Aperto Cage, 2017 [selected]

Just One Note: You Don’t Need More Time — Love Is Always a Means of Measuring Time

Elena Yushina: I was thinking about an exhibition curated by Viktor Misiano, Don’t You Think the Time for Love Has Come? I wanted to kick off our conversation by talking about love. My philosophical reference point is a work by Anita Sieff entitled Hai Tempo Per Me? — that is, “Do you have time for me?” It is similar to the question “Do you love me?” although generally not for the person to whom it is addressed. In the work, it was also addressed to oneself: you see your own reflection in a mirror. I thought about it in terms of your notion of sorrow, about the connection between love and time, and your work Long Sorrow. Love is always a means of measuring time.

I wanted to think about the subjects of time and love, and your attitude towards them in your works.

 Anri Sala: I don’t think my work means to trigger specific emotions. My work deals more with notions of time and space, and how their intersection creates an architecture, which, among other things, allows for emotions to develop. But what I’m particularly interested in is making visible events that are often overlooked and spaces that mostly seem not to exist. In other words, to conjure something from almost nothing. On the contrary, any emotion already has its own baggage, even when it seems to come from nowhere. But there is a common ground. I don’t approach time as duration, but as an intensification of experience. Some emotions and their respective durations often produce the same effect: a simultaneous suspension of time and intensification of experience.

 Augustin Maurs: It’s funny when you say you love time a lot, because I see it the other way around. Love is a kind of nothingness. Especially as a framework, time is something you cannot quantify. There is never enough of it. The expression of happiness, how happy you are, is something ungraspable.

 AS: In a philosophical sense, it is absolutely true. It comes with baggage nobody has an opinion about. Well, are we talking about laughter or love?

EY: Love. 

AM: Oh, I thought we were talking about laughter. That’s an interesting point as my answer would be the same.

 EY: Intensity steals time: I see it as an existential question. When we spoke with Boris Groys, he said we could never be wrong about time. Time is right a lot of the time.

AS: Time can be right, but tempo can be wrong.

AM: He is a composer.

EY: Time is followed by tempo and rhythm. For instance, Anri, in your work Ravel Ravel Unravel, we follow the rhythm, along with all the inner meanings. If we think about it in terms of relationships, the way we feel about somebody or something always occurs at a different speed. The DJ in Unravel, who is trying to mix two distinct performance of Ravel’s concerto, [AS1] [Office2] generates the piece. How do we choose the right rhythm in real life? Is it similar to composing or not? What’s the right tempo?

AS: When we speak of time, rhythm, and tempo, we can go back to the ancient Greek notions of time. I have in mind here the difference between chronos and kairos, between objectively measurable time and subjectively sensed time. There is duration, but there is also the sensation of time. Three minutes of pain unquestionably feel longer than three minutes of doing math. The duration might be the same, but the sensation of it is quite different.

There is also the inner relationship. When you conduct an orchestra, how important is the overall tempo? I think what really matters are the dynamics within the tempo. I don’t think the overall tempo has much impact on a musical work, even if it eventually defines its final duration. It’s the tempos and inner dynamics that lend a work its distinctive breath.

AM: It reminds me as well of your work To Each His Own (in Bridges). [AS3] Your interpretation of the bridge and the function of the bridge in pop music was really important as a way of escalating time within established time. It’s also complicated to speak about such broad topics as time and love.

EY: The thing is how to feel the right tempo. Sometimes, we act out the same story, and our narratives are the same, but different speeds generate asynchronization.

AM: I’m thinking about something else. A very simple example: take a piece by Bach. How is it, although it is played at the very same tempo on the very same instrument, we can recognize a particular interpretation from among a hundred different interpretations? The bridge is actually here, and maybe this is what you have been talking about. We have already drifted into a kind of magic, and maybe it has something to do with love or what we have invested in it. This is interesting, because, in classical music, it is called tempo rubato, that is, “stolen time,” and it has to do with the idea of desire. It is a way to approach music and play it so as to connect desire and time through how I hear things as a musician. Tempo rubato is very important to a performer: his body is giving up something. It’s pretty much about love and desire when you are able to give up something. You can identify a performer like Glenn Gould: you hear the first note and don’t even need the time signature. Just one note: you don’t need more time.

