Irene Bindi and Aston Coles: Moon Rehearsal Tape

by Tom Kohut

In the more than forty years since the artist and theorist Lucy Lippard announced the dematerialization of the art, it has become apparent, particularly to Lippard herself, that this proclamation may have been premature. The critiques that conceptual art launched during its heroic period in the late 1960s/mid 1970s—the critique of the object as commodity, as part of the retinal and financial economy of the art market, as theoretically unsuitable for the global world of networked information/communication technologies, as politically retrograde in its insertion of international financial and American imperial power into the realm of culture—have retained their force even in the face of the putative “failure” of conceptual art to dismantle the gallery system, the art market and capitalism as such. Furthermore, the dematerialization of the art object has been only partial at best, as the plethora of things to be found in galleries and art fairs can attest. So what sort of status does the art object-as-object retain after its quasi-dematerialization?

These are some of the questions that Irene Bindi and Aston Coles’s recent exhibition at Plug In ICA, Moon Rehearsal Tape, brought to mind. Bindi and Coles have so far pursued an artistic career that is both protean and multifaceted. Working in sound performance, painting and sculpture, film and installation, their work is characterized by an evanescent openness; process and exploration are emphasized for their own sake, and a truly experimental approach to their art projects means that the artists themselves are, sometimes, as surprised by the results as are the viewers. This is exemplified in Moon Rehearsal Tape, in which the artists were invited by Artistic Programs Director Jenifer Papararo to inhabit one of the galleries as a studio. To that end, Bindi and Coles scheduled a series of events around an audiovisual installation, about which presently. On January 24th, they engaged in a sound performance as part of the Winnipeg New Music Festival, in which they explored signal feedback, distortion and manipulation. On February 4th, the 1991 Russian television faux-documentary Lenin Was a Mushroom, in which we learned that Lenin’s interest in psychedelic mushrooms was of such intensity that he himself became a mushroom during the early years of the revolution. This was supplemented by a panel discussion between Soviet historian Radhika Dasai, mycologist (aptly enough) Thomas Booth and Winnipeg composer Matthew Patton about the nature and behaviour of mushrooms, hallucinogenic and otherwise, revolution, consciousness and art. On February 8th, Bindi and Coles arranged for eight children between the ages of two and four to utilize microphones and effect peddles in a group exploration of voice, sound, improvisation and collective dynamics, the results of which were recorded (one channel per child) and then donated to the WMFU Free Archive. March 3rd saw a performance by Winnipeg-based sound artist Crabskull (Chrys Fournier), who used techniques derived from dub, hip hop and dark techno to explore the sonic architectonics of the gallery space. The last even on March 10th was, perhaps, the most emblematic of the Moon Rehearsal Tape as a whole: a “screening” of Mikael Kristersson’s 1998 experimental documentary Kestrel’s Eye, a wordless evocation by means of image and sound of the life of a group of kestrels who nest in a Swedish church. In this “screening” (more of a “screenless”), the film was projected through the gallery windows into the night sky; aside from the incidental reflections of the film off of the galls in the window, the audience could only experience the ebbs and flows of the film’s soundtrack: bird calls, minimal urban noises, the sound of wind and water or church bells.

What drew these fairly heterogeneous events together—primarily sound-based, some participatory, some humourous, others meditative—is the sound system that Coles has designed (and continues to design as an ongoing work in progress). Consisting of a series of speaker boxes connected together, the design of the system allows for a considerable degree of natural resonance, which gives any sound emanating from them a particular sense of warm presence. Visually, the composite of boxes assembled together creates an architectural as much as sculptural effect, bringing to mind, for the present author, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 buildings in Montréal. Like Habitat 67, the sound system is modular, somewhere between bricolage and design, and practical in its emphasis on polyfunctionality (its use as a PA system for the screenings, panel discussions and sound performances). The resonating loops and cycles that the speakers provide created a sonically vibrant environment that emphasized the physicality of the sound emanating from it, while, interesting, incorporating and respecting the ambient aural textures of the space itself; the hums and buzzes of the room’s heating and lighting systems seemed to become incorporated into the whole as an extra, if random, instrument.

