Hazel Smith and Roger Dean
David Antin is a “talk poet” who gives provocative talks which combine the genres of lecture, stand up comedy, story-telling and poetry. They juxtapose anecdote with poetic metaphor, philosophical and political debate with satirical comment. The talks are improvised, that is they are created during the performance and no two performances are the same. In his talk piece Gambling (Tuning 148), performed in the seventies, Antin refers to the recreativeness which dominates many poetry readings and which he is reacting against; simply reading a poem is like “returning to the scene of the crime/you try to reenact it and the more you try to bring it back to life the deader it becomes.” The medium of the talk restores to poetry its lost oral dimension; the opportunity to bridge the gulf between creative process and product and the opportunity to create in a public forum. Although there is no written record of many of Antin’s talks, some of them have been published in two volumes Talking at the Boundaries and Tuning.
David Antin was born in New York City in 1932 and graduated from New York City College and New York University. He is currently Professor of Art at the University of California at San Diego. He is married to the performance and video artist and film-maker Eleanor Antin. He is also a distinguished critic who has written on the visual arts, postmodernism, television and video art, and the role of art in technology.
The context of the conversation was our forthcoming book Discovering the Discourse: improvisation in the arts after 1945 in which we are investigating the importance of improvisatory techniques and approaches in art, film, literature and theatre. In this book we will rebut the naive conception of improvisation as a purely spontaneous and intuitive process and demonstrate how improvisation has been a complex creative procedure used by many artists since 1945. We were particularly interested in David Antin’s work because it is one of the few examples of improvised poetry. We wanted in the interview to ascertain how David went about his improvisations, what his technique for improvising was and how this related to the effect of the improvisations.
The interview took place in San Diego in February 1992 shortly after David Antin’s talk at Carroll’s Bookshop in San Franscisco on the subject of the other. Although David’s work over the years was the main focus of the interview, we also alluded from time to time to that specific talk.
HS: In what sense do you think your talks are
improvisations?
DA: Probably in the same sense that most people's
improvisations are improvisations. One person I could
imagine myself in a relationship to, though I've never
said it before, is Coltrane. Coltrane was constantly
working over scales and examining other musical
manoeuvres, to keep his hands on a lot of things that
he could do; he was listening to timbres of different
mouthpieces and playing with different ways of making
music, so it is not as if he went in as a blank slate.
Jazz improvisation is work that in some ways I
feel very close to, because the language offers you a
well-formed grammar. I am not interested in
transforming English grammar, but I am interested in
the full range of English and its varieties of speech-
registers and its ways of movement from here to there.
It allows you much more freedom than anybody really
knows. I mean we know very little about the full range
of colloquial English. In fact most grammar that is
being used in the schools of the high levels of
linguistics, which I did doctoral work in, I regard as
highly idealized. There are so many things that it
doesn't explain, although it's a very eloquent family
of explanations for the things it does explain.
But it seems to me that language is a reservoir
of ways of thinking, because what I am really
interested in, at least as much as language, is
thinking: not thought but thinking. And the closest I
can get to thinking is talking. When I started doing
this I wanted to get close to the sound of thought, and
then I realised the only way you can get the sound of
thought is to think, to do a lot of thinking. Not all
thinking is verbal, and you can get close to some of
the things that are not generally thought to be
linguistic by approaching things in a way that seems
less discursive. That is, in some ways narrative and
images seem less discursive so that you can reach
towards images or towards semantics that are more
governed by other ways of arranging things in your mind
than merely what is taught to people as linguistics.
So the goal is to articulate through thinking, to find
my way and open up and explore the range of thinking,
but to think about things in the course of it. So in
this sense I have a lot of practice because I do it all
the time, but Coltrane also played music all the time.
It seems to me that Monk had a variably finite
repertory of ways of moving, part of which may have
been characteristic and part invented from time to time
and carried from performance to performance. In that
sense I am not any more original than Monk or Coltrane
but very much like them.
HS: I understand that. It is very important that
improvisation shouldn't just be confused with
spontaneity. Nevertheless, if you are going to give a
talk, is there any degree of preparation beyond previous
experience?
