Following up the release of his definitive RE-ENGINEERING LP on PANin November last year, Steven Warwick(aka Heatsick) is launching his book Interiors at Motto Berlin, on January 15.
Following Hanne Lippard‘s video for ‘MIMOSA’, Rachel Reupke directed Heatsick‘s ‘CLEAR CHANEL’, lifted from the Berlin-based artist’s RE-ENGINEERING, released on PAN, November 26.
Premiered on XLR8 and running along a similar aesthetic as ‘MIMOSA”s slightly skewed stock imagery for the home user, Reupke’s expanding and contracting tree bark and an endless stack of envelopes playfully echoes speculative realism’s fetishistic relationship with the material. As aid to the undulating one-minute instrumental named after what Heatsick calls “the smell of modernity“, ‘CLEAR CHANEL’ proposes a sight and a sound for it too.
Hanne Lippard’s artistic medium is her voice, so naturally I’m thrilled to meet up with her for a conversation. Over the past weeks I’ve been listening to her work –online and in galleries –and as a result her soothing, hypnotic tone has become quite familiar. When we meet at a small café in Kreuzberg, I feel like I’m having coffee with an old friend.
The first thing I think to associate her work with is Vanessa Redgrave’s mesmerizing narration of the latest Patrick Keiller film, Robinson in Ruins. I mention it but Lippard hasn’t seen it, so my reference falls a bit flat. The similarities are nevertheless there. It’s a subdued and pensive discussion of British landscape, architecture and spatial memory, where Redgrave, like Lippard, reflects the subject matter seamlessly with the use of her unwavering vocal register.
Lippard trained professionally as a graphic designer at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. At first it seems like a leap from that to her present, more esoteric art form but the connections are there. She explains how graphic design helped her to visualise pure text, as “word decoration or rearrangement.” Printed matter began to feel less meaningful to her and she took to reading her texts aloud. One of her early recorded works, ‘Beige,’ evokes the monotony, while reflecting on what statistically is the most ubiquitous colour in the universe. Her voice mirroring the mundanity of the hue, she tells the social history of beige and its relation to menial part-time work from the perspective of someone who has suddenly come to the equally banal realisation that they have a “strong liking” for beige.
Typical to Lippard’s work is an event-title like Speaking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chairlaunching her Nuances of No book, published by Berlin independent press Broken Dimanche, in Venice this past spring. Because it is more often the case that Lippard’s texts speak uncomfortable truths with a voice dripping with comfort: composed, considered, articulate and calming. This disjuncture between her words and their vocal adornment is what makes her work so alluring. No matter what medium she works in –whether graphic design, writing, video or audio –Lippard seems fascinated by different linguistic structural possibilities and arrangements.
As a result, many of her texts have multiple lives, appearing in visual and aural manifestations at different times. Lippard’s audio piece ‘Locus’ was recently presented in the two-person show Hanne Lippard <> Gwenn Thomas at Exile in Berlin. The exhibition inaugurated the gallery’s series of shows pairing artists from different artistic backgrounds and generations. The idea was to create a “phenomenological dialogue” between works that had been made separately, at different time periods. Lippard’s piece in this show had a particularly coercive quality, forcing the listener to contemplate the nature of otherness and being together.
aqnb: Your work has been described as an ‘aesthetic of the word’ – is this how you see it?
Hanne Lippard: I did a writing course when I was very young, living in Stockholm. It was the sort of course where you’re supposed to write a novel. Everyone in the class wanted to write a novel about their life. Have you seen this film Public Speaking about Fran Lebowitz, directed by Martin Scorcese? It’s a portrait of her, she’s jabbering on the whole time. She says that the problem today is that everyone has the space to say something but nothing to say. This writing course was a bit like that. About six women wanted to write about their pregnancies, as though pregnancy was a totally unique experience.
I am not leaving the possibility of writing a novel out of my life but at some point I just started speaking what I’d written. People are not aware of their own voices, it’s more that everyone is afraid of their own voice- they hate the recording of it. Why is that? Being more focused on the voice, you get more analytical about the way people speak to you, how you speak in different situations. The recording is a reverberation of yourself, and writing for the voice is manifest in that reverberation somehow.
aqnb: You must be very comfortable hearing your own voice by now. I’ll probably listen to this interview later and cringe at the sound of myself.
