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I recently re-discovered and have been re-listening to these three CDs over the past couple of days. Hope (1998), Trace (1999) and Zero (2000) were limited edition collections of one-minute, or two-minute in the case of the double CD Trace, soundworks. Contributors were invited to create an original recording of specified duration for each thematic CD. They were published by Audio Research Editions, which was founded by Colin Fallows in 1998 as a limited edition imprint for artists' soundworks.
The Audio Research Editions website tells us that:
“Audio Research Editions CDs contain soundworks by a broad range of international sound artists, experimental composers, noise makers and other audio creators. Using the limited edition print as a formal model, the imprint has to date published over two hundred works by artists from over twenty countries. Audio Research Editions treats the compact disc as an art space with each edition containing a themed audio exhibition that can be experienced in either linear or random modes.”
The CDs included contributions by ARPARP, Joe Banks, Warren Burt, Martin e Greil, The Groceries, Reed Ghazala, id battery, in between noise, The Land Of Nod, Longstone, The Mindwinder, Yoko Ono, Henry Priestman, Project Dark, Lee Ranaldo, Keith Rowe, scanner, Semiconductor, Will Sergeant, Janek Schaefer and Skyray among many others, including me.
The artists range from the well-known, the obscure and the unknown; the shortness, diversity and number of the tracks (68 on Hope, 70 on the two disc Trace, 46 on Zero) and their alphabetical-by-artist-name order, lends an arbitrary egalitarianism to the project which is further enhanced by taking the advice of the suggestion in the sleeve notes that they are ideally listened to in random mode: this is a project made for the shuffle play age. The CDs can be heard in their entirety as Real Media files (unfortunately only in unshuffleable linear order) at the Audio Research Editions website.
Here are my contributions to the three CDs:
Hope Under the Weather (1 minute, 1998, 1.5Mb, mp3) from the Hope CD, is a compacted remix of the soundtrack to my super 8 film Microphone (1994, 24 min). The film centred around the elliptical theme of a shadowy individual who lived in a small back room facing onto Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne recording the weather and making arcane calculations based on the International Dateline. This shadowy individual was of course me and I appear briefly in the film with a shaved head wearing a green dress and ruby lipstick.
Brittle Creek Stalker Track (2 minutes, 1999, 2.9Mb, mp3) from the Trace CD, original sleeve notes: “Original tapes recorded on the foot along Brittle Creek Track, digitally parsed as image files and traced back to sound through a variety of programmes. Retracing the steps and strangely resonant with the haunting presence that haunts the track.” The title is an allusion to Brittlesea which was an early name for Brightlingsea in Essex. The originating field recordings were made on a track alongside Brightlingsea Creek.
Say Zero (1 minute, 2000, 1.5Mb, mp3) from the Zero CD, original sleeve notes: “Digital dub stammers, loping fractures and repeated returns to a zero point – an end in itself. A micro mix of incomplete projected settings of ante-logocentric voice fragments. Constructed at the Footscray Dip House.” The voices were sourced from a promotional CD for a voice over agency, the voices were manipulated effectively by removing the diphthongs from the recorded spoken words.
In cinema, activity contained by narrative framing can hint at a universe beyond the local narrative as an ellipse often occurring at The End. In Chekhov (the Russian writer to whom Maeve tells me she has formed an attachment) characters inhabit clearly defined places, situated in a kind of pre-cinematic spatial mise en scene, place is key to their narrative form. There is this same tension in these paintings as their contained form and arrested energy fixes the temporal activity of painting in dimensions inside and outside the boxes.
Here we are then, first with 43 small polyglottous paintings. Small strokes inscribe stories, a number of occasions coexist in one pictorial space just as a place that can be described or named exists only when a number of temporalities have occupied it. In these paintings multiple, sometimes repetitive, actions and movements describe a spatial index, the body and movement both within and beyond the frame: activity is occupation within borders colonised by haptic abstraction.There are qualities here that I remember from Maeve’s films in the nineties when we were both active in the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. Films like Tawdry Sass (1996), incised and painted skinny film, in effect not unlike some of these paintings. A voice on its soundtrack offers a clue describing “… a symbolic conquest of some kind of room’s regular boundaries”. Scrammy and the Blowflies (1995), made for the Bush Studies project of super 8 film based on Barbara Baynton’s short stories, is perhaps the closest Maeve comes to conventional ‘narrative’, expressing claustrophobia born out of containment, wherein, given a voice, Scrammy plots escape from his imprisoning hut. Then the film Out of Place (1991) is alive with non-human subjectivity occupying a carefully defined macro world. At 52 minutes the film is long by most super 8 standards, but doesn’t conform to the familiar avant-garde durational mode of the heroic internalised temporal subjectivity; rather it presents spatially related subjectivities, coexisting in some interstitial place ‘out there’.
And now we are here, larger paintings with cinematic titles like Rear Window and Andalusian Slit (recalling Hitchcock and Buñuel, both of course occasional collaborators with Salvador Dali); feature-length with bold shapes and dissected space, like a floor plan of wheelchair-imprisoned voyeur James Stewart’s apartment, but the window here seems less suited to voyeurism, more a sinister opaque dark barrier threatening to block the view. In Maeve’s ‘Andalusian’ painting the cinematic icon of the dissected eye has been transformed into something like a danger sign through an abstraction of composition, or a diagram in which the razor has become a stake or a rod. I am reminded that surrealism thrives in that most dangerously mundane zone of the uncanny in the quotidian.
The relationship between titles with quite specific references and formally quite abstract paintings, is deliberate and carefully considered, not an after thought but as a way of complementing the works. The title of Firs on Stage, with Locked Doors comes from Maeve’s interest in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: the central round ‘stage’ of the painting seems deserted and deforested, a bleak greyness hemmed in, taunted perhaps, by the bustling world beyond its boundary. The titles suggest that abstract painting is not just some kind of ineffable expression, but part of a complex visual vocabulary, a spatial narrative extending in many directions.
Here We Are Then recent paintings and works on paper by Maeve Woods is at Watters Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 5 February to 1 March, 2008
images top to bottom:
Andalusian Slit - 2006, oil on cotton duck, 122 x 122cm
Rear Window - 2006, oil on cotton duck, 152 x 122cm
Firs On Stage, With Doors Locked - 2007, oil on cotton duck, 122 x 122cm
I recently re-discovered and have been re-listening to these three CDs over the past couple of days. Hope (1998), Trace (1999) and Zero (2000) were limited edition collections of one-minute, or two-minute in the case of the double CD Trace, soundworks. Contributors were invited to create an original recording of specified duration for each thematic CD. They were published by Audio Research Editions, which was founded by Colin Fallows in 1998 as a limited edition imprint for artists' soundworks.