DA: Sometimes there is but the preparation is not
formalized. In other words when Peter Cole asked me to
think about the idea of the other I started thinking
about a variety of things. I started thinking about
the way the idea is used. Not systematically, but as I
was driving to school or doing something else like
making coffee in the morning. And I took out books
from the library to read, but not on the subject of
the other. It struck me that I wanted to look at
Marco Polo's travels. I did and it turned out to be a
bad translation and I thought that maybe Mandeville's
travels would even be more useful because they were
more fanciful. So I took out several volumes and was
browsing Mandeville before falling asleep at night. I
also browsed through an older history of ethnology that
I wanted to look at again and I re-read some of Levi
Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, none of which I found
specially important. It was just that I was preparing
my mind and it wasn't that I needed, or was necessarily
going to use any of this material: I thought it might
have some edge-like relationship to what I was doing.
I also looked at several old articles where the term
got recycled but again not very seriously. I made a
very light play with the material just to make myself
cycle the information in my head very loosely.
By the time I arrived for the talk I had no fixed
idea of how I would begin and I had no fixed idea of
structure. The structure normally is provided by the
finite length of the tape, sometimes I will stop long
before the tape runs out. So I talk for about an hour
or 45 minutes: if I'm told that I have to go shorter I
will run around half an hour. I can do very short ones
if necessary, but then it is different, you don't have
the luxury of manoeuvering in the same way. There are
dictates which are purely practical, such as how much
you can get on a side and there are the dictates of the
range and type of audience which has a lot to do with
social interplay and making things intelligible.
Because it is not only thinking out loud, it's thinking
out loud where you are sharing the thinking in some way
with other people.
HS: But how can you tell what the audience is like if you
are not very directly interacting with them? How can
you tell what the range of intelligence is? I was
wondering all the time during the performance what kind
of audience you were pitching it at.
DA: You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the
beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly
exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away.
There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see
how they work for you but also whether people find them
intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon
them. But you get a sense from body language whether
people are with you or not with you and there are ways
of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't
even know how I do it. That is I spend a fair amount
of time circling the material before plunging in, to
achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning
relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a
prologue. In other words in standard orchestral
situations they tune because they have got to reach a
particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because
no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal
tuning.
HS: One possibility improvisation provides is
collaboration with other people, for example to
collaborate much more with the audience. I have read
about the incident at 80 Langton Place where the
audience, made up largely of poets, made you interact
with them.
DA: I was actually interacting with them rather maliciously
I thought.
HS: During your talk I wondered whether it would end with a
discussion and in some ways I was quite relieved that
it didn't.
DA: Most people are. I don't have a set feeling about it.
My sense is that people are there of their own free
will and I offer a kind of human engagement with them.
In other words I don't deal with material that is
impossible for them to deal with. I deal in a space
that I presume this intelligent audience can arrive at
in some manner. The length of the piece has something
to do with the audience's interest, and sometimes the
question is how much I can push the material and keep
the audience still with it. I think that I can also
tell whether people are dialoging with the piece.
When I am talking what I say is never quite what I
intend to say. There is a kind of relationship between
the sense of one's own intentionality and what one
does, because if one had a complete match between what
one intended and what one said, one wouldn't have to go
any further, one would never have to reformulate. So
there is a kind of slippage and sometimes what you say
is better than your intention and sometimes worse or
sometimes merely to the left or right of it. And so I
am always conducting a kind of dialogue with myself, as
well as a dialogue with the audience, and the audience
is always conducting a kind of dialogue with me, but
also spinning off. I feel that's good. One of the
reasons I use a less tight presentation mode is that I
want the audience to have room to pursue its own
interest and loop away and loop back, which I think
they do. I think people associate off into things that
are like my experience but different, and that they
might have said in a different way. So they pursue
their agreements and disagreements with me through
parallels of support, this allows them a full-scale
dialogue. And to the extent to which they are involved
in it, they are interested in the piece and they have
this kind of intense but intermittent attention.
HS: It's still different from a direct dialogue with the
audience. Have there been some instances (apart from
the incident at 80 Langton Place) where people have
spoken from the audience or you have actively
encouraged that?
DA: Sometimes but not a great deal, unless it happens, in
which case sometimes I will respond to it in a way,
loop it in and continue, but my performance is not
aimed at that. Usually the audience doesn't feel
inclined to do this, anymore than they would normally
feel inclined to do it. Imagine an audience of
musicians at a jazz performance. They might feel very
responsive, someone might say, yeah, but they are not
likely to start playing. There is a feeling that the
audience generally has at an artwork that they interact
with it by thinking about it, rather than that they
immediately interact discursively with it. Although
once in a while I'll say something that gets close and
somebody will say something, usually not much, and I
acknowledge it and bring it in a bit and that is fine.
HS: As audience we're very conservative, I think: we're not
used to participating and so I suppose we would have
to be actively encouraged.