HL: Not really, though. As a conscious speaker, I’m fine with it when I am reading or performing a text. But I have a big problem hearing myself speak in different languages, like in Swedish, for example. As a Norwegian, I feel really phony when I hear myself speak Swedish. It’s like if you would speak Australian English or something. Same language but you have to perform the dialect.
aqnb: Do you consciously tailor your voice depending on the text you perform?
HL: There’s not a huge vocal range but I guess it’s the rhythm that changes more than anything. What makes it different from normal speech is just timing and intonation. It becomes like a song. ‘Beige’ was a work I did when I was really young, still in school. At that time I was not so aware of the use of my own voice, but still it remains the most referenced of my work. The repetition of the word beige really comes quite naturally in it though. It’s the mantra of the piece.
aqnb: The narration of your audio pieces are often in the first person. Are they always personal texts?
HL: Yes, they are rather personal.
aqnb: Did you work at Starbucks, is what I’m really asking…
HL: No not actually. I used Starbucks as a universal reference point. There’s one on every high street and it’s slowly beiging people in. That is the problematic of the work though, keeping the personal delivery. The voice requires that you are always present, whereas I feel many contemporary artists are very distanced from their works. They tend to emphasize the huge distance between the artist and the object.
aqnb: When I listen to your work sometimes, it washes over me and I start to lose track of the content. But your ‘Locus’ piece at Exile really forces people to listen. When you start to read the text backwards, it brings the listener out of their complacency.
HL: It was quite a nice text to combine with the exhibited photography by Gwenn Thomas. It’s hard to negotiate playing sound art with other works. For instance, I had a piece in the Berlin Art Prize exhibition this year and the sound work gets quite lost in the mix when you have 20 artists exhibiting.
But at Exile it was quite nice because you could demand something more from the listener. They hear the words once in a normal narrative and then the exact same words start to be read backwards. You can make sense of it, and I like that. That language can be re-arranged and you understand it to some extent but there is still something obscure. Like when you use certain words together, they bring out different associations. You can’t just say, “I’m lovin’ it” without further connotation.
aqnb: Yes, like in your collaboration with Heatsick. You have all these different catchphrases…
HL: It was actually Steve [Warwick]’s text but we have a lot of overlap in our work. He has a funny way of using words, this inner dialogue about things being branded by words. And with lyrics you have to condense language quite a lot.
aqnb: The way the Exile exhibition was structured seemed really interesting to me. You had no contact with Gwenn Thomas before the opening?
HL: The gallerist had the idea of working with me next year and suddenly it was like, ‘could we do it next month? I have another artist I’d like to show you with’. It’s interesting when you are put together with someone from a different generation, and not in a group show. You know, you will be put against this person: young vs. old or this generation vs. contemporary but it completely recontextualises her work to have mine almost soundtracking it. It worked very well in that space. She is a great photographer and it’s nice that someone who has been working for so long is open to bring her work so close to another artist less known to her, in the intimacy of a rather small gallery space.
aqnb: The way it was described, it sounded more like an anti-collaboration. Yet it seemed to have worked…
HL: It was actually quite hard to work with her pieces in the sense of them being so visually strong, especially in terms of the topic; Ellis Island. The aesthetic was very 80s. I tried to write something new but in the end I decided not to, as ‘Locus’ is from 2009. I found this pre-existing text and instead gave importance to the installation. We had two channels, speakers on either end of the space, that divided the narrative of the text, depending which side was playing.
The text had never been recorded before. Now that I am working more and more with the voice, I have these texts that are unspoken and when I speak them at some point, it brings out a new life for them. That’s why it’s nice to work with people like Steve. You think you have to write a lot of new material, but really you don’t have to. You can already work with smaller texts and bring out new contexts through the use of the voice.
aqnb: In your new book, were the texts ones that you had already performed or recorded?
HL: Only a few. It was a bit out of nowhere for me to make a book at that point, but in the end it almost became like a script for my future readings and performances.
Nuances of No by Hanne Lippard. Published by Broken Dimanche. Image courtesy the artist.
aqnb: Did you do the graphic design?
