Witte de Withcenter for contemporary artRotterdam

Richter VerlagDiisseldorf

Michael Newman

Contingencyand Rule in

the Work ofPierre Bismuth

If the following series of notes, remarks, speculations that circle around, touch on, andsometimes move away from Pierre Bismuth’s work seems not very systematic, this is, toa certain degree, appropriate, since an arbitrariness of the system, or systematic arbi-trariness, is at the center of Bismuth’s work - a work that is very much ‘in progress,’ butat the same time governed by a rigorous logic. His concern is not with a pregiven logic,nor with the expression or communication of meaning, but rather with the way inwhich the contingent becomes necessary, as is the case when an error is retroactivelytransformed into a rule.

Language/excessLet us take Synonymsl (1994) as a starting point. In working from synonym to synonymalong a ‘tree,’ we find not simply a system, but a kind of infinity. Within the possibilitiesoffered, the choices made are contingent - no one word is intrinsically better thananother - yet once made impose their own seeming necessity. Language here serves notso much as an efficient instrument for communication, but as a display of excess. Thereis always an an-economic dimension to language - at once more and less words thannecessary; two words where one will do, or one word with two or more meanings. This isthe very condition for metaphoricity and linguistic creativity.

If the limits of language are the limits of the world, then the world is unlimited. Whatdoes this mean? Nothing other than that the world is not a closed system. This alsoimplies that there can never be a theory of existence. And equally, if art is nothing otherthan the articulation of existence, there can never be a theory of art. Pierre Bismuth’swork hints at what it might mean to carry over the rigor and reflexiveness of conceptualart into a post-theoretical moment - that is, the moment when art is understood not interms of a match but in terms of a gap between itself and its conditions of possibility.

It may seem odd, even dated, that I use the term ‘existence’ - a throwback to the six-ties, to Jean-Paul Sartre, to black turtlenecks and hot jazz. Isn’t existentialism, as Sartrewrote in a title of a well-known little book, a ‘humanism’? And aren’t we living in an agethat is ‘post-human’ - an age ofdigital communications, of cyberspace, of prosthetics? Iuse the category of existence in a specific sense: ‘existence’ as that which concerns notthe ‘what’ but the ‘that.’ In the context of Pierre Bismuth’s work: that there is a film, notwhat the film is; that there is a telephone conversation, not what the content of the con-versation might be. The difference with the existentialist moment is that existence is nolonger that of the centered, intentional subject; existence involves interference, inter-ruption, noise; it involves marginal, involuntary phenomena.

147

The ‘what’ is always an object of a conceptual determination, whereas the ‘that’ is a

mode of existence, a way of being. How, then, is the ‘that’ to be indicated in a work? Theanswer is by presenting phenomena at the limits ofdetermination. Bismuth’s Hummingl(1997) is a very good example: we are given those vocal gestures that are themselvesmeaningless but that make meaningful and communicative language possible - ameaningless condition of meaning or a condition of meaning that cannot be appropri-ated by meaning. This also has an ethical significance. The distinction I am makingcould be mapped onto the one made by Emmanuel Levinas between the ‘saying’ and the‘said’: the ‘said’ is that which is thematized, the ‘saying’ that which comes from theother and cannot be reduced to the said. At the very least this shows the distance of Bis-muth’s practice of language from that of the structuralists.

Consider also Bismuth’s various works involving a typist trying to follow the sound-track of a film -Postscript/The Passenger (1996), Postscript/Pnfession Reporter (1996), and TheParty (1997). What is interesting here is not the accurate transcription, nor even the filmas a signifying system, but the lapses, the points of breakdown when the film goes toofast for the typist to keep up; the moments that are opaque, and the difference betweenthat which leaves a sound trace, which can therefore be described by the typist, and thatwhich does not and which therefore disappears from the written record.

It is apparent from WhatBeyond3 (1995) that while the choices are determined by a pre-ceding system, by the already said - the thesaurus, language as a structure of similari-ties and differences - the way through that structure is undetermined, or is determinedin a way that can be understood neither through causality, nor through conditions ofpossibility. It is not so much a matter of the meaning of this or that synonym, but that achoice is made, an act which always involves a degree of arbitrariness. Yet once thechoice is made, itceases to be arbitrary and becomes absolute -it can never be undone;the passage is one-way. To put it another way, contingency retroactively becomes therule or law. Intention is thereby circumvented from both sides. This structure recurs inBismuth’s work almost as if the law of his work were the law of the becoming law of thecontingent. Of course this also implies its own reversal: the becoming contingent orarbitrary of the law. One could try to generalize this into a claim about aft! by making a

law or rule out ofthe contingent and the everyday (a kind of urbanized version of Kant’sdictum that nature gives the rule to art), art shows us the arbitrary character of the law,which ultimately can only absolutize itself as a tautology, ‘the law is the law.’

