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Architecture

Nearing the Machines

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

May 1^st, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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When I was in New York I went to see Merce Cunningham’s Nearly Ninety performance at BAM, on his 90th birthday.  Actually, I was brought there, because Megan sometimes does this thing:

Her: I got us tickets to this performance/exhibition/gallery/thing.

Me: Okay, cool.  What is it?

Her: It’s some guy, and there are these people… I don’t really remember.

Me: Oh.  What kind of film/ballet/concert is it?

Her: Fuck, I don’t know man.  Just some shit I read and thought it sounded okay.

And then we get there, and its something I’ve really been interested in, or would obviously have been really excited to see because it involves things in which I’m totally interested.

This is what happened.  I didn’t know who Merce Cunningham is, but I am really interested in the Black Mountain College and the people involved with it (though I’m not very knowledgeable about it).  And then we walk past the “merch” area, and I see all this Sonic Youth shit, and I ask dumbly:

Me: Oh, did Sonic Youth play here recently?

Her: You idiot, they’re doing the music for the show we’re seeing.

I don’t know if she just likes surprising me, or if it is fun to keep me wandering about in the dark, or maybe its a combination of the both.  I suppose I’m more docile when I don’t really know what is going on.

But this fun anecdote into our relationship aside, Sonic Youth performed the music live, on this massive pipe-welded rotating structure, while a translucent screen between them and the dancers had video effects projected upon it. It was way awesome.

Now, I don’t know very much about dance from any sort of theoretical perspective, but I am that strange sort of person who when confronted with art, feels some sort of a well start filling within him, whether from conscious thought or from elsewhere, which builds until it overflows into his mind, and he is forced to watch, with mind racing and anxiety causing his fingers to tap against the seat, until the intermission, at which point he can run to find a pen and scribble notes of what he is thinking all over the back of the program.

Here’s a bit of that, from what I was able to get down.

The program printed this, about Merce Cunningham and John Cage:

“They came to the conclusion that the two time-based arts should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way. Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition-such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax-were abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself.”

All well and good, I thought to myself as I read the words before the performance. I had heard the same thing said about writing before-but these elements are so characteristic of our conscious thought that if we are going to interpret any sort of meaning at all, it must be in terms of cause and effect, directed motion, and by extension, human relationships. There is cut up text to be sure, but the fact that it is “cut up” shows that it had meaning, it has only been obscured or mutilated.

But once the performance began, I was surprised. Most of the dance I have seen live (the good, technical dance) is ballet. Cunningham’s choreography showed me just how much ballet relies upon cause and effect, and psychological relationships. The pas de deux is pure sex. You might, for all intents and purposes, be watching two people engaging in the act of love on stage. You can add one dancer, or take one away, but the sex remains, only the relationship is made more complicated. The male and female dance as classic male and female components, the epic duality, the cosmic pair, the A and B. You can have A, B, AA, BB, ABA, or BBBB, but one is still spelling this body-phrases with the same two letters. We are consigned to writing in the narrative of classical sex, bodies become symbols. It is the endless story, told countless times both with and without words every time a human being thinks of touching another.

Cunningham instead presents his dancers as motion. It is physics, a swarming pallet of vectors, directed in flows around each other on the stage. There is material there-it is not devoid of meaning, or blank substance. But we are no longer watching a story. We are viewing a building, reading a blueprint, or falling into a diagram. It is architectural-he presents cross-sectional images, elevation views, rotational, cartesian, angular phenomena. As I watched his performance, the video images echoed the motions of the dancers, spinning lines and angles above the stage, as the bodies performed excellently, portraying the curves, stretches, fittings, and joints of the body’s frame and range of motion. They did not move like people, who stumble, bend at the waist while sitting and standing, hold their sore points as they struggle for the flexibility they lost in an ancient youth. Those are stories, and these dancers moved in pure physicalities, in possibilities and probabilities of encounter rather than personification of what we know and are able to think.

But still-these are people, directed to act like machines. They are not an assembly line, not an automaton. They are humane, bodily machines to be sure, but their only design has been for aesthetic purpose, to depict a visual, phenomenal scene, not to build or produce unseen within the confines of a factory or site. We are still watching a stage, after all.

Isn’t this the way that we want our machines? We aestheticians of mechanics, who find beauty in the clean lines of a well-made device, or in the subtle depth of a diagram describing a physical form not yet realized. We want our machines to burst outward in exploded view, whirling upon three axes so that we can see and admire the closeness of their components’ motion, the tight fit of the gears, and the quick pace of the electronics converting our clever programs into physicalities we ourselves could never achieve. And more than that-we design new machines in our minds to fill the still-present voids. Rube-Goldberg machines of cause and effect are the easiest, taking our current machines and lining them up into narratives to complete the tasks that still weigh upon our own fragile skins. We name our devices, love them, and love to peek inside to see what they hide from us. How is it that they work? Why do they still fail us? When will the machine come about that will never break, and will do everything, looking beautiful while it whirls about the stage of our imagination?

The function of machines in our lives is always metaphor, always narrative. We do not love our machines for the aspect ratios of their gears, though we might hold these lovely measurements up as the proof of our attraction. We love them because they function; we love them because they mean something to us. Design is never an accident, never natural, and for that, we love it as we wish to love ourselves.

We can’t see the aesthetics of our machines as we would like. They are never as they appear in our minds, or on the blueprints. We want smooth transfers, gentle harmonics, rotational symmetry, and tight, tight belts. Instead we get rusty cam shafts, stuck and broken interfaces, dangerous vibration and pinch points. The male/female connectors are frustratingly non-sexual, despite our designs and naming. There is no good and evil in binary code, no matter how complex we make it, spitting lines of digits fruitlessly to infinity. The clean lines, tempting us with the narrative of non-narrative, that human fantasy of what is beyond humanity, and the repeating regression that will not find a straight line because there is no compound of quadratics able to approach the fundamental instability of emotional ebb and flow-all of these dreams will remain unfilled. Not even robots can live for ever.

There is no truth in metaphor, but still they speak. “What it is like,” is not actually what it is like, but that is the only think that it is like! The dance has music, movement, video, and no words. Still, words come from the dance to the humans who watch it. The dance is not a machine, nor completely human, but it tells a story of machines to us through its mechanical non-narrative.

And in the background, completely separated, Sonic Youth plays ambient, distorted sounds. Distortion is easy to play, but Sonic Youth are the masters. There is aesthetic to it as well, as the sounds ambulates, oscillates, and resounds through what we typically know as music. Is it music, or is it noise? Does it tell a story, or no? Is there really no pleasure in inserting a ¼” jack into an amp?

As they move around the things they refuse to describe, these art forms have an exacting form of a approximation. Definitive cuts, loose measurements, always fitting, because what they are attempting to assemble is not strictly material. The motion of construction, this design on the fly, this performance of the aesthetic principles before our very, un-describing eyes-they move close and around meaning through the means that inspire narrative within us, though not directly representing any to us. They require no symbolic narrative or psychology; they are mere machines. Aesthetic machines-making phenomena.

For us humans, the poorly-functioning, drunk poets of the machine world, this is as close as we get. We call it beautiful.