Reviews

CREO

Absences and Making Sense of Performance Art, Page Two
An Interview with Director Andrey Kasparov

John Campbell: Since you're a composer concerned with musical development as well as director of Absences, can you offer our readers any insight into what composer Petros Ovsepyan has accomplished in this performance piece?
Andrey Kasparov: I have to say that the most valuable aspect of the piece for me is the selection of interactive and interdisciplinary means of development. Given that music and painting are so different in nature in that music develops in time and painting in space, music operates with sounds and painting with colors, how does one choose the means which complement each other in a profound and meaningful way? For convenience and simplification, I would subdivide the means Ovsepyan used in two large general categories: sonic and visual.

J.C.:This piece has sound but not anything that I would understand to be music. The sounds seem to grow out of the visual experience. Could you explore this?
A.K.:There is no doubt that every good painting contains vibrations akin to musical ones, created by masterful selections of colors, forms and textures. Sometimes these vibrations are even audible! For instance, once in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I was looking at Nightwatch by Rembrandt. There was a number of people behind me, and suddenly one of them (turned out to be a painter from the republic of Georgia) suddenly screamed very loudly. That's how the dynamic spirit and brutal tension of this painting found its sonic expression through the body of an understanding viewer.

      The problem here is that it's impossible to systemitize those sensations, as they are very individual for every person, just like people with synaesthesia feel the same phenomenon, for instance pain, in different colors. But the fact that these sensations are different doesn't mean they are not there. In that respect the very style of Ovsepyan's work which deals with inner sound trapped within a performer's body worked very well. Ovsepyan explores various aspects of inner development in both paintings and music and creates a powerful amalgam. For example, an intense red color, as if coming out of the cello, in the first movement finds its expression in the "violinist's" yells, growing in intensity dramatically akin to the growth of the color, before being trapped and put back into the painting and the body of the performer as well. I stop here, but there are similar examples throughout the work.

J.C.: You say there are visual components to the composer's work. How so?
A.K.:There is no doubt that visual aspects of music are very substantial. Every well-known performer brings to our minds a certain visual image. When going to a concert we foresee an image of a certain chamber group, orchestra or a theatrical set. Every good musical venue is designed so it would prepare us for and enhance our perception of music. Every performance contains unique motions, intentional and unintentional, which, in good cases enhance our understanding of music and remain in our memory long after the performance. Ovsepyan capitalizes on that, enhancing the visual element of music in that he carefully choreographs every second of all 45 minutes. He extends paintings visually through live performers making sure that the motions or the lack of those by performers (changing the angles of body, shivering, facial expressions, stillness, slow motions of torso and hands, intermittent breathing, etc.) are carefully selected, work well with the paintings/visual improvisation, and create one line of development from the beginning to the end.

      Even though the visual aspect of the work seems to be somewhat less innovative than the sonic one, it is still a very necessary, well-thought-through and organic part of the work. All in all, the visual aspect can be considered innovative in terms of the consistency of its application. Personally, I don't know of any other work as carefully through-composed in terms of visual interaction between the performers and paintings. .

J.C.: Are you personally pleased with this performance piece; does it work?
A.K.: In sum, I have to confess that this work went a lot further than I originally expected. In all honesty, I thought that the work would be a nice gimmick. Instead, it turned out to be a profoundly and intricately developed composition, unique and innovative in its consistency and careful selection of the common means of development between the visual and musical arts. I recognize that I have only touched the technical aspects of the work. This work, inspired by the poem of Artaud, also raises important issues of meaning.

      What does it mean for an artist to create? This question always seems to lurk at the edges of our understanding of any work of art. The question is rarely given full consideration in response to the work of a single artist. When considering a collaborative work of art the question is called to the fore. With a single creator we can assume the process of creation is one conducted in privacy. Collaboration raises the question of process and, perhaps inappropriately, who to praise or blame for the outcome. For a collaboration to be successful what blending of personalities, ideas and execution by the participants are required? Musical performance by its nature is a collaboration between composer and performer but when the composition itself is the product of collaboration this point is accentuated.