HL: Yes, I wanted to. It was a collection of many different texts but then somehow, strangely, they had quite a coherent topic.
aqnb: The book is called Nuances of No…
HL: Yes, the topic is negation in speech, communication, the Web. How we communicate through social media. There were many screenshots included in the process of writing the book, as well as within the book. I’m quite intrigued by these dead ends of the Internet. Like when you end up somewhere and you can’t go any further, this ‘Help’ that is of no help. I don’t know if it’s just since I’ve moved to Germany but there’s something about a mix between normal everyday bureaucracy and online help. It’s very often complicated. Even these small spam things where you are supposed to find lost love, or your life and plans being compiled in six short ads on the sidebar: Trips to Istanbul!
aqnb: One time I was breaking up with my ex and we kept having lengthy email conversations, and all my ads on Gmail would be stuff like, ‘How to deal with autistic children’. ‘Seemed eerily fitting…
HL: Yes, it’s almost like a side tracking of the mind. There’s a lot of paranoia and self-diagnosis or self-help that comes with supposed Internet “solutions”. Everything is becoming very self, and at the same time very helpless.So my book is not directly political but it’s a lot about social habits, a kind of current anthropology. You can sometimes see the whole current state of the world in one webpage if you have some extra sidebars. You can really capture, in a screenshot, our current state.
aqnb: Your voice in particular seems like a good conduit for these reflections.
HL: Sometimes people mention a robotic quality to my voice but I am trying still to maintain the human factor. It’s very popular to have the Siri voice as a narrator in artworks. In my work she would have to be a backing vocal or something, a lot of the message falls away without the human intonation. **
A board of blinding lights, the metronomic click of a beat-up CASIO taps against an elastic keyboard loop that stretches and contracts, expands and compresses, across the ebbing tide of space and time. A tiny bottle of Chanel No. 5 materialises, Steven Warwick gingerly squirting its contents on a convulsing audience at the Berghain in Berlin. This is one of several times I’ve seen, felt and absorbed a Heatsick performance but the perfume’s a first.
At the time, I thought it was just another addition to the multi-sensory experience that Warwick strives towards; a bodily transcendence founded on a powerful conceptual bearing. By now I’ve figured otherwise. Said ‘feminine fine fragrance’ reappears, again and again, as a bootlegged ‘climate change’ sweatshirt and the “clear chanel” of his RE-ENGINEERING artist statement, a manifesto of sorts accompanying what he calls the “11 blobs” of his upcoming vinyl release, out through PAN on November 26. “It’s the smell of modernity”.
Warwick is as much a musician as he is an artist and intellectual, the distinction as imperceptible as his life view is malleable. A Berlin-based performer steeped in a visual culture orbiting but not limited to the city, his first full-length as Heatsick is littered with references to the contemporary art discourse and theory that he disrupts, dissects and often parodies, in the same cyclical way that RE-ENGINEERING ends as it begins, if not in a distant, degraded form.
Fellow artist Hanne Lippard’s colourless, disembodied voice preens, over measured exhalations and a crisp melody evoking a dial tone, as she robotically engages in a disintegrating loop of references; speaking, quoting, sloganeering, “black power”, “gay Google”, “what we do is secret”, “labour in the bodily mode”, “second annual trend report”, over a rhythm that is less a groove than a forward lurch. Warwick’s manifesto’s “relentless interconnectivity” carries on, across ideas and ideologies, philosophers and philosophies, even past recordings and present tracks, surfacing and disappearing across its track listing.
“I’ve just really thought about these things, they’re such concerns,” says Warwick through Skype and on tour in Australia, about the ideas and aesthetics that he often explicitly explores, sometimes abuses, on RE-ENGINEERING, “That’s the thing with a lot of network theory and circulation. I’m really trying to link a lot of ideas, or map my own ontology, or even some kind of mode, and I’m trying to think about why I think that. Sometimes, if I see people referencing certain philosophers or schools of thought, and it’s just a bit of a quick joke, you feel a bit short-changed, and not in a particularly subversive way.”
Jesse Garciapurrs, disjointedly in ‘DIAL AGAIN’ emulating the stilted automated voice, deliberately, poorly, over swaggering toms, while Warwick’s voice comes through a far-off megaphone, beneath the noise of a field recording, repeating Lippard’s words (“Modern life is still rubbish, you say. Modern rubbish is still life”) from the beginning, now at the end, as it links into album-closer, ‘ACCELERATIONISTA’ –a circular motion of movement ending up where it began, but different.
“With RE-ENGINEERING,it’s playing around with treating it more like a manual. It’s like, ‘let’s look at these options and maybe you can reprogram yourself to try and get around this dissatisfaction’, or you could just also remould something,” Warwick tells me, following up an email listing ten artists he thinks are doing just that.