AS: It is about how you distribute time within time or how you steal time from time, as the term tempo rubato suggests. You can decide to start performing a piece in a very orthodox way, and then suddenly play it in a much slower way. It could come across as a quite arbitrary decision, almost a matter of ideology. But the way Gould plays, it never comes across as his having made a decision, such as wanting to play it the slowest way in the universe. His choices don’t come across as arbitrary decisions, and consequently they run counter to any established ideology or fixed approach.

AM: I think you know what he is doing there: he is getting rid of time. This is something you find in John Cage, too. Cage’s big idea was to get rid of time. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but this is my impression. In my works, I try to get rid of time, too, all the time. Love is a useless word, you know.

EY: When you think about it from different perspectives, you can see it more precisely.

AM: That would be my question to Anri. When you’re worried about something, do you really think about works in terms of time?

AS: No, I let my works take the exact time they need to take. It’s not the concept or the preliminary idea that decides. It’s the process. While the process reveals the idea, it becomes its embodiment. In that sense, I’m not interested in ideas, but in their embodiments.

I was impressed once when I saw a friend of mine throwing a tent on a beach in Albania. He threw his tent in the air, and it opened automatically in a couple of seconds before it hit the ground. It’s a bit like that with idea. You throw an idea in the air and juggle with it until it lands in the real world, until it becomes itself. Ultimately, the duration is the outcome of the negotiations between the initial idea and its ensuing embodiment.

Speaking of To Each His Own (in Bridges), what particularly interested me was the notion of bridges in songs and the ensuing contradiction between a bridge and the rest of the song. A bridge is a transition, near the end of a song, that breaks from the song’s set pattern, thus building a tension leading to the song’s climax. The bridge tends to alienate listeners from the song itself, holding their attention while suspending their beliefs and expectations.

EY: How do increasing velocity and the singularity affect modern society?

AM: Of course, there is the technical aspect, but you touched on synchronization, and I find this important. We are all synchronized through our tools and also the media, news, etc. For example, I know what it means as a musician in an orchestra when you are synchronized: you are not together. The idea of synchronization means staging the idea of being together, not interacting. That is a fundamental principle of how I work with musicians and how I understand time. I think people should learn how to steal time.

AS: There is a difference between being together and being in sync. A couple of years ago, when I was working on a new piece, The Present Moment, I did research to understand what the longest present moment was. The present moment is commonly understood as the longest uninterrupted stretch of time: the interval during which the brain cannot distinguish among before, now, and later. Apparently, neuroscience has proven that the longest present moments (before the brain starts chopping time up into past, present, and future) occur in music and correspond with musical phrases. Being together in music is utterly different from being together or interacting in conversation. Present moments are much shorter during a verbal interaction.

AM: The moment after the last note of a piece, the moment you don’t want to switch off.

EY: You can translate it into psychoanalytic terms. Per Lacan, we might wonder who speaks this moment. You or somebody beyond you? Consciousness or the unconscious?

AM: To a large extent, it’s a matter of identification and getting into a trance.

AS: When you speak about the first note, it’s a way of generating a signal. There is intentionality.

AM: It’s beautiful, because I discovered these things as a musician, and one thing that strikes me is the curve. When you play a curve on an instrument (because you are always looking for curves as a musician), you are extremely pregnant and present and give something up. There is a transition between past and future in the curve.