DA: You have to be not only encouraged but also feel
sufficiently ready. It is more than that, you have to
feel a readiness with respect to a common range of the
material and I think the lack of feeling ready is
partly a sense that the material is not quite so common
to them. In fact that was one of the complaints that
the Langton Place people had which I was toying with,
it was essentially that they knew very little about the
material. I was dealing with a relationship between
the figures of rhetoric and figures of mind and I was
trying to retrieve the values of certain Greek terms
because I thought they were useful. But when I got to
a story in an area they felt they knew a great deal
about or thought they knew something about, (they felt
inclined to have an opinion about anorexia say, or what
was called anorexia) it was funny because they hadn't
really thought about that either. Which was of course
one of the great difficulties for them, that is, they
were thinking about it now for the first time in any
significant way. And I think even they were tepid in
their interventions because they really hadn't thought
about it that much, and they figured I had thought
about it more which was probably true.
RD: Have you ever tried to set up a situation where you
have a discourse between several people who are
simultaneously thinking?
DA: I've never tried to set it up because it is hard to do.
Though I would certainly find it interesting.
RD: Because that would be the analogy to the jazz
performance.
DA: It certainly would, it's just that you have to organise
it and find people and find a terrain that you all feel
you are willing to do it in relationship to. I did a
thing in France at the Beauborg with several French
poets a couple of years ago but I think they saw
themselves as more supportive of what I was doing than
I would have liked. It was fun talking with them but I
found it hard to draw them out. I tried but it was
harder for me to draw them out in those circumstances.
HS: Could you give me any idea of the process by which you
generate the talks, how you get from one item in them
to another?
DA: Well I look for a promising tangle, some kind of snarl
of threads so to speak. I may not see all of them at
once, I may see the end of a thread, the end of a
couple of threads and I try to pick it apart, and find
out what it consists of.
HS: So you are holding all those threads together
simultaneously in your mind?
DA: I follow one of them and it either leads to another
knot or I go back up to find another one and I might
move into what seems like an end that I can't get out
of and then instead of backtracking I will leap to one
that was next to it. I will make a transition to the
one that was further away but which I had left over
there. So there is a way of dealing with it, as a
problematic: it is a sort of playfulness, it is as if I
took the notion of problem solving and thinking away
from its seriousness into a kind of sheer pleasure, the
idea of solving knots. You look for the great knot and
then you try to solve it like the Gordian knot. To me
the world is filled with some things that are knots and
some things that are snarls and some things that are
pleasant tangles and I try to find a way to open them
up and see what they are made out of and this sometimes
lead to new forms of ravelling. I knot and unknot and
I am looking for an ultimately elegant knot structure
which I will eventually work out of the remaining
material.
HS: That is actually what it feels like.
RD: It feels like several successive modules in some cases
doesn't it, particularly in the other. Did you have
an awareness that it was likely that there would be
five modules and that "Guattari" and "Saddam" and
"molecular structure" would be amongst them, or were
those things that mostly came to mind as it happened?
DA: I think they come from a kind of experience and a set
of attitudes and what sometimes happens is that you
have clear cut modules but the number of them may
differ and also they turn out not to be situated
precisely in the same plane. In other words there are
discrete concentrations usually, something leads to a
concentrated module and somewhere another one may
develop, but it generally turns out not to be module
module module in total contiguity. I try to construct
in a kind of cognitive space in such a way that the
distances between the modules create openings for the
mind and also begin to throw light on a space that
seems like a meaningful quasi container, but a
container filled with holes. In other words my
relationship to a system is--the problem of systems
is--that they don't have enough holes. So that they
become fanciful and unreal: the trap of systematic
thinking is that it is falsified through closure. I
like systems, I find them illuminating, but what I find
illuminating is the notion of systems that articulate
and are elegant and in some way incomplete and clearly
so. And it is a relationship between the one
incomplete system and the other one which creates a
kind of hyperspace, because the spaces between them
become interesting. The principle of complementarity
in physics is an example of concentration, on the non-
fit between two situations, and it takes head on the
difficulty of wave and particle and puts it right up
front in physics. Well I don't want to necessarily
argue that what I do puts it right up front like that
but I have treated it with casual obviousness. That is
I allow this complementarity situation to develop where
one story doesn't fit over the other story in such a
way that one completely clarifies the other (I don't
believe in total clarification) but on the other hand
it throws light onto it.
RD: But it is a logical necessity that thinking could not
have a complete closure really isn't it?
DA: It can't have complete closure.