      Within the new piece commissioned by Creo with the help of generous grants from the F. Ludwig Diehn Fund of the Norfolk Foundation and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, composer Petros Ovsepyan and painter Alexander Anufriev, have created a new work, Absences, to be performed at the Old Dominion University Gallery by musicians, singers, actors and a painter this past spring. The work squarely addresses the act of composition and execution across several disciplines. Each visual, auditory and choreographic element seems to speak directly to what philosopher and visual art critic Arthur Danto recommends for greatness, that the artwork should embody the idea being expressed.

      Certainly Anufriev is up to the task of investigating the creative act. Working in a neo-expressionist style he creates large canvases using images strongly influenced by Orthodox iconography. The idea of the icon implies an inspired image, rather than one of conscious consideration meant to evoke for the viewer the presence of the divine. For the artist the act of creating a work can seem inspired as if it were coming to the artist from outside. This is an illusion. This illusion asserts itself as real when ideas, which reside in the subconscious/unconscious mind, rise to consciousness in preparation for communication. Anufriev's images frequently appear as personifications of aspects of the creative process and this may play an important role in the content implied in this collaboration. For example, by limiting his imagery to angelic apparitions he evokes the idea of divine creation as mirrored in human creativity. The figures themselves become personifications of a muse representing some attribute of human creativity. Additionally, he plays off traditional western iconography within these personifications: the red blur of paint over strings of the cello in a flat painting indicates sound, or a smaller figure with a violin, is not only a muse in the classical location of a winged victory, but also communicates the idea of the divine creative act within the limitations of substantial form.

      The work itself is divided into three segments each of which is a living picture located in a different part of the gallery in which the performance takes place. Visually these vignettes are reminiscent of the early work of the collaborative artists Gilbert and George as living sculpture. Each tableau has a distinct visual quality, mirroring the work of American regionalist and social realists such as Grant Wood and Philip Evergood. They depict a frozen quality, a suspension of action which is broken only with highly controlled actions and vocalizations followed by abrupt though incomplete cessation of activity.

      This frozen quality is evocative of the potentiality that exists in the subconscious, made manifest only in preparation for communication. The action in these tableaux seems stunted or frustrated. They are separated by an interlude during which the audience moves from one scene to the next thus becoming participants in the work, providing accidental noise and loosely structured movement. In each scene the music and visual effects of the performers are dependent on each other. So it proceeds, throughout the performance structured as a series of distinct events moving through the gallery. Each event separated by movement, a kind of shuffling as the audience proceeds tentatively to the next station, reflective of the sounds of daily life and ordinary experience. The musical composition was a seamless evocation of the emotional aspects of the visual elements.

      The sound of paint brush on canvas, the odor of paint, the accidental sound of air-conditioning ducts, the deliberate sounds of the performers and audience noise join in the sensual feast/assault on the witness/viewer/listener as active collaborator/interpreter in the work. Ovsepyan's musical notation for Absences requires a tightly scripted set of events which includes chance behavior of the audience and enviornmental sounds as part of the experience. The audience members who experience the events interpret those experiences and become collaborators in what is created. Here the stunted actions within the tableaux reveal the idea of the creator as the first observer. The act is brought forth as a communication of an idea to be examined and explored by a creator and observer as a manifestation of subconscious thought.

      Think of that moment when the unconscious state seems to rise to the surface of consciousness. It is a process of shifting from thought to preparation for expression (the most difficult state in the process) leading to the blatant manifestation of the idea as communication. It is this state of preparation for communication of the idea that seems most daunting that is mirrored in Absences. After periods of unconscious wanderings of the audience and the chaotic sound and images, it would appear the art-as-communication comes to fruition and is examined as interpretation.

      Perhaps this is the central idea expressed in the work, but ultimately Absences plays off the idea of the binary aspect of presence and absence as expressed in post structuralism and deconstruction. Presence always implies absence and vice versa. But these seeming opposites simply define a range within which the creative act must operate. Absence is not the manifestation of nothingness, but the manifestation of potentiality. Presence of the sound or visual element is not just a manifestation of something but the destruction of potentiality to be examined in relationship to what it is and what it is not. It is here that Absences comes closest to embodying the idea contained in the work.

Frederick S. Bayersdorfer
Arts Assistant to the Dean
College of Arts and Letters
Old Dominion University