We had a very compelling talk with Yan Jun, he first spoke about his background in performance with a laptop, which he referred to as ‘Table Music’, as there is always a table in front of the performer for their laptop.
We were then shown a piece I believe was entitled ‘Table Music’, which took this idea, through the lens of a dinner setting. Where Yan Jun sat at the head of a dining table with his laptop and small speakers cones were laid out across the table with the audience sat around. Yan wanted people to sit around the table in this formal setting. The formalities of a concert performance blend with formalities of a completely separate human activity, sharing of food. This shifts a quite bland type of performance, ‘the laptop performer’ which is something sections of the Sound Art community have become critical of in the last decade. (Against Ambiance, Seth Kim-Cohen).
Yan seems to be similarly frustrated with laptop performance and prefaced with Table Music saying that they have been trying to shift their performance over the last ten years away from this. Stating he “didn’t want to write emails whilst people listened to recordings of noise”.
‘Feedback Solo’
Hand gestures, responding to high pitched drones. Yan Jun’s body in control of the occurring feedback within the room. ‘Free from the table’, Jun holds his hands out and slowly gestures with his whole body. He says that feedback connects him to a room.
All signals are grounded, which Jun says protects people and the equipment from electric shocks… but also the sound itself. If there’s too much feedback signal then the piece is too noisy and cannot be ‘just noise’. So far I feel that these two works are connected. The way Jun postures with his body, and the setting of the table. Both have this abstract visual aspect of gestures which interestingly as I was fixating on this word, was the title of his next piece
Gestures,
For this performance, we see Jun in a chair, gesturing with his hand. The Sound/Music is from flash cameras. Everybody is encouraged to take photos of the performance for which Jun has prepared no sound. The sounds come from the points of interest related to certain movements and poses Jun choses to pull and the frequency of which he chooses to pull these. So, he conducts the performance, but the points of intrigue aren’t totally his to know. The sound is circumstance of what images the photographers want to capture.
“My music has to share space with sounds, like a neighbour or room-mate”, Jun claims that he is not fund of Cage ‘Everything is Music’ philosophy. I guess music to him is planned or created and sound exists, maybe everything is music but each separate music. ‘Sharing space’ things are often unwanted or deemed that way, but as an afterthought accepted.
Jun performs a lot in peoples homes,
“I go to audience home to play plastic bag”.
“Do anything stupid in someone’s home, and they can’t be angry”
Jun spoke about the freedom of performing in these environments. How the scrunching up of a plastic bag in the setting of a home is something that has merit. But if you did that at a paid venue, particularly a larger venue. It would be harder for you to win over an audience with that type of performance. Space plays a huge issue in the kinds of messages work can put across. There is an expectation with a performance in these larger settings. ‘You know what you are going to get from Merzbow’ – in a way there is less freedom and more expectation on an established artist than there would be in a smaller performance.
“Being an artist is about building a connection with a small room or a big room… [and to]… show that you are free.”
I personally relate quite a lot to this sentiment. When I was younger I performed a lot in a solo setting, with a background track and I leant towards making it as robotic a performance as possible. Standing still whilst instrumental segments played out, looking bored, drinking a beer whilst a musical segments played out. Trying to make the event less special in a way. Reacting to how uncomfortable I felt performing and becoming some sort of persona – and through that becoming one… But I rarely cared about the size of the crowd, and found that it worked better the less busy the gig was, and more people would actually want to talk to me at the end in those settings.
Meaningless Work by Walter De Maria, mentioned in passing by Yan Jun.
“When you enter the room, you can feel the rich smell of well-preserved soil and sense the warm humidity of the breezing. The installation of the Earth Room occupies three gallery rooms, with a knee-high sheet of Plexiglas boxes placed off the viewing stage so that visitors can see how deep the dirt is.
The New York Earth Room is installed in a white-painted room, and the dirt itself appears warmer or cooler depending on the hour of the day. The viewing area is fixed because the soil covers the floor from wall to wall. Visitors are allowed to take photographs of the Earth Room. Although de Maria himself was against it at first, he eventually caved in and let people savor the art by taking pictures.” – Publicdelivery.org
De Maria’s work is often ‘land art’, taking place outside, very much concerned with our relationship to the world. In one of De Maria’s most notable land art works ‘The Lightning Field’, 400 Stainless Steel Poles were erected across a square km in Quemado, New Mexico.
This work strikes me as Sound Art adjacent, as the sound of lightning is cause and effect with this piece. Much like Gestures by Yan Jun, in which photographers take photos from conduction of Jun. In the case of The Lightning Field. De Maria conducts the lightning by nature of placing poles in a scientific location where lightning is likely to strike. When we spoke to Andrew Pierre White last term. He spoke about painting objects like rocks and spoke about the sounds associated without placing them within the piece. In this case, with something like lightning (which sound is known to us through our set human experience), we don’t need to hear the sounds associated with lightning necessarily to hear it in our heads. So this work could be catatgorised as Sound Art in some sense.
Land Art takes art outside of a traditional gallery space sometimes because the ideas wouldn’t work in those spaces. Is this a rejection of the white cube? Similarly, is Jun’s use of smaller spaces like peoples homes a similar line of inquiry? Both artists are concerned primarily with space with very different application.
Jun ended our talk with a line from his bio. ‘I wish I was a piece of field recording’.
I want to read a few of Jun’s articles for the Wire in future and learn more about his thought processes. He spoke about how the piece above came to him shortly before the performance was due to start. I find something quite profound in these abstract movements and their sound generation, the humour present in the work speaks for itself. The playful approach and ‘master of none’ type philosophy that Yan Jun has is infectious and most of all, free.