RD: So what I was going to ask was,why so much emphasis on
making that necessary failure overt? I can see the
attraction but why is it attractive to you?
DA: Well it doesn't turn out to be a failure, because what
I really am doing is partly making a polemical case for
what I believe is real thought, real thinking, as
opposed to what has come to stand for rationalism in
the history of Western thought, which is a straw man:
the notion of the totally closed logical system which
has only one little hole in it that is unfortunate
because there is a paradox lurking in the corner. This
particular form, has dominated rational and
irrationalist thought in Western European discourse to
the point of annoyance finally, but what you actually
find is that structures, because they have holes in
them, don't become useless. On the other hand rational
thought is different from what people think it is, and
rationality is an exaggeration of the kind of clarity
of mind and the possible mental tactics that can be
deployed to think usefully, meaningfully and
creatively, and it seems to me these are very poorly
understood. So part of the purpose of my work is to
illuminate, by example, the nature of real thinking, in
which art-thinking shares a great deal with scientific-
thinking, and we have a lot in common although we will
do things that may be done differently we may not do
some of the things that scientists may do and we may do
a great number that they do. And even if you do what
they do, what they do doesn't look like what they say
it is, because when they write the article they always
do it backwards. The article is not the thinking.
RD: We art thinkers would not have such a tendency to
prioritise as scientists would have would we?
DA: No, and my work is about the unity of thinking and the
absolute absence of the dichotomy between what we call
irrational artistic thought and rational thought. It
basically engages with the idea of raiding across the
two terrains to insist on the unity of the terrain.
Logic is a function of human character, people are
basically in some sense logical when they think at all.
But logic is broader than that. The truth-table fable
is a fantasy but if you could lock down the categories
in such a way and you could position them rigidly
between here and there, you could quantise between the
true and the false in a particular curious way. But
usually the categories are too slippery for anything
significant to be put into this position for very long.
What happens is that the slippage in anything you use
generally causes you to have to approach it in a number
of different ways, "as long as this holds to be true"
and "as long as this is like that then it follows from
that that this is this."
HS: Do you feel there is a sense in which you adopt a
persona in your talks? Reading through the talks I
sometimes felt there was a persona of a kind of naive
person struggling to understand certain things, for
example in the talk where you speak about the third
world and what the third world actually is.
DA: There is in a sense a persona but the persona develops,
because as soon as you begin representing yourself at
all, anything you represent has a fictional property.
As soon as a representation occurs it's partly untrue,
it's partly fiction, but it develops its own inertial
moment, its own commitments and a lot of these things
derive essentially from a kind of philosophical
positioning. In other words you can approach it in a
different way: "what if we didn't start by accepting
belief in all these things that everybody always knows,
what if we didn't know this, how could we examine this
belief." So the naivety is ultimately based on the
belief that we know too much and that it is founded on
too little. We are standing on a swamp or a cloud and
we rely on these well known things, that are well known
to be true, but how true are they? So in a way you
take things everybody knows so it sounds naive to say
them, but if you say "third world" by now everybody
seems to have forgotten what the first and second
worlds were. I mean is there a second world? What do
you mean by a world? Are there more than that? In
other words if the third is invented largely as a
function of a quarrel between one and two and you
develop a kind of economic theory on the basis of this,
the third gets to be built up largely on not belonging
to one or two. And then you call it unified, but the
relations that either the one or two might have can be
extremely bizarre, and furthermore you can imagine a
unity of victimization but the victims might not like
each other if they were unified. For example, it is
not obvious that the Jehovah's Witnesses, the gypsies,
the Jews, and the communists in the concentration camps
of the Nazis really were very friendly with each other,
or they were only as long as you had the barbed wire
around the camp, and they were often treated in
different ways. So it seems to me, without being
naive, you can't ask the right questions.
HS: But can I go back to the issue of the relationship
between the first person and yourself, because that has
been worked out in so many different ways in post-
modern poetry and yours seems to be very interestingly
situated with regard to that. Do you feel you have a
strong sense of talking about your own experience, or
do you sometimes tell lies about your own experience?
DA: Very often. No, it is all mixed! I basically feel
that my talks should be no more reliable than
conversation in general as absolute fact! You see what
one depicts as true is a function of one's feeling and
experience and all of it has its origins in things that
are factual as far as I remember, but some of them are
fantasies. And some of them are fantasies
involuntarily, sometimes you remember things that are
not true simply because your desire has already
produced the representation. So that I have never gone
out and notarised my statements, and my self-position
is that people will take it as credibly as
conversation. Now much of the experience is true or at
least partially true and some of it is very true and
some of it is fiction, but it is fiction that is true,
in other words it is serious fiction, it's not fantasy.
