CREO

Absences and Making Sense of Performance Art
by John Campbell and Steve Brockman

Part One: Happenings

      Huntington, West Virginia in 1965 was an unlikely place for an avant-garde art experience and yet it happened. Roger Hess Matheny (1941-2000) was an art student at Marshall University and I was invited to a "happening" by him. A happening is defined as "a performance, event or situation meant to be considered as art. Happenings lack a narrative, are often multi-disciplinary, and frequently seek to involve the audience in the performance in some way. Elements of them may be planned while retaining room for improvisation. They can take place anywhere." (Wickipedia.com). As a recently, but no longer, devout Baptist from the mountains it was difficult to get my mind around this experience held in a basement room of the local interfaith religious center. There was sound - recorded music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, shouts, screams, physical movement by Roger and his confederates, some of which involved fabric, lights and paint discharged in a random fashion. I'm sure there was more but I've lost the details. I left baffled and with paint spattered on my shoe.

      From Wikipedia.com we learn a bit of the history of this movement. Alan Kaprow, a student of John Cage, originated the term in 1959 with his piece titled 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. But it was Cage's Theater Piece No. 1 in 1952 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina that began the movement. The Grove Dictionary of Music suggests that the first happening was a collaborative effort between Cage and David Tudor who both taught at Black Mountain College. Accounts of exactly what happened vary but most agree that Cage read poetry and lectured, M.C. Richards read her poetry, David Tudor played prepared piano, Robert Rauschenberg showed his paintings and Merce Cunningham danced among the audience all at the same time.

      The event I attended was part of an avant-garde art movement that began in America and traveled to Europe including England, Belgium and in the seventies to Australia. Roger, who created this multimedia art experience, had recently been at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where he became aware of cutting edge visual arts and music. Though the experience was baffling, I found it exciting to know someone who could and did introduce me to so much western culture. His LP collection ranged from Bach and Handel to John Cage concert percussion and the European and American electronic-generated soundscapes and so much in between. All this was water to a young man who had been in the desert. The visual arts, his knowledge of painters and their works and his dramatic flair of presentation of his latest finds helped shape my personal history. Over the years I have expanded on this base, learning, exploring and sharing with him and others around me.

      Roger's keen intelligence, curiosity, love of nature and sense of drama and willingness to share expanded my personal horizons enormously. Whether it was a candlelight tour of his assembled moss garden with mushrooms and other unusual objects he found in the woods, his creations in the kitchen, his wildflower arrangements, his paintings, drawings or watercolors or in a discussion of philosophy he became a lifelong cultural mentor. I was a sponge absorbing whatever came my way but I could offer my interest and enthusiasm for the arts and an ability to hold up my side of the discussion. He elicited my verbal descriptions of what I experienced in his art works and in music we heard together and my knowledge of living an alert life in nature. I honed my skill with him but, more important, he helped me learn to appreciate my own ability to verbalize and communicate about the arts.

      Roger was Dionysian in temperament and chose to use his inheritance from his grandparents to explore Japan. He moved to rural Japan, learned the language, both spoken and written. He was ecstatic at the beauty of refined nature found in moss gardens and historic buildings. Even the photographs he brought back were magical. When his parents left him a second inheritance he moved to Amsterdam and explored Western Europe for several years until the money ran out. He returned to San Francisco and lived and worked there until he left us at age fifty-nine with liver cancer. I miss him! Still, on my walls and in my heart his legacy lives on.

      On April 11 &12, 2005 at Old Dominion University Art Gallery, both composer Ovsepyan and painter Anufriev were in Norfolk, Virginia for the performance of their collaborative multimedia creation Absences . The piece was developed for Creo, ODU's contemporary music ensemble and directed, coordinated and produced by Andrey Kasparov, with help from Frederick Bayersdorfer, Arts Assistant to the Dean, and Katherine Huntoon, the Art Gallery director.

      To further create a framework for the ideas in this review of Creo's multimedia program, it will be instructive to talk about differences. In happenings and John Cage's music chance and spontaneity are important elements. In Petros Ovsepyan's Absences, he uses exact timing, down to fractions of a second and would have preferred a performance space that eliminated all outside sound. The ODU Art Gallery is on a busy street near railroad tracks so what the audience experienced was different than what the composer intended.

      The figures in paintings by Anufriev have a sculptural, even monumental solidity. The figure of a female dressed in a vivid flowing garment with a set expression on the face (more of a mask that precludes emotion) is typical of his work. Even the landscapes seem cut from styrofoam, removing the vitality of trees, leaving the shape but with only pale color. For those of us who have experienced the playing of Mr. Anufriev's wife, the cellist Tanya Anisimova, who is often the figure he paints, we witness how she seems to inhabit a rapt state where she has become totally identified with the music, yet she is not remote. Her intensity is such that one feels an almost embarrassed, voyeuristic thrill in watching her.

