something one must become, whether because of inner repetition compulsions (or attempts to break free of them) or because of the social motivations that cling to bicycles, song formats, or guitar strings. The title “How I Became A Ramblin’ Man” stands in contrast to “I was born a ramblin’ man” (1973), a lyric from the song “Ramblin’ Man” by the Allman Brothers Band, an influential 1970s Southern rock group. One is not born a ramblin’ man, Graham implies. That position can only be maintained by the blues-rock of a band like the Allman Brothers, in which the blues have been dehistoricized and decontextualized – appropriated, naturalized, and finally asserted as white Southern rock.
But how does one lay hold of the internal dimension of the process of becoming a ramblin’ man with a horse, a guitar, and a tradition? How does the visual artist show the invisible and unobservable internal time of the soul and music? I have already suggested that merely observing a musician performing constitutes the visual manifestation of an internal musical movement. It is overlaid, however, by the successfully externalized, structured time of the mastered internal musical material. At various moments in the film Zabriskie Point we see hallucinations and external projections of internal mental images, which are most often associated with a particular music. This metonymic strategy has evolved into a cinematic convention for representing internal, mental processes: in order to show the internal execution of music, I as the director show something else that, I suggest, is executed internally – visual associations, hallucinations, dream images, etc. – and I play music at the same time.
The difference between Zabriskie Point and other contemporaneous cinematic narratives of introspection is the success the film had with its images of ostensibly musically induced internal associations and the relationship created between internal and political images. This “making public” of the internal process of cognition, and the purposeful manipulation, control, and above all deconditioning of that process under the aegis of the political represents an essential aspect of the psychedelic movement—especially its political wing, as expressed in the writings of Ginsberg and Robert Smithson.
Another artist, Hans-Peter Feldmann, whose work has been rediscovered in Germany, recently related that, over a period of time, he consistently photographed the radio/tape deck in his car when he especially liked the music that was playing. As a photographer, one relies on the visual index even when reality is offering something invisible, like music. Graham, by contrast, simply increases the interiority, unobservability, invisibility, and intensity of that which eludes observation. What is more, he heightens the anticipated deviation of internal, individual time with respect to every measurable, objective temporality. How does he do that?
In the film portion of “The Phonokinetoscope”, Graham takes LSD in front of the camera and rambles – this time on a bicycle – through the Tiergarten in Berlin. He has a thermos with him, and he spends a lot of time contemplating details of nature, as one tends to do on LSD. The decisive aspect of the film, of course, is the fact that its lead actor is under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. However, that fact is invisible. We can only take it on faith, supported by the facial expressions, states of concentration, physical attitudes, and, ultimately, the music. The film’s installation includes a record player and a vinyl record containing one of Graham’s own somewhat cliched songs, a loving reconstruction of 1970s psychedelic rock. Graham captures the beauty of the music, which, unlike the psychedelic rock of the 60s, is not usually regarded as beautiful but rather strange, overambitious, and clumsy – qualities Graham captures as well.
Rather than try to find visual metaphors for the sensations that occur on LSD, Graham contains them in his head without revealing them to the viewer. One might argue that he does the opposite of Antonioni, for example, who shows a house exploding from different perspectives, one after another – its treatment suggesting the fulfillment of one character’s wishes. The temporal disorientation that Graham is presumably experiencing is not even hinted at. Time, for the artist on LSD, is not structured in a comprehensible order, nor does it follow a logic that can be communicated; it is individual time. Like some of his other cinematic projects, Graham seeks to show something invisible. This is reinforced by the fact that, as an artist working in film, he does not assume the role of director, but instead becomes the producer and lead actor. The director, he points out, differs from film to film.
In this way Graham abandons the auteur theory, which has historically represented the convergence of art and film, in favor of an older model of production used in prewar Hollywood movies. In his capacity as actor, he actually induces the required hallucinations, instead of manufacturing them through acting technique. This is only logical, as hallucinations are unique to the person experiencing them. He functions the same way in “Halcion Sleep” (1994), albeit under the influence of a different drug. As is the case with certain Method actors, Graham is not representing the effect of the drugs, he is the effect of the drugs.
The artist Mathew Hale, who assisted Graham during the filming of “The Phonokinetoscope”, has noted various historical and contemporary connections between Graham and psychedelic rock music.14 He compares Graham to Syd Barrett, the legendary founder of Pink Floyd who embarked on a solo career after one and a half albums and vanished soon thereafter apparently due to serious mental disturbances caused by psychedelic drugs. Throughout “The Phonokinetoscope”, Graham pays homage to Barrett. Besides the film, the installation also includes a record player whose tone arm the viewer may set to play a composition that borrows a lyric from “Bike”, one of Barrett’s best-known songs with Pink Floyd. “You’re the kind of girl that fits in with my world” is both the refrain and title of Graham’s pastiche.