It is serious fiction in that it derives from a kind of
experiential engagement with it.
HS: How do you think the talks relate to your normal talk
or your normal speech?
DA: They are close but the situation creates a greater
intensification of the characteristics. In a
conversation with other people, in a social situation,
you tend to encourage other people and allow other
people to play and you may not have the space to take
on one of these things.
HS: The knotting and the unknotting you talk about wouldn't
be so prevalent in a conversation would it?
DA: No. But it has a relationship with some of the
teaching that I do.
HS: That was another thing that struck me when I saw the
talk; it reminded me of the lecture situation in some
respects.
DA: Yes, well it draws on the lecture and on stand-up
comedy. It is not really stand up comedy in that I
really don't play gag after gag, I don't theatricalize
myself like Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray, of course,
is characterized as a performer who also does
improvisation although his improvisations become
somewhat memorized by the time he does the work. At
least I think he said this and on another occasion he
said he didn't, so I am not sure, he may work more like
me than he indicated first time around. He comes from
acting and so what he generates essentially is very
markedly a persona of Spalding Gray. He theatricalises
himself so he is his main actor and he positions
Spalding Gray as bewildered and as a major victim of
his own inadequacies and it is very charming.
And what happens is that though he is his main
actor, things befall him, whereas I tend to be
sometimes an actor and often merely only an observer or
sometimes an actor who is in there involuntarily but
the action is the other people. I am not my main actor
so my persona doesn't develop beyond necessity. It
seems to me as long as you start saying "I" you have
got a persona, especially if you say it three times in
a row because the "I" begins to develop a configuration
from its continuity. And you see Gray concentrates so
much on the behaviour and the bewilderment of his "I"
because he is his main actor, he produces not exactly a
Chaplinesque figure but a certain kind of bewildered
central figure. It is a more artefactually complete
version of the naivety you say that you pick up in
some of my pieces but my pieces are merely an attitude
that enters into a discussion of something else,
whereas in his case he then intrudes into and stumbles
over it and falls into a trap deliberately and picks
himself up out of the trap.
HS: Well that is a very important distinction isn't it?
DA: And so I don't build up the character and occasionally
I get sucked into a case where I am a considerable
figure but usually I am interested in something outside
of the "I." The subject in my case becomes the vantage
point from which to look.
HS: How do the talks relate to the written transcripts of
them, how do you actually notate them and what makes
you decide where to notate the gaps?
DA: It is very impressionistic. You see the media are
really quite different so what I am doing with the
talks is trying to create an experience for the reader
which is an analogue structure of the performance. The
media are really so different, that is performance has
all these unknown things that are happening between
you. The audience is there and they pick up a great
number of things from the way you look, from what you
are saying, the inclination of your head movement, they
have many more contextual clues than is on the tape
recording. The tape recording is in some ways totally
bewildering for most people, because it contains stuff
that people don't hear and it doesn't contain things
they do pick up. Whatever is said they ignore certain
things and slips at the time which they don't pay
attention to. It is perfectly clear when an audience
listens they hear the right thing. They hear what you
intend to a very great degree, and a tape recorder
records only what is acoustically available to it
within certain filters, so the tape recording is the
most bizarre mode of dealing with this material.
The transcript then is an attempt to construct. I
used to do it myself but now I get somebody just to
type it up altogether with no pauses, or to pause
wherever they think a sentence ends or not to worry
about it. If I decide to listen to the tape, which I
sometimes do, I listen all the way through and then I
take the transcript and put it down over there. And
then I look at the beginning and I read through it once
and then I start typing and then I might look at it
four pages later, six pages later, 12 pages later, I
may look at it very closely in spots. So what happens
is that I am typing, I am writing something with my own
habits of verbal composition and in my head the image
of what I have done, and I am recreating its image, I
am not transcribing line for line. Often without doing
anything of the sort it comes out almost as if it has
been memorized, which is very startling. But sometimes
what will happen is that I will come to a place where I
didn't have room to do something at the time, the piece
had a moment where I wanted to go on and for some
reason I couldn't do it as fully as I would have liked
and I think it should be made more articulate. Some
transcripts are twice as long as the talks originally
were. Some pieces are very close to the literal form:
the phrasing system seems to be very similar in both of
them and you could hardly tell the difference between
them.