***
“Ed Lehan is known for his acerbic commentaries on participation and the public event. See his various shows where the opening will consist of a reconstruction of an empty charity box built by the artist, a case of beers, a barrel of mojito and the visitor(s). For the one at a gallery in Tallin [Error 404 at Temnikova & Kasela] he reconstructed an adizone that had been popping up in various parts of London for the Olympics.”
“In Loretta Fahrenholz’s film ‘Ditch Plains’, a street performance group contort in the early hours of a desolate area of East New York, various upscale hotel spaces and an apartment in Manhattan, post-Hurricane Sandy. It’s a strange post-apocalypse zombie HD afrofuturist hypercapitalistic ecological crisis; a networked virus of disconnect.”
“Georgie Nettell’s last show [2013 at Reena Spaulings]dealt with notions of recycling, circulation and eco branding. Local dirty dishes were picked up in restaurant bus trays and re-presented in the gallery, images found on the internet were downloaded, distressed and formatted onto raw linen canvases. Her musical group, Plug (with Sian Dorrer), also used a stock image as its cover, confusing the listener as to the public image of the group. “
Plug, Body Story (2011) album cover.
“Katja Novitskova uses images found on the internet such as wildlife and prints them out, mounting them in physical space and opening up the notions of documentation, preservation, ecology and materiality. The digital image is itself fuelled by carbon materials and minerals extracted from the earth. Species on the verge of extinction are fed back into image circulation and, in turn, play with the neuro-chemical recognition mechanisms in the viewer’s brain.”
Katja Novitskova, ‘Approximation III’ (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Paul Kindersley’s thebritisharecumming YouTube channel is best viewed left running during a morning after with genuinely bizarre makeup tutorials, presumably also made the morning after (perhaps a satire of the MT genre themselves) at once absurd, daft, unnerving, hilarious and engaging. Current fave: Babes (correct usage).”
“Gili Tal presented REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE [at LimaZulu]as a wall text superimposed by four gestural paintings, evoking haptic gestures and waiting room paintings. The text consisted of the “goriest parts of Marx’s Capital” (itself full of references to Dracula and Frankenstein), written in languages from post-Communist countries and presented with the deceptively friendly aesthetic of an Innocent smoothie, one visitor was heard to have described the show as “Muji Expressionism”.”
Gili Tal, REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE. Installation view (2013). Photo by Tom Carter.
“Sabine Reitmaier is a photographer and artist whose work blurs commercial and fine art contexts. Her show [Not comme les autres at Galerie Friedlaender] last year consisted of portraits of models staged in a similar method to how she would present them for the Psychologie Heute covers she also shoots for. In the exhibition, the large format photos confront us, provoking how we make neurological recognitions and associations, down to posing, body language or the coloured backgrounds that Reitmaier herself painted as per a photo shoot.”
Sabine Reitmaier, ‘PETIT POIS “CAVIAR VERT”‘(2012). Courtesy and @ Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin.
“Hanne Lippard‘s vocal register evokes the automated hold tone of a service centre phonecall and plays with pre-existing imagery found online. Her videos such as ‘Beige’ deploy wordplay and humour to comment upon the hyperreal mundanity of part time work, lifestyles and (non) space.”
“Sarah MacKillop‘s Ex Library Bookis itself an artist book consisting of fragments of obsolete library books –withdrawn from circulation and sold off at a discounted price onto a discarded heap –presented as a shiny glossy catalogue. Her other artist book, New Stationary Department, consists of various materials found at various stationers, be it neon marker pens or corrective materials such as Tipp-Ex, found in the commercial office, highlighting and reworking notions of editing, work and commercial presentation.”
Ex Library Book by Sara MacKillop. Published by Pork Salad Press (2012). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Rachel Reupkedeals with HD stock images in videos that, when stripped of its conversations, penetrate an eerie and uncanny atmosphere of social relationships and catalogue-like objects. The warm emotional bond of social relation deployed by advertising is stripped and the viewer is suddenly presented with a cold flat image.In ‘Containing Matters of No Peaceable Colour’ from 2009, the hard gaze confronts the viewer with a series of HD towels while an automated voice proceeds to obsessively list a lifestyle specification quota with the delivery of a Robbe-Grillet novel.” **
Now that the apocalypse has passed, the time has come to figure out where we’re headed. That’s certainly the sense one gets when juxtaposing last year’s The End-themed Unsound Festival in Krakow with CTM’s The Golden Age in Berlin. Oddly, where the contrasting programme titles imply doom and hopelessness, progress and innovation respectively, they both share a common thread in that they appear to be communicating in opposites. That’s why the overriding themes of CTM and its corresponding art and culture-centred counterpart, transmediale, concentrate on deep self-assessment, re-evaluation and a look to an exhilarating and sometimes frightening future –all with the benefit of hindsight.