      The dark gallery walls were hung with large blank white canvases and three seating areas faced performing areas, each with a painting by Anufriev. The composer included a well-defined role for the audience in the piece which assembled in the lighted area of the gallery, facing a raised platform. The first scene included a painting of a female cellist in a red flowing garment with a fuzzy area over the strings indicating sound. With a chair on either side, occupied on the left by Johanna Groot Bluemink, her beautiful, intelligent, sensitive face frozen into an expressionless mask, holding a violin flat on her lap. On the right the composer sat with a violin, its back on his lap. This tableau vivant was a living picture reflecting Anufriev's painting. There was no sound for a number of minutes except for the heating system which came on by chance, low air flow over a grid. The male grimaces but his eyes are in shadow. The female's face is lighted so that the shadow on her face echoes the curve of her neck. The male makes a sort of interrupted humming sound, a duet with the heating system. This sound slowly rises in volume as he gradually raises his face to the light. When this distressed sound stops he remains frozen with his mouth open but soundless, reminiscent of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream.

      My mind remembers John Cage's use of street sounds from a live microphone in his music fifty years ago. Then I stop thinking, become mentally quiet, passive. The male raises the violin which has remained on his lap. The lights go out. Behind a screen I can see Andrey Kasparov looking at a stopwatch. The lights come up in the next area and the audience slowly moves toward it. I continue to sit as do the performers.

      The new tableau has Oksana Lutsyshyn seated at a harpsichord, Gerald Errante in the center with clarinet, Carin Cowell on the right at a podium and painter ODU graduate student Peter Geiger slightly behind the musicians near a nearly blank canvas on an easel. In the second performance Mr. Anufriev created the painting. The lighting gives a polished, lovely glow. The silence is punctuated by an occasional vocal outburst, "CHA!" and even more rarely by a brief burst from the clarinet or sounds of air flowing through the instrument. My mind puns "Air on a clarinet." The harpsichordist and clarinetist mime playing their instruments by a shivering or rather quaking motion, while wearing intense expressions. The strong smell of new vinyl crosses my consciousness for the second time. The painter is poised with a raised brush, immobile. I become aware of his handsome profile and his muscular arm, partially visible under a short t-shirt sleeve. The participants all wear black. The lights go down and our attention shifts. A train whistles in the distance. The painter moves, tossing brushes into a bucket, making abrupt clunks. They all freeze as the lights go down. We learn later that the score described each action in detail, timed just as any other piece of music.

      Once again the lights go out, only to gently come up on a trio as our attention shifts and the audience moves to the new tableau. Dark once again, we hear a harpsichord phrase. The trio becomes visible again. There is silence, except for the squeak of a chair or a muffled sound from the street. Ms. Bluemink stands at the left, holding a violin. Rebecca Gilmore is seated in the center with cello, her lovely face intense and expressionless, and Natalia Kuznetsova with viola stands at the right. The dimly lighted painting of a female cello player in soft shades of green and gold made no sure impression on my memory. The violinist chokes out a sound and the violist joins with a distress sound of her own. Silence, a shout, cello sound, labored breathing. Then a sort of death rattle, scratching sounds on viola for 90 seconds or more, later on cello. The violinist is crouched, her arm so extended and stiff that her bow can hardly reach the strings. She seems tortured, her face showing a horrible despair. There are shouts and instrumental sounds, all distraught. As the lights go out I become the reporter, wondering about the reaction of this roomful of intelligent and interesting people. Firm walking steps in the dark room gain my attention. Dr. Kasparov is on the floor with a flashlight looking at the score. Lights come up. Traffic sounds and a very faint viola sound of bow on strings but not from player I can see.

      Light is restored and the audience applauds, making the sound that they are programmed to make at the end of a piece. As one performer later told us: "I can not say what the overall effect was for the audience for sure. I was so busy trying not to look at my stop watch and trying to keep the intensity ....not really doable unless memorized. I do think they were awfully happy to see the paintings coming out at the very end." After the applause the blank canvases on the gallery walls were replace by Alexander Anufriev's paintings. Another round of applause

      This blank canvas, a sort of tabula rasa of the mind created by a tightly structured performance piece left each of us on our own to contemplate our subjective experience. In talking with others the range of reactions was wide, from "If this had been my first experience of Creo I would never have attended another one," and "This was a worship of creativity. A mixture of energy that evoked a memory of an atmosphere created by a hypnotist to free artists of phobias." "More is less."

      As we were driving home my response was to feel an inner quiet, a certain emptied-out feeling, a remoteness from my daily concerns. It is as if I had gone to a plateau of the mind somehow untouched by emotion. The faces in Anufriev's paintings are masks. The feeling I get is that all emotional expression has been stifled. My assumption from past experience of his works was that they spoke of the repression of the Soviet Union of his youth. What depths of passion, fear or love these placid surfaces cover, I know not. For me, Ovsepyan created a soundscape that perfectly reflects this stifled expression.

      The title of the piece, Absences, is from a poem Correspondence de la Momie (Correspondence with the Mummy) from his "Textes surréaliste" by the French writer Antonin Artaud. Johanna Bluemink, an ODU student translated the text "This flesh that no longer inspires life, …the voice that no longer carries the burden of sound, …this brain, finally where conception is no longer formed in its folds…But all this flesh is only the beginning and the void, the void, the void…"

      I wonder, if the goal for this creative endeavor is to carry us outside of our concepts, structured to deal with our insecurity as animals who will die into a realm where creative energy has a purer form, where we touch the infinite, if only for a brief time?