No Fun 2009: Infinite Sound and Image No Fun Goes to New York’s New Museum

Still, Makino Takashi and Jim O'Rourke, The Seasons, 2009.

"Infinite Sound and Image" was part of No Fun Fest 2009, which you can read about here.

If a three-bar, bouncer-peppered, profit-centric venue like Music Hall of Williamsburg seems somewhat of stretch for a “show case” of what is ostensibly the most fiercely anti-commercial and anti-hegemonic music today, try a major metropolitan museum. Those of us who relied solely on the No Fun website for information on the lineup this year will be surprised to learn that the festival had not only one new home this year, but two -- along with a brand new “Infinite Sound and Image” component, which is longhand for “film screening.” Recognizing that many of the artists on the bill this year are active outside the purely musical sphere -- and, perhaps, that the noise experience in general is not only about what we hear, but, almost always also what we see and feel -- Carlos Giffoni teamed with Rhizome's ongoing “New Silent Series” for an afternoon of moving image work at the New Museum on the Bowery.

What is curious about this pairing is not so much the art museum's symbolic endorsement of noise music (hasn't the art world already proven that is capable of digesting anything?), but the festival's symbolic alignment with the art museum. Even if it's a pretty damn great addition to the festival, “Infinite Sound and Image” sits funny in the same way that “Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix” did: is presenting “noise art” in a white cube really creating an accurate representation of an art that is remarkable for rising and sustaining itself everywhere outside that very space? Is a subculture that grew up on the edge of the poverty-line, scattered in far-flung and heterogenous geographical destinations -- leaky basements, living rooms, barns -- still truly itself when it falls into the centralizing and institutionalizing orbit of the art museum? Even if that museum is a "new" museum, one that vows to dismantle the social and economic power structure intrinsic to the museal environment and to reverse this seemingly unavoidable process?

Perhaps not, though we can at least applaud the festival's effort to make noise culture accessible to an audience who might not even be aware of its existence -- and who might, on the off chance, even return from the experience transformed. Isn't the point of No Fun, after all, about bringing people together? Rather than harping too much on the institutionalization/commercialization factor, it is probably more worthwhile to think about the image of this thing called “noise film” -- or film by noise musicians and their collaborators -- that Giffoni's curatorial choices leave us with. His choice of site, while we're still on the matter, is a crucial one. Questions of logistics and human capacity aside, housing a screening of “noise films” in a museum auditorium -- and not in a concert venue, lumped in with rest of the noise -- implies that the former is somehow distinct from the latter, designed to be experienced in a different presentational context, and maybe even by a different public: a museum-going public, or a museum-going cross-section of the greater noise public. Does this mean that “noise film” is art, while “noise” in general is sometimes art, but mostly “just music”? Does having the audience view the screening in seats -- and not on their feet, free to respond to the same music in pretty much any way they physically desire -- imply that noise film is somehow more of a cognitive or intellectual experience than noise music? One for the brain, and not for the body?

One thing's for sure: if the number of spectators who took a break during the one-and-a-half-hour program is any indication, the combination of excruciatingly loud decibels and stationary confinement was simply too much for most of our bodies (or our minds, depending on how you slice it) to handle. Which brings us to our next observation about “Infinite Sound and Image” and its representation of “noise film”: while it would be impossible to say that they were all alike, almost all of the works chosen for the screening featured a single-channel visual track and a scorchingly loud and grating sound one -- generally pre-recorded, but in Robert Beatty's case, performed live . Even if few of the musicians in the event could be said to deal exclusively in pure and hard noise (Jim O'Rourke coming to mind as an obvious counter-example, not to mention the equally versatile C. Spencer Yeh and Sarah Lipstate), Giffoni's curatorial rule of thumb seemed to be that in order for a film to make sense in the context of the festival at large, it had to be accompanied by some serious knob-turning-- “noise” in the most transparent sense of the term. And this makes sense, given the unwritten No Fun agenda, but it doesn't necessarily explain the new setting and the new set up. For if the noise film is just noise plus visual experience -- and not some other art form entirely, going above and beyond the simple criterion of harsh sound -- it is not all that different from what many of us know as the noise experience in general, and certainly doesn't seem to merit any special treatment.