AS: It makes me think about André Vida, a musician and saxophone player with whom I have collaborated several times. He has performed live at more than eight hundred screenings of Long Sorrow, playing a duet, as it were, with Jemeel Moondoc, who does the sax solo in the film itself. Having to continuously improvise to a prerecorded piece of music, you feel caged as a musician. So what happens over time? There are at least three very different variations: you play with, you play along (denying the music that is playing the same time as you are), and you play against — meaning, you are aware of what is happening and you wrestle with it. I am talking about circumstances in which you’re doing eight performances a day over two months seven days a week. As a jazz musician, you are incapable of continuously setting yourself free. So how can you escape the cage of the film and the recording? To escape the limbo of repetition, André drew really abstract scores. They were not actual musical scores, just curved lines he drew on paper or the corners of exhibition walls. When he felt completely lost and didn’t know which way to go, he would sometimes turn to one of these random drawings, consisting of curves, to find the key that would set him free. He would need another couple of curves every day.

EY: It’s interesting in terms of symbolization. It might be the opposite when you want to stay in spiritual transmission and generate your own mystery music. It seems you are completely riding the rails. I mean you are not symbolizing the moment: you are dealing with realistic things.

AS: I’m not interested in symbols, because they are chockablock with infatuation.

EY: I was thinking less about symbols per se and more about the process. It’s also psychoanalytical, as when you experience a trauma, it has to be symbolized.

AM: I have more problems with the literalism of certain symbols and the way they are interpreted. When it comes to society, I have always found everything on the Internet, etc., so literal I cannot accept it personally.

AS: But it goes hand in glove with what we have been saying about the difference between synchronization and being together. Symbols precede any interaction. They are completely in sync with established modes of communication, and thus often disconnected from the new modes.

AM: But what about André’s symbols?

AS: They are not symbols. They are directions.

EY: They are free of meaning. That is the problem with social media. It doesn’t matter whether you read them rightly or wrongly. They have their own meaning anyway.

AM: There is established meaning everywhere. I’ve also done research on the dark web to look for something less literal. I think it’s funny how society is so violent and tough, but also so literal and correct in a sense.

EY: I have read that Stalker opened up new perspectives for you. How do you feel about it now?

AS: Stalker revolves around the prospect of navigating a troubled place, as long as you don’t return down the same path. This choreography produces a really open narrative and open-ended meanings. It’s my favorite Tarkovsky film, compared to some of his other films, such as Nostalgia or The Sacrifice, which supply meanings that are more set and fixed.

AM: He tries, perhaps, to draw unfinished symbols. I can feel this, while still experiencing the films as quite heavy and distanced.

AS: I find distance in his films and a fragile freedom in the way he frames scenes.

EY: Can we compare a symbol with an image? There are a lot of differences among the films, and maybe also a lot of words for describing the differences. Sometimes, the sensation circumstances produce is more like an image.

AM: Maybe you will dislike this idea, but it’s an important thing like hieroglyphs, a possible way of splitting the distance.

EY: What does silence mean to you? What kind of music is possible that incorporates silence?

AM: When I think about silence, I come back to what I was discussing before: the very last note. So, you have an idea of something. Music consists of impulses that ultimately lead to nothing. That is really something.

AS: Silence is like oxygen to sound and music. I understand silence as an interval, as the necessary space around the sound. It is the space that enables something to sound.

EY: Coming back to our discussion of the last note, how do you keep applause from ruining the magic of this moment?

AM: Here we are dealing with the presence of things we cannot count and control.

AS: It is interesting who claps first after a silence. Somebody has got to be the first.

AM: Let’s not go in this direction. Otherwise, we will end up discussing the totally different problem of bourgeois concerts.

AS: Why shouldn’t we speak of it, replacing the notion of love with the notion of the bourgeois?

AM: We have already touched on all the aspects, such as symbols, signs, etc. As a performing artist, your body makes something from sheer silence. My project The Love Transcriptions deals with these transitions. Why do we need to write? How is writing connected to love? How does a love of cherries become a love of nations?

EY: In a world of cages, how do you feel about musical recordings?