I remember a piece called dialogue in my book
tuning. I did this piece in Santa Barbara and they
sent it back to me and I transcribed it and I added a
whole story that I cite in the performance but didn't
have room to tell it. But a reading audience doesn't
suffer from the same psycho-dynamic as a listening one,
you are in a different space, you are holding a book in
your hand and so I simply told the whole story that I
couldn't have told there given the difficulties of
timing. So the version that I sent back to them was
one and a half to two times the length of the other
piece. I met the editor about a week later and she
said she really liked it a lot and what she really
liked was how completely identical my original version
was with the performance! And so I have to say that
there is a phenomonological issue at stake.
It does vary from occasion to occasion depending
on the commitments I have. I have a commitment to the
performance, to the psycho-dynamics of improvisation,
to doing the best I can, which always involves an
engagement with an audience, and a commitment to
material. And sometimes one has to be traded off
against the other, you can't let the audience down. I
have a responsibility to an audience to do it as well
as I can in a way that allows them to be participants
to the end, and so my sense of timing is partly related
to that. I can stretch it, I can negotiate it but I
am not a performer who is interested in violating
audiences. My interest is essentially in engaging an
audience, discoursing with an audience perhaps pushing
it, but in some kind of social relationship that I find
is humanly responsible. Now the problem is I don't
always feel that I was responsible enough to some of
the articulations I should have undertaken in relation
to my loyalty to the material and then the question is
how do I do it in the text in such a way that it
doesn't violate the spirit of the performance? And
there will be times when I will take up in the text a
greater articulation of some of the material that I was
handling in a performance, and then I have to construct
a way of getting back from it into where I was before.
It is as if a cadenza went wild and I take the cadenza
way out and then I've got to come back in some way and
I create an artifice for getting back to where I was
before.
HS: I think, actually, the transcripts are very successful
because one of the things that struck me when I saw you
talk was...
DA: They sound like me.
HS: Yes that it was very much what I had conjured up from
the text.
DA: Well that is the intention.
RD: On the other hand another way of looking at that
process of transcribing is that you are using the
process of thinking but then you are also superimposing
thought.
DA: Well actually no. Just superimposing more thinking.
RD: Except that you are presumably doing that over a much
longer time-span and you are also thinking
retrospectively about what you thought in the process
of thinking when you performed--i.e., by now, thought.
It is kind of a combination of the two, isn't it?
DA: Well it is interesting--it is true in a way although I
don't see it that way. I see it as thinking and
rethinking, because it seems to me I don't write slowly
either. I write almost as fast as I speak. I use a
computer and I used to use a typewriter and I am an
extraordinarily fast typist and the computer has made
me even faster. So I don't use the system that many
people use to write, which is built on endless
revision; not because I don't want to do it, I just
don't feel that way. I write almost the way I talk so
I go pusssssh you know and I catapult myself along
almost at the pace of my speaking.
RD: That raises the other question which comes from the
realization of the two stages. Why do you really need
to do the performance verbally in public? Why can't
you do the thinking at the computer.
DA: I like the engagement. Somewhere in Levi Strauss' work
he talks about the one thing that is so marked in all
primitive art and that is almost lost completely in
Western traditional art as we know it. And he says
what isn't there is a sense of occasion, whereas
occasion so dominates the art that he was talking
about. For me the sense of occasion, of art being
rooted in an occasion, is one of the central issues of
its motivation.
RD: Yes, well as an improviser I sympathise with that.
Stemming from what you said at the beginning of the
conversation and the comparison with Coltrane there is
one major difference, it seems to me, between what you
are doing in your talks and what they are doing. You
are saying that you don't really want to transform
grammar but I think that they did eventually transform
the grammar of music and by the heyday of free jazz it
became a primary objective almost. I don't think it
was ever a prime objective of Coltrane's but it
probably was of Cecil or Ornette. Do you not feel any
temptation in that direction in spite of that?
DA: Well grammar plays a different role historically in
music. And in a certain sense the grammar of music is
much more constraining and in some sense fairly
trivial. As someone reasonably grounded in music my
sense is that grammar in music is more of a
straightjacket than grammar in language. So they
really had to break with a lot, although they didn't
really break with grammar if you take grammar to be a
universal grammar. Supposing we take the notion of the
universal grammar of music, a very loosely
understandable psycho-grammar in a sense of what you
can distinguish, that is based on the
distinguishability of timbres, the limit and thresholds
of what perception can in fact articulate in sound. It
seems to me we don't know the universal grammar of
music. The grammar of language has just begun to be
discovered with the appearance of people like Chomsky
and the Russian formalists, and we hardly know what the
real grammar of language is.