Though Hale does not mention this, Barrett can be seen as the Lenz of recent pop music in that he is both a real artist and a mythologized figure. (However, the mythicization of Barrett has taken place during his lifetime, whereas Lenz was mythicized posthumously by Büchner.) Graham makes use of these two figures in the knowledge that such legends make a comfortable intertextual net. One can draw from them at will without taking them too literally. However, neither Barrett nor Lenz had legends to fall back on the way Graham does. Both young men constructed their legends from scratch, as it were, and ended up failing tragically.
Graham’s work seems to suggest that it is possible to exit such a doomed Oedipal cycle by way of the eternally youthful, up-to-the-minute language of pop music. (Perhaps this is what Graham is talking about in the song “Music for the Very Old” on his 2003 release, Rock Is Hard.15) For Adorno, jazz was a “Perennial Fashion” and therefore related to eternal recurrence. Graham reverses this proposition when – precisely by means of the aggressively temporal and transitory nature of the musical formats he has adopted – he leaves the eternal now in which Fahey and Garcia lived and looks back. And he does so, for once, in temporal categories that can actually be lived, beyond eternity and eternal repetition. That is precisely how fuckin’ long a song can go on.
- When music is ontologically immaterial – as in several philosophies of music – a recording or a sheet of music are merely symptoms of a process that actually happens elsewhere, on another level, in another ontologically different order. ↩︎
- For example, by Anthony Spira, “A Cycle-logical Journey”, in Rodney Graham, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2002), 93-101; and by Michael Glasmeier, Loop – Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Endlosschleife am Beispiel Rodney Graham (Cologne, Germany: Salon Verlag, 2002). ↩︎
- Glasmeier, Loop. The complete text of the motto from Moritz reads: “The repetition of the beautiful does not cause surfeit or disgust, but increases its charm for the person who has begun to discern the trace that is present in it, and who pursues that trace every time it presents itself to him.” ↩︎
- “Lot of Knocks”, in “More Music for the Love Scene, Zabriskie Point”, in Graham, Getting It Together in the Country – Some Works With Sound Waves, Some Works With Light Waves, and Some Other Experimental Works, 10-inch record and catalogue (Munich, Germany: Kunstverein; Münster, Germany: Westfälischer Kunstverein; Berlin: Kunstlerprogramm/DAAD; and Cologne, Germany: Oktagon Verlag, 2000). ↩︎
- Presumably Graham gleaned this information from the same expanded, double-CD edition of the soundtrack (with additional recordings and notes) that I possess. Zabriskie Point Original Soundtrack Plus an Entire Disc of Newly Discovered and Unreleased Material From Pink Floyd and Jerry Garcia, Rhino Movie Music compact disc set R2 72 462, 1997. ↩︎
- Jeff Wall, Dans la forêt: Deux ébauches d’étude sur l’oeuvre de Rodney Graham (Brussels: Emile Van Balberghe Librairie, 1996). ↩︎
- See Graham and Matthew Higgs, “A Little Thought”, in Rodney Graham, 75-83. ↩︎
- Produced by Lisson Gallery, London, 2001. ↩︎
- For example, among many others: Mike Kelley, John Miller, Tony Oursler, Stephen Prina, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, with Graham, Jeff Wall. ↩︎
- The UJ3RK5 released one four-track ep titled UJ3RK5 on Polydor Records in 1980. ↩︎
- Produced by Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and Graham, 2000. ↩︎
- Graham, in Higgs, “A Little Thought”, 82. ↩︎
- The lyrics and score of the song for the projected film installation are reproduced in the liner notes to “Getting It Together In The Country”, 14-15. ↩︎
- Mathew Hale, “And I Am Wondering Who Could Be Writing This Song”, Parkett, no. 64 (May 2002): 116-24. ↩︎
- “One more round of this and I’m bound to lose control / Life is so unfair, then you fall into a very dark hole / Seems I slipped / When I lost my tourniquet grip / And no one ever said things will change / It will always always be the same. / It’s high time my very last cent was well and truly spent: / Income versus outcome that’s my predicament. / At long, long last, after all these years / The shocking truth can be told: / This is music for the very very old.” From “Music for the Very Old”, on Graham’s self-produced Rock Is Hard, 2003. ↩︎