Enunciation/enunciatedBismuth inherits a shift that took place in conceptual aft from structure to performativityWe see this preeminently, and very early, in the work of Dan Graham, and also in JamesColeman’s Slide Piece (1973) and in the work of Bas Jan Ader. Indeed, it is possible to general-ize that the emphasis of conceptual art has shifted from structure to situation, and this isprecisely why a ‘theory’ of art is now seen to be impossible. ‘Situation’ involves somethinguntheorizable, that is to say, a singular enunciation.The moment of enunciation - the performative - is that of the appropriation of languageby the subject. Language as structure becomes the substance of a subject only in the enun-ciation. And the enunciation is always that of a singular subject, and a body. Thus enuncia-

148

tion is the site of the greatest paradox of language: not that ofthe relation of the universaland the individual as the ‘instance’ of the universal, but ofthe binding of the universal andthe singular - the ‘this one here’ that cannot be spoken of It is in this impossible relationthat the possibility oflanguage is articulated. But if it cannot be spoken of if language can-not represent its own condition of possibility without being reduced to that which itmakes possible, namely language, the condition of possibility oflanguage as given inlan-guage, then how can this scandalous relation between the singular and the universal be‘presented’? Pierre Bismuth’s work revolves around nothing other than this question.

Accident/necessigfTo accompany the work Blue Monk in Progress (1995), Pierre Bismuth issued a statementwhich provides a key to his approach to the relation between rule and contingencyacross a range of his works, and even, perhaps, in one crucial strand of modern art. Inone of its forms the work consists of a Disclavier piano - a piano that records what isplayed on it and then, in the absence of the player, replays it with the automatic depres-sion of the keys. This particular sound reproduction is of Bismuth trying to teach him-self to play Theolonius Monk’s Blue Monk from memory.

BlueMonk in Progress is a work that examines the gradual process of thought bybringing it together with an act of remembering. It is based around the tech-nology of the Yahama Disclavier, a relatively rare keyboard instrument that canmemorize whatever piece of music is played on it and can replay the entire piece -with every modulation and keyboard movement - exactly as it was originally per-formed. These computer assisted pianos are mostly seen in hotels where theyfunction as nothing more than large music boxes. However, on reflection thepiano does pose a number of questions on the notions of recording, perfection,and reproduction.

By displacing the problem of recording sound to that of recording a physicalgesture, a confusion is created in terms of time of the action. What interests me isthe way this instrument can repeat an action from the past, making us feel notthat we are listening to a static recording as we do with discs, videos, or film, butthat we are witnessing a new event taking place. An act that has already happenedmay be repeated ad infinitum and would continue to qualify as ‘present,’ a kind of‘performance after the act.’

More than the absence of the pianist, which for me represents an economyrather than an effect, I am particularly interested in this instrument’s capacity tomake us witnesses to an entire working process or, to be more exact, to the processof understanding a musical composition.

Although I have a certain notion of music, I have no experience playing key-boards. It was precisely this underexploitation of the capacities of the machinethat most clearly and playfully revealed this aspect. In my concern to follow thefluctuations of thought, I used this piano to record the operation of rememberingand playing a piece that was going through my head - Blue Monk by TheloniousMonk. I played for an hour, doing the best I could. The progress I made is mini-mal, but recognizable nonetheless. The piece is put together gradually. My play-

149

ing does not seek to illustrate anything, but does represent a moment in time, andat such a moment it is clear that the idea of exhibiting could not have been furtherfrom my mind.

The Blue Monk in Progress musical score, on the other hand, grew out ofthequestion of representation. By nature, a score normalizes and codifies thegestures involved in playing; by establishing the relationship between gestureand sign, it makes the music legible and replayable. This score is an accuratewritten transcript which rationalizes sixty minutes of my playing, completewith every random moment of hesitation, repetition, and silence. Its particularityis that it was produced by a computer program which did not understand theorigin of the music it was transcribing. In some senses, the computer turned a

‘mistake’ into something ‘correct’ simply by normalizing it, by creating a rule forit retroactively.

Later, without providing any information as to its origin, I asked a pianoteacher to perform this computer-generated score. Naturally, she played it impec-cably, thus reiterating the mistakes that went into its writing. As a result, the mostindeterminate notes were played as if they were intentional, and my hesitationsbecame professional gestures of the utmost precision.