RD: Nevertheless quite a few of our literary peers have
felt inclined to attack it haven't they?
DA: Yes though they usually do so on the basis of very
insufficient understanding.
RD: But as you have said in various ways already that
doesn't necessarily undermine the validity of the
enterprise does it, quite the opposite.
DA: No, not at all, I'm perfectly happy with them doing it.
If they start out from false premises and do terrific
things. I've got nothing against it! It is the theory
that I sometimes find foolish but the outcome of the
work is often terrific. So in a sense if Coltrane or
Ornette do things that are breaking up a grammar it is
only when you take grammar in the narrow sense of the
grammar of music, because if, for example, you suppose
that the deep grammar of music is different from the
grammar that was imposed on it, in my sense they look
for the deep grammar. I would say they are looking for
the deep grammar in music and that was the greatness of
free jazz, the fact that it was so coherent. I taught
one entire 3 hour course with a group of people where
we tried simply to take one whole performance of the
Coltrane group in 65 and we were listening to it and we
tried to find a way to talk about it that made
intelligent sense about the articulations and the moods
that were made. And we needed a kind of theatrical
vocabulary to discuss it and we were trying to re-
formulate, and it seemed to us that the work was
extraordinarily coherent and in some sense humanly
grammatical because it was intelligible.
RD: Do you recognise a group of improvising talk-givers in
whatever country that are your peers, and if so have
you considered trying to set up a condition in which
you could collaborate with any of them specifically?
DA: Well I don't know of any peers in the sense of having
close relations although I know other people who work
in the domain.
RD: Yes I mean in the latter sense, a peer, somebody with
an equivalent level of interest.
DA: Yes they do but they are in a semi-commercial zone
overlapping mine and have different aims. For example
Garrison Keillor is an improvisor in certain ways. I
am not sure whether he memorizes his stuff and maybe it
is in story-telling that we overlap more than in
improvisation, although I have a feeling he may
improvise his stories. And there is a kind of
connection, although not a connection of sensibility
with Spalding Gray, though he is theatrical. And
whereas my talks have a kind of philosophical
linguistic commitment, in his there is a kind of
theatrical but also psychological set of concerns. I
don't know anyone who basically works that way that it
would be easy to imagine working in relationship to.
RD: So the idea of a collaboration with say a person who
might use phonemic improvising, let's say a Bob Cobbing
wouldn't really appeal because there isn't that
cohesion between the two approaches?
DA: No, although I am very inclined to the possibility of
working with a musician because I could imagine working
with some really contemporary musician, doing a piece
for example with George Lewis. I could imagine doing
things with him because the space that he operates in
seems to me not unreasonably playful. It is both
different enough and at the same time capable of being
rhetorically innovative and I could see myself playing
with it.
RD: We have used musical and verbal improvising. It can be
very interesting, you can make the relationship in lots
of ways.
DA: Yes, as long as you can figure out how to work together
in a physical sense and a team-like sense. It seems to
me that we could do it in ways that are not the most
obvious ways.
HS: And have you thought of doing anything, setting
yourself up technologically in any way? Having for
example a tape of yourself talking and then talking
with that or something like that.
DA: Well I did use the intervention of taped conversations
for the Archeology at Home and I was not enormously
thrilled by that. And I did another piece, Scenario for Beginning Meditation, that was published in one of
my books of poems. It has a set of questions with wide
spaces between them and some responses to them. There
were questions such as "is this the right time to
begin" and I left spaces between them on the tape
recording long enough so that I could answer the tape
recording. And I went back the next day and I ran down
the batteries of the tape recording so that I knew that
it would be fairly weak and that it would get weaker
and weaker. The sentences were philosophical
reflections on the problem of beginning. The tape
recording would talk and then I would try to answer the
recording in a dialogue. I tried to respond because it
was asking questions and I tried to answer it. The
students were in the middle and as the tape recorder
got lower and lower because I had deliberately run down
the battery very low, I had to push through the
students to hear the tape recording and be able to
respond to it. So the piece was a sculptural piece
because basically it forced the re-articulation of the
space. The piece took a while to do and at the end I
frantically leant against the tape-recording trying to
hear what it said in order to answer it. So the piece
was sort of funny but it was designed as a piece of
sculpture but later I just published the questions.
HS: Reading through Talking at the Boundaries and
Tuning there didn't seem to be a major change in the
way that you actually approached giving talks. When
did you start the talks?
D: Early 70's, about 71.
HS: Do you feel that the talks you give now are very
different in certain ways?
