Briefly: What'll it be like?
A delicate and detailed walk through urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. 16mm projection, live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle)
In more detail:
Who are these people?Luke Fowler is a Glaswegian artist-filmmaker who has made a clutch of super interesting films which investigates counterculture or slightly maverick figures both in the arts and in (and outside) society in general: from radical composer Cornelius Cardew to Bogman Palmjaguara, a resident of Sutherland, "essentially maladjusted to people" and so withdrawn through distrust into nature. Here's a nice quote about him (Luke, not Mr. Palmjaguar,) from the eminent film scholar1 Michael Zyrd, "(Luke's films present)... a complex and highly varied surface of image and sound that points implicitly to a deeper and ordered structure underneath".
Lee Patterson is Mancunian musician and sound artist2, who is really quite obsessed with the minute sounds in nature, and with sound itself as it travels through mediums other that air: through water, through metal fencing, concrete bridges and such. I once described his work, in it's transforming of minute vibrations into real, understandable, and crucially, musical works of art as alchemy, and I can't do much better than that thinking about it now.
What's going on here?They'll perform a new live audio visual performance inspired by La Monte Young's 1960 instruction score " draw a straight line and follow it." Fowler and Patterson's response to the score was to find a straight road in Dundee and follow it, documenting the experience in film and sound - collecting manmade and natural objects along the way. The hidden potential of these objects as "sound objects" will become evident as part of the live performance.
If La Monte Young's score was the catalyst for this project, his radical approach to composition also provided a stimulus. Young grew up in Idaho and cites his formative influences as "the sound of the wind; the sound of crickets and cicadas; the sound of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping vessels such as my mothers kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonances set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes and planes".
Why's it interesting?Because like many of the other things we're interested in at this fest, it approaches sound and image together, not separately; in this case both responding to a central score, the documenting of the same walk. Everything is very equitably. It's narrative (every straight line has a beginning, middle and end) and representational and so a good counter-point to more abstract stuff in the fest, and it opens up the world around us to new, poetic and detailed ways of looking and hearing. It seems fitting here to mention John Cage's response when asked for a different definition of art; he suggested "paying attention to the world around us, and to the life that we are so excellently living."
Based on Composition 1960 No. 10
Draw a Straight line and follow it (for Bob Morris)
By La Monte Young
B8016 (draw a straight line and follow it)
Luke Fowler and Lee Patterson
Photo: Ivo Gormley
(c) Tate
UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2008
1. He’s an expert on both Hollis Frampton, who I’ll be banging on about loads at this festival, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who sadly features less regularly in the KYTN programme, this year at least.
2. Decide for yourself what the difference is. . .
