eye(aɪ)–ear(ɪə(r))
Live Art
On the 14 to 15 October 2011, Adam Blackburn (who has just completed his MA in Fine Art) and Professor John Harvey built a test bed in order to examine some possible relationships between drawing and sound production. This experimental platform was part of the School’s endeavour to develop intermedial studies between visual art and other creative disciplines. The event was neither a public performance nor a concert. Rather, it was a two-day mutually-educative session in which the collaborators were both the teacher and the learner.
Live Art is a generic term that describes acts of individual or collaborative, innovative and explorative, performance practice. It can be undertaken in relation to one or more art forms. Dialogues is the second in a series of experimental and experiential exchanges between the visual and audible arts. The discourse is through improvisation: a free-style creative act that exists in the moment, in the instincts and intuitions of the individual, and in the participants’ reciprocal response to each other’s activities. (It may, but need not have, an audience.) On this occasion, the conversation was through the mediums of drawing and sounding (that is, the act of perceiving and emitting, aurally). The exchange took place within the ‘laboratory’ of the School of Art’s Project Room. It provided a controlled environment in which the collaborators could learn, invent, test concepts, devices, and methods, make trial of different models of practice, and record ideas. Two determinations governed the collaboration: action and consideration; (to make in order to understand and to understand what has been made).
Both drawing and sounding were conducted in an abstract mode. This implies that the physical means and language of the art form was not directed towards (in respect to the former) the representation of the visible world and (in respect to the latter) melodic structure and composition. The conscious exclusion of these otherwise legitimate concerns enabled the participants to concentrate on the art forms’ formal and shared elements (either actual or metaphorical). For example: shape, line, pattern, texture, rhythm, pulse, tonality, atonality, pitch, contrast, dynamics, scale, size, simplicity, complexity, variation, repetition, layering, relation, sequence, proportion, wholeness, starting, stopping, resolution, duration, speed, vibration, movement, gesture, space, silence, noise, cacophony, indeterminacy, and distortion
The collaboration was, for all intents and purposes, a duet. (And, as in Renaissance music, the duet was a teaching tool performed by student and teacher). While the ‘players’ performed together in the same space, they were at the same time separated by the obstinate and yet beguiling disparities between their respective mediums. Both participants are visual artists who play musical instruments. Therefore, as they sought to explore the nature and possibilities of a meaningful and productive interaction between two people and two art forms, the duo contributed a tutored and an intuitive understanding of each other’s chosen domain.
Adam Blackburn: ‘My time at Aberystwyth University, studying for a BA (Hons.) degree and a MA degree in fine art, has been dedicated to investigation and experimentation. I’ve sought to develop a style, distinguish an individual language of paint, and gain a deeper understanding of my work. Through the processes of improvisation and collage, my drawings and paintings have tried to express a sense of objective response and subjective experience – a combination of characteristics that has always been central to the work. For me, music and art have a profound affinity. This present collaboration offered an opportunity not only to combine my interests in these art forms but also to explore the concept of improvisation across the medial divide. My expectation – that there would be a creative dialogue between the two, one which would result in a synthesis that transcends the individual parts and contributors – was fulfilled’.
John Harvey: ‘I put down the guitar in September 1977 at the start of my art school education, so that I could study single-mindedly. My return to music has been in response to two realisations: first, the instinct to make sound was too strong in me (It could not be resisted forever.); second, it was both possible and necessary to conceive of an aural analogue for the ideas, processes, and systems that I deploy in my visual art work. I do not refer to myself as a musician. To do so would give rise to expectations that I cannot presently fulfil. I am, rather, a practitioner who articulates concept through sound on those occasions when sound is the most appropriate embodiment of a concept. Improvisation is the antithesis of the static, reductive, predetermined, and concept-led orientation of my visual art practice, although no less disciplined for that. In its immediacy, adaptability, uncertainty, and stress upon moment-by-moment attentiveness, improvisation serves as a complementary (rather than contradictory) extension to my usual mode of composition’.
