Rodney Graham
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A Canadian conceptual artist with a long history of manipulating texts, Rodney Graham showed his Lenz at the Art Institute’s “About Place: Recent Art of the Americas” exhibit last spring. He inserted the first five pages of a German Romantic novella into a mechanical “reading machine” devised to create an endless loop of text. The resulting narrative, which was to be read on a carousel of pages, violated the conventions of storytelling because it had no beginning and no end. Seeing that the closed cycles and endless repetitions of his textual work would have a greater impact if he could transcend the page, Graham turned to different texts: musical scores. The concept in his installations Parsifal and School of Velocity hasn’t changed, but the results are richer, and they make a composer out of Graham.
Although Graham has no musical training (unless you count his stint as a guitarist in a rock group that once opened for the Gang of Four), his fresh ears and natural inventiveness have enabled him to dream up compositional techniques for pieces that last all day long–or even for billions of years. Free of the pressure that professional composers feel to tailor their works to the duration of a concert–though many will never live to hear these works performed–Graham has composed two electronic pieces that are being played more or less continuously at the Renaissance Society through November 12. In Parsifal, based on Richard Wagner’s opera of the same name, he takes a piece of musical filler written by Wagner’s assistant Englebert Humperdinck and feeds it through a computer program that repeats portions and desynchronizes various parts, stretching the music out so that it won’t come back in sync for 39 billion years. The computer runs 14 small speakers in the hallway outside the Renaissance Society’s main gallery, each one transmitting the sound of one instrument.
Graham’s Parsifal, as opposed to Wagner’s, depends on software specially designed for the project by Graham’s associate, Gary Bourgeois. The program links the computer’s internal clock with the mathematical formula that directs the composition, meaning that the equipment can be shut down in the evening and the speakers stowed away for reasons of security–this is Hyde Park, after all–and in the morning the music starts again just as if it had been going all night. Another advantage of the software is that the artist or Bourgeois can type in any date and time, and the music scheduled for that time will issue forth. The School of Velocity program isn’t as sophisticated, but Graham plans to update it with a version of Bourgeois’s software. And possibly another program will come along that will outperform the one that now drives Parsifal. In other words, what looks like eternity is really the product of computer technology, the very avatar of planned obsolescence. By means of a computer program that reduces eternity to an unspectacular binary code, Rodney Graham–a musical amateur–trumps a great master.