AM: Now you have forced me to speak about the bourgeois and a crucial moment in the history of music. The idea of recordings emerged much earlier than recordings themselves — in 1805, I think. The metronome was invented not by musicians, but by a charlatan, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. Anyway, since we have metronomes we can set the tempo and establish the idea of synchronization. There is no longer any question of how quickly or slowly the music should be played. More importantly, the metronome was a huge success as a device. People everywhere practiced music with it, and that radically changed the way we understand music, and the way we practice and hear it. In a way, it changed our approach to notation. Earlier, it was more allegorical, but now it was more mathematical and literal. From that moment on, music was reproducible, and it was no accident that it coincided with the bourgeois notion of the conductor standing in front of the orchestra or ensemble and synchronizing the performance of the musicians. A concert is not just a mode of listening, but also a mode of looking at things. The western bourgeois world staged concerts as visual spectacles, which brought us to the point where we looked at music more than we listened to it. The recording is purely a continuation of this way of seeing things.

AS: Before the advent of recordings, playing music was obligatory to listening to music. Many more people played a musical instrument back then than nowadays, when we have all these devices for listening to it. I have read there is a distinct pleasure derived from physically playing music, which is very different from the acoustic pleasure derived from listening to it. Often a pianist likes playing certain concertos, but prefers listening to different concertos.

EY: Could we compare it with dance or painting? You can also record it on photo or video, but it’s different and incomparable.

AM: That is the relevance of music today. It actually cannot be reproduced. I’m not against recordings, but personally I do not make recordings. If it has become the systematic way of making music, it is a problem or a shame, because we miss the essence and particularity of music. It is bound to the space where it happened, it does not endure, and it has this marvelous quality of being physical and virtual at the same time. It’s not a matter of the recording itself. It is approaching all of music through recordings that makes it different.

AS: Most things would not be produced, only played, and so they would exist transiently. But what do we know about how people enjoy recordings now? When you think about the impact of recording in our civilization, it is still a late arrival, and it is too early to judge it. There is also the architecture of recordings, the fusion of physical sound and acquired taste.

AM: I think you’re right. Glenn Gould was one of the first and maybe one of the last who adopted this approach to recordings. For instance, what Glenn Gould did in the fifties and sixties, forget it. Nobody would allow him to work like that today, with a broken piano, etc. Now you have to work according to the music industry’s standards.[AS4] 

AS: But there are also differences among standards. I drive daily in Berlin and I usually listen the radio when I drive, either to BBC or NPR. The culture of recordings on these radio stations is very different. The voices recorded in their respective studios, during talk shows, sound very different, and I don’t think it is by chance. On the BBC, the voices sound slightly more distant. If we could imagine the voice as an image, I would say that voices on the BBC resemble more a bird’s-eye view, whereas the voices on NPR are more like close-ups or subjective shots. A recording’s style—the type of microphone used, where you set it up, the distance between the microphone and the interviewees or performers, the degree of reverb, etc — shapes our relation to the voice and the personality it embodies. The resulting sense of distance or closeness, of objectivity or subjectivity is not innocent, but part of the architecture of the recording and its politics.

AM: We could also consider these questions in terms of filmmaking.

AS: When you work with filmmaking in contemporary art, it’s very different from filmmaking as an industry, because every industry develops its tools in accordance with its aims and means. In contemporary art, we work with tools that were not specially produced for us. We work with tools produced for others; for instance, artists had little input in the development and production of cameras. We work with borrowed or hijacked tools. On the one hand, no artist ever had any input into the development of projectors and cameras. On the other hand, we are not obliged to respect the industry’s standards. For instance, in an exhibition, I can decide to produce asymmetrical conditions for the way you watch an image or listen to its sound. I don’t need to project onto the center of the wall. I don’t have to place an equal number of speakers on each side of the space. You can’t do this in the film industry, because those decisions have already been made. Everything is very symmetrical.

 EY: What kind of music would you like to listen now, for instance?

AM: There are classical pieces I always come back to, like some of the late Beethoven pieces. But usually I don’t listen to much music.

AS: I’ve worked a lot with music in the past ten or fifteen years, and consequently I mainly listen to music for my research. The kind of music generally depends on the subject I’m working with. So, when I’m not working, I prefer either not to listen to music at all or let music happen without my choosing it.

