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This text is an excerpt from
the essay Tenuous Notes, by
Pavel
Büchler.
The full text is included in the HICA publication, Exhibitions 2010.
Preparations, getting ready ... for what? In his 'Lecture on Nothing' John
Cage describes the composition of the text 'like an empty glass' the
purpose of which is its readiness to receive what comes along.
Punctuation and hyphenation play a prominent part in the arrangement of
the text as a graphic score. These indicators of phrasing follow the
invisible typographic grid rather than the conventions of grammar or the
logic of syntax and act as small obstructions placed within the text,
almost in the manner in which the composer had been known to insert small
objects between the strings of a piano to change its sound. For the score
of his Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano a decade earlier, Cage
devised a precise sortiment of such 'mutes', consisting of nuts, bolts,
screws, pieces of plastic and rubber, measured their relative distances
from the instrument's bridge and the dampers, and provided notes on how
they should be used. The inventory ends with an item that Cage might have
used to revise his early sketches of the piece, an American Pencil Co.
#346 eraser. I would like to think that the pedantic identification of a
particular make and model of this indispensable 'mute' from the writing
desk drawer may be a little joke by the artist who spoke of
'contradictions in which we have the room to live', who prolifically used
chance
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operations
as a compositional tool and whose name has become synonymous with
everything that is unpredictable. It could be even a light hearted rebuke
to those who might take his instructions too literally or try and prepare
themselves for the experience of the music by a careful scrutiny of the
artist's intentions. It says to me, erase all that and it sets me adrift.
In Jeremy
Millar's film, preparations are an end in themselves, not an a priori act
but all that there is. There is nothing to follow nor is there anything to
tell me that the process is complete and its purpose, if any, has been
attained. The film shows the interior of a grand piano, the strings,
hammers and dampers with the various objects prescribed by Cage placed
here and there. An invisible hand taps the piano keys, a large bolt
vibrates and gently rocks, an oversize nut threaded loosely on the shaft
of an old wood screw pounces up and down and a well used eraser tensions
apart three strings. Its provenance is indeterminable but it seems just
right for the job. The sound is beautiful. There are no chords or any
musical figures, just single slightly off-key notes at irregular intervals
and some faint background noises, and like in John Cage's music, silence
and intentionally produced sounds seem to play equal parts. There is a
sense of duration but no narrative or development in the sequence of
evenly composed static close-up shots edited without transitions. After
some twelve mesmerising minutes the film abruptly ends, leaving me adrift
once again.
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