DA: I think they vary enormously. Obviously there were
changes because I am much more experienced at doing
them. But on the other hand if you look at the two
books, there are 16 talk pieces published in the two
books and yet in the 21 years that I have done this I
may have done 160 talks.
And this is a very small subset of what I have
done and in it is hard to have an idea of the range of
the talks from the 16. I could publish more but in a
way I am an oral poet who has book capability, and to
be an oral poet you have to do 7 or 8 performances a
year or you are not performing. It's important to be
an ongoing performer. I will do about 5 or 6 this
year; if you don't do it you can't keep your hand in
it. There have been changes and I've got a book coming
out with New Directions which will be out in Spring of
93. It is called What It Means to be Avant Garde.
HS: Do you think there are certain topics that you are
really obsessed with, which keep coming up time and
time again in your talks? I am sure if I went through
I could find certain recurring themes.
DA: Probably some that come up more than others and new
things show up once in a while. I like to think that I
am not so completely closed that I always talk about
the same things. On the other hand we have our habits
and concerns and things that are not resolved. What is
resolved I don't bother dealing with. For example in
the other certain things familiarly fit into it. On
the other hand it was not a subject I had thought about
in any significant way before and if you take it at the
micro-level, some of the concerns are the same, but you
are looking at them from different points of view. So
my sense is that there is a mixture. I am sure if I
went through the talks I would find things that were
familiar, but then one isn't infinite in one's
capabilities.
The Interviewers:
Hazel Smith, who lived in England until 1989, was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, has a PhD from the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham in contemporary American poetry and is currently a lecturer in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has a particular interest in the contemporary avant-garde and in the creative process, and her current research interests include performance- orientated and technologically manipulated poetry, and improvisatory techniques and real time manipulation in the contemporary arts. She has published articles in many journals and is currently writing a book collaboratively with Roger Dean on improvisation in the arts after 1945 for the publishers Gordon and Breach.
Hazel Smith is also a poet and sound artist working in the area of experimental poetry and performance and has published in numerous international poetry magazines. She has also published three volumes Threely (Spectacular Diseases Imprint 1986), Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90 (Butterfly Books 1991) and TranceFIGUREd Spirit (Soma 1990). Some of her work was included in the 1991 Anthology Floating Capital: new poets from London, Potes and Poets Press, U.S.A..
Hazel Smith has given poetry and text performances in many different countries including Australia, Great Britain, USA, Belgium and New Zealand, and also on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), BBC and US radio. She has collaborated several times with artist Sieglinde Karl and musician Roger Dean and her performance work has been featured on several ABC programmes, and internationally, for example on France Culture. She is currently making a CD of her poetry and performance pieces and one is being released on CD by the US journal in sound, Aerial.
Hazel is also a violinist. She is leader of the contemporary music group austraLYSIS and has performed solo and chamber music in many parts of the world including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Norway and the Philippines. She has featured as soloist on several gramophone records.
Roger Dean is an improviser, instrumentalist (playing double bass, piano and electronics), composer and musicologist. He has worked widely in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the U.S.. He formed the European group Lysis in 1975, and its Australian counterpart, austraLYSIS, in 1989. He has made more than twenty five lp and cd recordings. Amongst his recent recordings are The Wings of the Whale (with Lysis; Soma 783), Something British (with Graham Collier Music; Mosaic GCM 871), Moving the Landscapes (austraLYSIS, Tall Poppies 007) and Xenakis Epei on the Wergo label.
He has written more than 60 works, both completely notated pieces and also works for improvisers. He has used a range of compositional techniques, from serial, and freely atonal, to neotonal and other post-modern approaches; and composed for digital electronics also. Several scores have been widely distributed in his books (mentioned below); and in publications of Sounds Australian, The Australian Music Centre, Sydney, and Red House Press, Melbourne. Many are on commercial record releases on Soma, Mosaic, and recently Tall Poppies.
Amongst his recent works are TimeDancesPeace, in which dancers and musicians work interpretively and improvisatorily with shared materials and methods of development. He has also collaborated with Hazel Smith in two large text-sound works, Poet Without Language, and Silent Waves, both written for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
He is active in musicology, with many articles and reviews published. His practical book Creative Improvisation was published by Open University Press (UK/US) in 1989. It was followed by New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960 (Open University Press; 1991). He has received bursaries and commissions from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Australia Council, ABC, and Rikskonserter (Sweden).
He also has a career in scientific research, and is the Director of The Heart Research Institute, Sydney, Australia.
. . . Now Cordless