 EY: Let’s put Aperto Radio on. Anri and Augustin, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us.

In the first post-Soviet decade, Russian pop music was the flagship of sexual emancipation. Art critic and curator Agata Iordan spoke with art critic Andrey Shental about the power of suddenly liberated music and a non-professionalized music industry.

Neither contemporary art, film nor literature was able to convey the notions of sexual revolution in Russia. Why did it happen this way? Only because music is sensual, powerfully capable of provoking different moods, because lyrics are obvious, easily audible, and so on?

In Europe and North America, rock-and-roll was the medium of sexual revolution. Russian rock (e.g., Aquarium, Nautilus Pompilius, Kino), which became popular only in the 1980s, was fairly asexual. It was protest music, politically engaged, and defiant and androgynous in its own way. Yet it was not a vehicle of sexual emancipation and other sexual and bodily freedoms, as western rock-and-roll had been. Besides, there were almost no women amongst Soviet/Russian rock performers, or they were outsiders and came to bad ends, like Yanka Dyagileva. Cinema was unable to act in this capacity due to a lack of financing. Mosfilm was at a standstill. By the way, its soundstages were used to shoot a good number of pop music videos in the nineties, for example, Lika Star’s Let It Rain. Contemporary art’s corporeality was highly politically colored, but remained masculine and macho. Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe was an isolated case. I’m amazed that local theorists try to represent him as a trickster or impersonator, while ignoring the gender aspect of his works. I tried to debunk this erroneous view in an article for the magazine Little Joe. Vinogradov & Dubossarsky’s paintings exploit feminine sexuality. Alexander Brener’s performances (say, with Oleg Kulik and Yaroslav Mogutin) had a homoerotic subtext usually ignored by art critics.

Art and literature are considered engines of the counterculture, but amidst the reality of Russia in the nineties they were not able to keep up. Or maybe they didn’t want to transmit the sexual revolution’s call for gender equality, the rights of sexual minorities, the liberation of desire, and so on. The minds of readers were flooded by pop literature and the yellow press. Such progressive sex researchers as Igor Kon had to turn either to high art or the yellow press and pornography. In fiction, sexuality was vulgarized and adopted the grotesque shapes of sexism, in which the woman submits to the man’s desire, and so on.

Sexualization was a completely different thing in pop music. It produced new sexual identities and role models, often emancipated and insisting on the right to one’s own pleasure. Different sex divas emerged, for example. Lika Star was an underground diva. The early Natalya Vetlitskaya was noble and aristocratic, while Lada Dance was energetic and dance-focused. But they were opposed, for example, by the group Strelki, who represented a certain kind of empowerment. The group’s members were young women whose appeal hardly corresponded to stereotypes of feminine beauty. In 2000, the year Putin took power, Strelki and Boris Moiseev did a cover of Sexual Revolution. The only musician who had come out and exoticized his otherness, Moiseev was also a Soviet-era star. But there were also such queer characters as Oscar, Shura, and Nikita, who introduced the public to the world of night clubs, drugs, drag queens, and collective ecstasy. Your remark about sensuality was spot on. Of course, the voice matters in music. Unlike Soviet vocalists, the performers of the nineties had very different and often deliberately sexualized voices. It suffices to recall the toothless Shura, the most uncompromising hero of the period. But videos mattered no less: beginning in the eighties, they were inseparable from the songs. Videos displayed new behavioral codes, sexual idioms, styles of clothing, etc. Literature could not cope with all of this technically, cinema did not have the means, and art reflected its own institutionality.

It’s interesting that pop music didn’t adopt the tactic of totally vulgarizing the topic of sex, which happened in contemporary tabloid literature.

