Reson8 - Pauline Amos & Jeff Cloak

Pauline Amos has risen into the public eye recently, after hitting the tabloids for the astronomical Words and interview: Martin Woods
Pics: By kind courtesy of Pauline Amos and Jeff Cloakprice tag of her work "Opera Paese-Rome" and more recently for allowing the audience to paint her naked body at the end of a live art performance. I wanted to look beyond the headlines and also investigate the eerie accompanying music that Jeff Cloke creates with his software Reson8, using the resonance of the audience itself.

It's debatable when the marriage of visual art and sound experimentation first tested the aesthetics of the audience. Painters such as Luigi Rossolo and Marcel Duchamp experimented with sound nearly one hundred years ago, leading to the avant garde movement and the experimental music most commonly associated to John Cage. In fact it could be said they were the pioneers of the electronic music that is so popular today.

Considering the progression mentioned above, I was keen to know who influenced the concept of their work. Pauline felt this was a difficult question - there are many artists that she admires, such as Leonardo De Vinci, Francis Bacon, Joseph Vallribera and David Lynch. After spending the time studying the techniques and rules of art - and how to break those rules - she looked at the philosophies of the Zen Buddhists, in particular the philosophy where one line of ink is written on rice paper before the Buddhist meditates for years before continuing again. Effectively, this symbolises the attempt to throw away all the lessons learnt and start over again, with no set process, and Pauline pointed out that Picasso had stated that he worked all his life to try and paint like a child. Jeff, on the other hand, cited artists such as Alvin Lucier, who worked with the resonance of space and was the first person to amplify the brain's alpha waves via EEM receptors to play percussive instruments. He also mentioned Keith Rowe, the tabletop guitarist of the free improvisation group AMM (and yet another painter), who alters the timbre with bizarre objects like springs and elastic bands and was also cited as an influence by Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.

Interview:

Toxin: Could you explain to the reader how the Reson8 process works?

Jeff: Reson8 takes an input from the live environment or from a stored recording and transforms it using its constituent harmonic forms and rhythms. I have control of the Reson8 software parameters (filters, delays, stretch, fade etc) to shape the sound, but the harmonic content and changes all come from the source material. I have found that the human voice has a unique set of harmonics that somehow resonate with the human ear and brain (not surprising, really) so that now I only use samples of speech (poetry mainly) in my stored samples, and the sounds of an audience in the live samples. When working with musicians I use a mixture of their instrumental sounds and my stored human voice sounds as input to the process.

Toxin: It seems to go hand in hand for avant garde musicians to work with painters (that is if they are not also painters themselves), so it appears quite obvious why the musician would choose to work on this project. But why did the painter choose to work with a musician?

Pauline: Jeff and I first collaborated in, I think it was 2000, we had a 'band' or collection of artists (me, Jeff, Tony Moore & Mike MacInerney) called 'Work' and we did many gigs and recordings. I was using a fretless bass and vocals and sometimes samples. It was an improvising group. It tied in with the work I was researching for a PhD and the audio/visual concept i.e. how sound affects the visual and vice versa. So, my first practice is as a painter, but the paintings and sound making (for me) have the same process, i.e. improvised, spontaneous - but its not chaos. The dropping of discipline or rules needs a control and there is a fine line between contriving a drop of control and freely working. It's not an easy moment to explain really, thinking but not thinking...

Toxin: Jeff you have been interested in experimental music since the 1960's, but now in this age of the internet discovering experimental artists is relatively easy. How did you come across these forms back then?

Jeff: I was lucky enough to work briefly with Derek Bailey, Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley in 1965/66. I then followed their careers and naturally came across other like-minded artists such as John Cage and Derek Bailey's 'Company' performers. During the '70s and '80s there was a lot of experimental stuff on Radio 3, so I was introduced to Cornelius Cardew, Keith Rowe, Steve Beresford and many others specifically through radio broadcasts. It was not until the '90s that I became obsessed with Alvin Lucier's piece 'I Am Sitting in A Room' and not until 2002 that I met Keith Rowe and became familiar with his artistic aesthetic. I think for an artist their 'influences' are about showing possibilities and giving permissions rather than specific techniques. My total aesthetic now is to simply play the sounds that I enjoy listening to - it's no deeper than that!

{I think there's a separate debate to be had outside of these questions as to whether "discovering experimental artists using the internet is relatively easy" .....}

Toxin: Pauline, in your recent interview with Radio Four's Women's Hour, you were asked if you felt the nudity in your work was pornographic and depicted women as sexual objects to men. Do you feel the same questions would have arisen if you were male?