I mentioned above that Coles’s sound system is a work in progress, repurposed and reconfigured for each of its uses. In this sense, it is an objective correlative for the modularly variable nature of the exhibition itself. Furthermore, the sound system served as a sort of anchor for the audiovisual installation itself, for which the events described above served as punctuation or marks of emphasis. Entering the gallery, he hear recurring hums of feedback and signal distortion whose granularity and analogue sources are emphasised by the aforementioned sonic properties are afforded by the properties of the sound system, which was mounted on the wall. On this wall, we see projected images of the artists moving about as though engaging in, at first the sound check, and then a performance. In fact, we are watching a performance; Bindi and Coles recorded themselves performing to an empty gallery and then screened the results. The effect is an uncanny one; the footage of the performance is taken from a single POV, giving the impression of being in the audience of a performance that is/is not happening, and the two-dimensionality of the shimmering images of the musicians further abstracts from what is happening. This uncanny abstraction is emphasized even more by the sonic elements of the “performance,” whose decentred drones and lack of harmonic base—which can only be described as lunar—create an interesting tension with their palpable materiality.

So what does all of this have to do with the dematerialization of the art object? While I do not attribute a programmatic impulse to Bindi and Coles, they are nevertheless working within the post-conceptual territory in which the object is a source of anxiety, or at least a considerable ambivalence. Why anxiety? Is it an anxiety related to the afterlife of the object? Certainly, the mysteriously glowing images of the artists as they “perform” in the installation, as well as the poignant, poetic futility of projecting a film into the night sky, give a strong sense of a fragility to the art object as unit of apperception; the there-but-not-there aspect of the perceptual object is manifested in the Moon Rehearsal Tape installation and the non-screening of Kestrel’s Eye, not by means of dematerialization, but by submitting the art work to the structure of the trace. Not, then, an ontology of the art object in its post-dematerialized state, but, pace Derrida, a hauntology.

However, there is one object that is undoubtedly present, that is foregrounded in the installation and essential to all of the events: the sound system. Its aforementioned architectural qualities, as well as the physical properties of the sound that it produces, make it an object of aesthetic contemplation in its own right, which under normal circumstances would not be a problem. But in this context, in which the anxiety relating to the work of art as object is emphasized, what to make of the aesthetic qualities of the sound system as object? Here, it is important to remember that the sound system’s role in this exhibition is not merely that of an object of aesthetic consumption, but that its role is primarily functional; it is an object that performs work, that labours, during Moon Rehearsal Tape as a whole. In this respect, we might recall the argument made by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in his 1958 book Du mode d’existence des objets techniques to the effect that the fear of automation, that the “machines will rule,” is a result of the fact that the relations between humans and machines is presently one of master to slave; the fear of machines taking over is the fear of a workers’ revolt. What Simondon recommends, albeit enigmatically, is that the relation between human and machine become one of reciprocal transduction; in this sense, he moves from the “device” paradigm of technology (in which technology is defined as the totality of singular devices, e.g., a car, a telephone, a transistor, etc.) to the cybernetic models that were becoming available in the mid-twentieth century. While now is not the time to go into the precise details of Simondon’s argument, we can note two germane features: the need to render the labour of the technological object visible as labour and the importance of transduction. After all, what is a sound system but an assemblage of transducers that convert electronic signals into sound waves? And in terms of the visibility of the object’s labour, could this be the source of the anxiety of the object? (As the saying goes, no one likes to know how their shoes are made; the anxiety here is related, perhaps, to a sense of embarrassment, if not shame, before object-worker’s unremunerated labour). In effect, by placing the transductive labour of the object at the centre of the exhibition, Bindi and Coles have made the first gesture in a process of the demystification of the art process by foregrounding the material base on which the dematerialization of the art object always stood.

Irene Bindi and Aston Coles: Moon Rehearsal Tape exhibited at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg from March 22nd to April 13th, 2016.

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Tom Kohut is an art theorist and critic living in Winnipeg, Canada. He is the co-editor of Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Communication and Aesthetic Theories Revisited and the author of numerous articles on film, video, new media, sound and bio art.