Music was also censored after 1991, of course. Pop performers could not get away with things print publications “for adults” could permit themselves. Until the so-called takeover of NTV in 2000–2003, Russian television was fairly progressive. It discussed all the topics that are taboo nowadays. Programs such as About It were not only entertaining, but educational. Nowadays, on the contrary, we see members of the clergy have to voice their opinion in every program, while pop stars have long become upstanding heterosexual family values people who take conservative stances. On the other hand, certain videos, like Na-Na’s legendary homoerotic fantasy Faina or the first BDSM video, Irina Saltykova’s Gray Eyes, have been banned from the airwaves.

I remember, as a child in the mid-nineties, that you could hear many words, resounding from stereo speakers, that while not forbidden were, at least, not spoken in public.

Some musical critics believe the group Malchishnik (Bachelor Party) first sang the word “sex” so everyone could hear it.

Given that there was no sex in the USSR, that sounds plausible.

There is a direct correlation between music and politics. You can follow it literally year by year. Kris Kelmi shot the first video that hinted at a bedroom scene the same year as the first democratic elections, 1989, and Malchishnik’s Sex Without a Break was released right on the dot in 1991. The song describes a gangbang, in which several guys take turns having their way with a young woman. I think we shouldn’t take the song literally, although machismo is often a pose adopted by mainstream rap, but symbolically, as the revolutionary violence inevitable during any revolution, even a sexual revolution. But the commercial aspect matters here as well. Of course, many groups and performers acknowledged they sang songs “about it” just for the money. Sex sold, although it was packaged differently than in tabloid literature.

Sex and fetishism sell well. Do you think it was a temporary phenomenon, typical of the nineties, or a permanent one? I think that sexuality is no longer an obligatory component of a hot-selling commodity nowadays.

Since the late nineties, we have been observing a worldwide trend towards the normalization and production of moderation. It has become the ideological superstructure that justifies neoliberal economic reforms: austerity budgets, increasing inequality, etc. People had to be convinced their pleasures were excessive. As Robert Pfaller reminds us, pop culture feeds us images of people in business suits who do fitness after work and practice safe sex instead of indulging in transgression and sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Compare the videos by the Spice Girls and their former member Melanie C. She runs on a track and sings: “I’ll never be the same again.” These transformations, of course, have contributed to the neoconservative turn of recent years. Nevertheless, if we agree with the hypothesis that the capitalist economy is libidinal, then every object and participant in that economy is sexually invested. It’s just that sexuality takes on different shapes.

In Television, Lacan writes that, in fact, capitalism begins by sending sex to the dump. How would you comment this?

I guess that Lacan means that sex becomes a means of payment and mutual benefit between partners. Of course, one can speculate that during the period of the “initial accumulation of capital” in the post-Soviet space, sex was rather a synonym of freedom and experimentation than of reproductivity. That was roughly how gay theorists described sex before the AIDS epidemic. But this nostalgic view leads to a dangerous idealization of the past. Besides, a number of questions arise. To what extent was the Soviet project socialism? Is the Putin regime full-fledged capitalism? What is more repressive: suppressing sexuality or sublimating it and enjoining everyone to pleasure themselves to the hilt? As we sit in the current “dump”, we should think about how sex has emigrated to the internet, while the social subject has been de-eroticized. I think this process is nicely illustrated by the video Go with the Flow, by the Russian experimental electronic group IC3PEAK. But in a period of postinternet sensuality, Lika Star’s 1994 video Fallen Angel looks just as modern.

A postscript on sensuality: the Russian edition of Playboy was launched by Artemy Troitsky, Russian’s most famous musical critic and concert promoter. He served as the magazine’s editor-in-chief until 1999.

I’m not a fan of the notion that post-socialist countries are “catching up”, meaning they must go through the same stages of development as capitalist countries because they fell out of the bosom of modernity for decades. Nevertheless, the emergence of this magazine was quite logical. It fulfilled a certain mission, however dubious and anti-feminist that might sound. The desire to pose for Playboy, despite the magazine’s sexism and the slight misogyny of Troitsky himself, was a quite natural reaction to Soviet hypocrisy. In terms of our conversation, I would note that the magazine was part of pop music “in the expanded field”. What was not shown on the screen was continued in print, and it was not low-grade porno, of course.