The outcome is one of confusion and a feeling of helplessness; if not in the physical impossibility of attending all the discussions, workshops, exhibitions and performances taking place on either side of the river Spree, then in reflecting the same sense of information overload that every voracious human-cum-digital-data-processor experiences on a regular basis. Apart from the distinction between the music-related projects and everything else, there’s a practical, though significant division made between the two worlds of transmediale and CTM. Where the privileged position of the art of transmediale is centred at the Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt (The House of World Cultures) in Berlin’s political heart of Mitte, music is relegated to where it belongs; on the vibrant cultural fringe of cheap real estate and free artistic expression around the south-eastern regions of Neukölln and Kreuzberg.
Imaging with Machine Processes: The Generative Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan. Image courtesy of transmediale.
That blurred distinction between art and economics is a recurrent theme in discussion on either side of the dual festival circuit. Steve Warwick, of looping sensory experiment Heatsick, attests to eschewing his fine art background in favour of the freedom and spontaneity of live music performance. Sonia Landy Sheridan,the proto-psychedelic generative artist pioneering in machine processes also actively avoided the restrictions of a gallery career, while doctoral candidate Holly Herndon takes her scholarly experiments in embodied laptop performance and vocal processing to the famous Berghain instead of a sound lab. Even artist and academic Terre Thaemlitz, famous for releasing a 32+ hour long album Soulnessless on mp3,expresses a similar sentiment in conversation with Electronic Beats editor Max Dax. Hers though is a far more cynical reason for choosing music as an outlet for her investigations in identity politics, describing the medium as “a petri dish of all that I hate about society”.
Thaemlitz’ candid statement, “hopeless. Doomed. Everything is shit. No hope,” is a feeling seemingly shared by author and political and cultural theorist, Mark Fisher. He applies his anti-capitalist ideals to a call to reject ‘hope’ as mere distraction, in favour of mobilisation against the evils of neoliberalism, while loosely relating that to his belief that there is nothing truly new in music anymore. That’s an idea that is both reinforced and destroyed by Oxford PhD candidate in Musicology Adam Harper in his dissection of a new online music phenomenon, known as ‘vaporwave’, with the likes of James Ferraro, Fatima Al Qadiri and Gatekeeper at the helm. For Harper, these artists’ simultaneous rejoice and implicit critique of corporate culture echoes the “technofuck buzz” of Nick Land’s Machinic Desire and display some, but not all, of the characteristics of a contemporary philosophy of Accelerationism.
Equally exhilarating and disturbing as Harper’s Virtual Plaza is an examination of the so-called ‘ruling classes’ of the new world order. Artist Andrew Norman Wilson exposes the problematic caste system of the Google Empire in Workers Leaving the Googleplex, as well as the parallels with Aldous Huxley’s dystopian fiction, Brave New World. Digital activist Marcel Mars, on the other hand, takes a more practical approach to his privately held anarchist ideals, by revealing the digital infrastructure of those major informational monopolies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay (GFAeB). He encourages active engagement and public investment in free open source software, in striving toward an economic and political balance.
Incidentally, keeping off Google search results is a constant battle for poet and ubuweb founder Kenneth Goldsmith, who encourages crowdsourcing as a vehicle for positive change in response to criticism that his archive of avant garde educational resources lacks diversity. His desire to collect and classify comes with the surplus of information available through the internet, which is why his advice is that every one of us should take on the role of archivist as a result and above all, “don’t trust the cloud”. Goldsmith even notes that since the dawn of file-sharing sites like Napster, the way media is filed and displayed has changed the way we all interact with it, shifting the connections and articulations between genres, ideas and artists.
So, now that the end is passed and the future can begin, it’s recontextusalisation, redefinition and making sense that is the goal for all of us. Festivals like CTM and transmediale are trying to do just that.
CTM runs in various venues in Berlin, Germany annually.