But maybe Giffoni and Rhizome had something else in mind when they decided to project these six earsplitting moving image pieces inside those four white walls. If they forced us to experience these projects sitting down, maybe it was because they wanted us to pay extra close attention to what we were seeing -- in the context of what we were hearing. Sitting on the auditorium's stiff white chairs, it was hard not to recall La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House, which attempted to transform the composer's work with simultaneous sound frequencies and the artist's light sculptures into a single, sensory continuum: “Together,” Zazeela famously explained, “the sound and light can be experienced as a new form, or new media: the sound and light environment [...] The experience of the two mediums together as one requires a new, or at least different, mode of attention.” “Infinite Sound and Image” lacked the Dream House's particularity of being a space that spectators could move around in, but the demand it placed on our senses was the same: not only to “survive” in an environment that is physically and mentally grueling, but to encounter what we saw and heard as a unified sensorial experience.

And it is probably no coincidence that Giffoni's own contribution to the event, a video-sound collaboration with Megan Ellis, provides the simplest and most clear-cut illustration of this idea: a strobing sequence of green, black, and white flashes, almost as hard on the eyes as Giffoni's pummeling electronic frequencies are on the ears. Attempts to discern whether these flashes are actually synced up with the rhythm of the score, while tempting, proved futile: “tuning in” to either of these elements for long enough, let alone simultaneously, was almost too much to bear.

Japanese filmmaker Makino Takashi's The Seasons, a 30-minute film featuring an independently authored soundtrack by Jim O'Rourke, multiplied this assault a hundredfold while somehow remaining pleasing --inviting, even --to the senses. Digitally layering multiple 35mm film frames into complex composite landscapes, Takashi took high resolution images of analog “objects” -- anywhere from an artifact on the camera lens to a bird in flight or a patch of lawn -- and transformed them into an ecstatic surfeit of visual information. As we followed the film's progression from “Winter” (alternately construed a bubbling puddle of mud, a UFO ride through the milky way, or platinum jewelry on black fabric) to Spring (a kinetic jumble of trees, grass, and critters), we began to grow suspicious of these image categories (the “Seasons” included), suspicious, even, of our need to the recognize them. Takashi's chosen “objects” abstracted into a single material and organic continuum, taking O'Rourke's equally undifferentiated sound “images” (motorcycle engines? TV static? Cartoon laser guns?) along with them. The resulting sensation of excess -- or is it oneness? -- was positively exhilarating and impossible to break down in terms of a simple equation of visuals plus sound.

Other pieces on the program thrived on a similar balancing act between cognitive pigeonholing and transcendental abstraction. spins the world's wheel again, a short film by Dominick Fernow/Prurient, combines David Attenborough-style footage of the White Owl going about his daily business -- hanging out on a tree branch, swooping down for a kill, and soaring away in the sky -- with a highly Homosapien monologue on the existence of life after death (on subtitles) and a sweeping synthesizer score. This gentle association of elements leaves each of them intact, while allowing each to become something greater than itself: the human text becomes the “voice” of the animal image, just as the animal image becomes an illustration of the text; a drone becomes an “epic” drone when perceived alongside the owl, just as the owl image becomes more epic, once bolstered by the drone.

Whether they magnified human form to grotesque proportions (C. Spencer Yeh's Eclipse, a six-minute close-up of a human mouth, its sound amplified beyond all recognition), abstracted it into a skeleton (Sarah Lipstate's Interior Variations), or ignored its existence completely (Takeshi Murata's digital animations of stark geometric forms, accompanied by Beatty's equally geometric found-sound collage), all of the “noise films” “Infinite Sound and Image” were always bringing us back to the body, and always drawing our attention to how that body perceives. Not only for the very obvious reason that they were all very loud -- although that definitely has a lot to do with it -- but because they force us to experience that loudness alongside another kind of sensory “loudness”: the “infinite” stimulation (or potential for stimulation) encapsulated in a reel of 24 images per second. The configuration Giffoni and Rhizome imposed on us left us with only two choices: to close our eyes and plug up our ears -- rejecting the “noise film” experience completely -- or to suck it up and face the squall, opening ourselves to an uncomfortable, though perhaps ultimately transformative, encounter with might just be our sixth human sense: that of seeing and hearing together. The spectators chose their sides.

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