Pauline: Of course not. I doubt if anyone asked Jeff Koons and his work was using porn and challenging all those areas. But that is the point of the work, I say - look at a person - it is a natural form, but the subject of the female body is only seen in a sexual light. I am still challenged about this every time. When the performance happens, it begins with a painting and then I am naked and become part of the painting. There is such a sobriety around the work; there is not a sexual energy around it. If anything, it feels very serious and almost tragic, I am naked, with my eyes closed and requesting the audience 'take care of this vulnerability'. I throw the trust and responsibility back onto the audience; the presence of the painting states the sobriety of the work and I have to say that so far, in all the performances only once did I have a disappointing reaction. What is surprising is that it was a female. I have received comments about my sexual orientation (which is straight), but for some reason people (usually men) decide I am a lesbian because of my thoughts on this nature of work. I am naked and I ask people to see a work of art made by a person. I guess it's just a challenge and provocative and this is the response, which is a shame. Jenni Murray on the Woman's Hour interview said: "Oh come on - how can it not be sexual, what do you expect?" And I simply said something like, "I expect people to see a person, who is vulnerable and I request they look after it." So, it's about trust and responsibility.
Until it is witnessed most people don't believe me when I say there is no sexual energy in the air at all. But its true and I know that it is also to do with Jeff and the painting and the quality of 'correspondence' between the sound and the visual.

Jeff: It's clear to me that your work is different: it is about you as the artist making work on canvas (paper) as a painter, then re-framing the whole activity with you (the artist, not the model) as the canvas, and with the audience in a whole new relationship with you and the canvas. By concentrating on the naked bit I think the critics and commentators miss the essential core of the work. To some extent you allow this to happen by not emphasising the work you do with the canvas. Anyone can lie down naked and get painted on: 'flesh as canvas' - you should not allow people to think that's all you do.

Thinking more about your performance, you begin as the artist, totally in control, with the blank canvas at your mercy. You treat the canvas with love and respect. It is this, I think, that is essential for the naked bit to work (generally) so well.

As for the awkward transition, it may be that the transition between the two sets of relationships (canvas-you, you-audience) is difficult and awkward - your performance sort of demonstrates the reality of this difficulty...

Toxin: Working with sound resonance produces a random unstructured sound that would differ in every performance. The audience will obviously choose different colours and strokes when painting you, Pauline. Is your artwork unstructured and random in the performance or is there some idea formed in your mind prior to the show?

Pauline: There are the materials, the paper, canvas, paints, charcoal and my own reference points. I have done this performance work before but no, there is no formula, other than here are the materials and at some point I will be naked and lie on my side and close my eyes. There are usually only three or four colours; black, white, yellow and maybe red. This is just because the performances happen in gig spaces, on white paper and these colours look the best in this environment. I have some repeated 'structures' in the drawing (the work starts with charcoal) but this is only because I am using my body shape, arm length to reach etc, and so nothing is planned, but with what I have to use it may seem there is a repetition, but every time it is different. The environment is different, the new audience is different, I am different. And how the day has affected me (and Jeff) will all have an effect on what happens.

Toxin: It's widely known that marketing helps sell music and familiarity equals popularity. Jeff, what appealed to you to work the random unstructured pattern with resonance and noise as opposed to structured music with more mass appeal?

Jeff: I don't think my sounds are random and unstructured, but I am interested in sound, making sound, developing my language, performing and collaborating, and not interested in sales or popularity. As I said, my aesthetic is just to make sounds I enjoy listening to, but also the artists that have influenced me have given permission to have non-functional harmony, less than the obvious beat/pulse, and to dispense with climax/anticlimax and surprise as structural elements.

Morton Feldman (another enormous influence) once explained the whole of musical structure as follows: Something happens; after a while something else happens that may or may not remind you of something you have already heard; this process repeats until the piece ends. By manipulating the various controls of the Reson8 software I can make something happen, and after a while something else. I control how different something is from something else, and as the work progresses I can produce sound's that remind me, at least, of something I heard earlier.

I should emphasise that this whole process is entirely organic: nothing is preplanned. During the performance I tend to come across sounds that interest me and stick with them for a while, then gradually or abruptly change to something else, maybe coming back later. Of course this process is heavily influenced by what is going on around me, but is not a depiction of what's going on around me. (Here I'm indebted to discussions with Keith Rowe on how the same process applied to different media gives radically different results....)

Toxin: Are you going to continue to work together as a team on other projects or is it a loose collaboration where you may work with other artists, go solo and perhaps work together in the future?

Pauline: I hope so. Open to all areas. As long as the work is moving forwards and all is advancing with respect and integrity,

Jeff: I expect us both to work solo and with other artists in the future, and I very much look forward to working with Pauline in whatever context just as soon as something presents itself. I hope our recent work has given us the confidence to be more ambitious!