Reflections On "Conductor Number One"
Cary Peppermint
April 1997
_____________________________________________________________In a piece called "The Chief", Joseph Beuys was wrapped in a roll of felt in which he remained for 9 hours with two dead hares at both ends of his body and a microphone into which he murmured, breathed or other wise communicated through speakers placed in the physical space. When I consider this work I think of the circumvention of time and space as well as the insistence of ritual so often times excluded or rendered ineffective via commodification in our postmodern condition. "Conductor Number One: Getting In Touch With Chicken" requires I remain confined in a pine box. The pine box references my death, the "grand event" toward which all my other "events" subtly or loudly aspire to supersede. Through this "ritual" I seek not only the circumvention of time and space but, also the fear of my own physical death by my conscious simulation of it. "Conductor Number One: Getting In Touch With Chicken" belittles the artifact and the linear concept of origin and demise. With regard to its transmission of light and sound and the physical displacement granted via the telematic experience, it is quite possible I am physically dead already and thus far ahead of my time.
In a piece entitled, "Same Time Tommorrow", Laurie Anderson says, "Now I in YOU without a body move." This causes me to consider the word mediated. I enjoy representations. I get excited thinking of all the material through which we could and do touch and or rather "make contact." "Conductor Number One" is a circuit in which I become "conductor" and illicit the responses of participants called "batteries" in effort to contact a chicken who is a "resistor". In each of our lives we are multimedia artists conducting ourselves through a variety of media but most often through air. I often consider the word resolution. This word suggests there is a place where we meet in perfect symmetry as in a one to one ratio. At this point we will cease to be multimedia artists. At this junction we will humm the ohm or rather the sound forever makes. Would this be heaven? As artists do we defy the notions of cohesion and certainty or do we actively seek the shutdown or rather the lull of such a moment when everything comes together? "Conductor Number One", suggests the overwhelming promise of grand event, death, and or shutdown. The geographical schizophrenia of such a piece designed to function potentially everywhere yet existing nowhere illuminates the thin threaded fictions to which we subscribe lest we otherwise unravel ourselves into personal and global chaos. The success of "Conductor Number One", is concurrent upon participants acceptance of "nowhere" and the interaction of both "conductor" and all "batteries" toward completion of a "circuit" gingerly titled "chicken".
I am not interested in where one comes from only in where one may arrive. Arthur Kroker makes a similar statement with regard to the internet in his book "Data Trash", He says, "The internet body is not concerned with travel, only with destination." In an age of telematic consciousness response times have been abbreviated, life times may be effectively epitomized through time based media in well under five minutes as demonstrated by my earlier work entitled, "Special." Seemingly infinite destinations are at our fingertips via the ever expansive and evolving world wide web called the internet. "Conductor Number One: Getting In Touch With Chicken" emphasizes destination. The piece cares not "From Whence We Came." Moreover it conjures a future culture uprooted and blowing in a haphazard wind; severed from constants, meaning and any distinguishable points of reference.
"Well we know where we're going but, we don't know where we've
been and we know what we're knowing but, we can't say what
we've seen, and we're not little children, and we know what we
want and the future is certain, give us time to work it out..."
-Talking Heads from "Road To Nowhere"
Walter Benjamin states, with regard to the work of Proust, "For here the day unravels what the night was woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting." With Proust, a lifetime was recollected for what Jean Cocteau articulated as "...the incurable imperfection in the very essence of the present moment." Within my work I actively acknowledge this "incurable imperfection" only opposite the obsessions of Proust, I wish to incur, demonstrate and or otherwise celebrate in the certain dissolve of the moment and construct a "woven web" out of future instead of past. With Conductor Number One, I begin to spin the web of my future through becoming the material or rather "medium", by designating myself, "conductor".
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capepper@dreamscape.com