Pierre Bismuth, 1995

The piece of music, as remembered, stands as a kind of law, which must then be articu-lated with a singular body in an enunciation, a performance. The performance is

marked in its singularity both by intentional inflections and by errors. This perform-ance in turn, through computer transcription into musical notation, becomes a new law- the law for another performance. In effect, once rendered repeatable through tran-scription into notation, an error, or concatenation of errors, becomes law. I would like to

suggest that originality - according to its strictly Kantian conception, rather than its

banalizations -lies not in the pure invention of the subject, but in the articulation oflaw and enunciation. Originality is not pure invention, invention out of nothing, in

Kant either: rather, he writes, through genius nature ‘gives the role to art’ (Critique ofjudgment). But here the relation is not to nature but to the law. In other words, the mak-ing of the work ofart does not consist in the expression of an opaque origin (‘nature’),but rather in a set of operations performed on preexisting symbolic structures (‘cul-

ture’). It could be argued that the postconceptual notion of what it means to be an artistinvolves a ‘destruction’ of the banal conception of ‘originality’ in order to recapture its

‘original’ sense. While Bismuth participates in this general postconceptual shift in theconception of the artist, of what an artist does, he inflects it in a particular and veryinteresting way. This inflection is precisely in the direction of interference, noise, thecontingencies of bodily existence. In other words, in the direction of those points ofbreakdown at which enunciation, as such, presents itself

Image/lzghtnessNow I want to turn to the question of the image as posed by those works that use digi-tized images with their descriptions - Du Grand Canyon d...4 (From the Grand Canyon

15o

to..., 1997) and From somefolded shirts to...S (1997). Note that the ends of the titles of theseries are not given, which we may interpret as a deliberate evocation of open-ended-ness, the full stop coming simply when it is time for the work to be shown.

A digitized image is one without a surface of inscription, or at least independent ofany particular surface of inscription. Without such an inscription, an image loses itsindexicality, the real connection with its subject. The image also remains a matter oftime: its appearance and disappearance are unavoidably temporal. This of course is thecase with all images, but the very telos of the tradition of art in the West has been to dis-guise this, to render the image eternal in the image of God.

The digitized image forces us to confront a condition of absolute erasure, that is, era-sure without a trace. Paradoxically, this erasure is the very condition of the trace, in thatit is already in the mode of an absolute loss. In other words, the image without a tracereveals the condition of the trace: that the essence of the trace is not its permanence butits erasure. In making a point that was at once architectural and political, Walter Ben-jamin, commenting on the first poem in Bertholt Brecht’s Handbook jar City-Dwellers,called for the effacement of traces: no more impressions left in padded armchairs, onlythe hard, cold surfaces of the modern. Digitalization takes this process one stage fur-ther; in the age of the easy-come-easy-go image, what we sense is the unbearable light-ness of being. Or perhaps, in the affirmative sense, an existence that touches lightly onthings.

Time/memoryIn Du Grand Canyon a... and related works, the digital image changes the relation of thephotograph to time, as well as to subjectivity. On the viewer of a digital camera, repro-duced by Bismuth in a projection on the wall, the image appears and disappears notinstantly but with a sweep. As they are taken, eliminated, replaced with new images, thedigital photos create a kind of quasi narrative, which Bismuth compares with a walk.

Bismuth writes in his notes on this work of the gap between what the photographerdesires to show, and what appears that the photographer does not aim to show. Perhapsthe point is that without what the photographer doesn’t aim to show, there would be noimage in thefirst place - that the image is made possible by something unintentional,something that can’t be controlled.

This focus on fringe phenomena once again diverts ‘existence’ from ‘intentionality.’ Ifthe digital camera, unlike traditional cameras, is not put to the eye but the image is

viewed on a screen, who, or what, is taking the picture? The photographer or the appa-ratus? And who or what, for that matter, sees?

In Bismuth’s Postscrzpt/Proj%ssion Reporteré (1996) a typist types a description of theaction of a film she hears but does not see. We hear the soundtrack and see her words as

they appear. Sometimes she can’t keep up, or makes mistakes which there is not time tocorrect. Our interpretation of the sounds that we hear is mediated through her subjec-tivity, and indeed through the contingency of the relation of her capacity as a typist tothe speed of the action.

Freedom and necessity are not opposed. By setting a parameter, by providing a kindof rule or limit, Bismuth has created a space for subjectivity. The closed circuit between

151

image and sound is broken open. The typist introduces a kind of stumbling into thefilm. Subjectivity here is not intentionality, nor is the ‘uncaused’ that which is self-caused (God as the unmoved mover, as the model for the autonomous subject). Rather,the accident or slip is the indication that something has happened.

In Bismuth’s The Pang” (1997) we see Blake Edwards’s 1968 film starring Peter Sellerswithout the sound, together with a typist’s interpretation of the soundtrack. Thisintroduces an indeterminacy into a film that is itself about indeterminacy - about theway that intentions have unforeseen effects. Edwards’s and Sellars’s undercutting ofthe mores of the L.A. movie class is a gentle homage to Jacques Tati’s subversion of thepostwar bourgeoisie’s embrace of the new technology. Beyond this play on and withcontext, both Edwards’s The Pargf and Tati’s films are concerned with the sheer ‘event-ness’ of the event. Only if there is law and control to be violated can the unexpectedhappen. Each of the films consists of a series of minor catastrophes. The expected is

overturned.In Bismuth’s version of The Parg/, a delay is introduced between seeing and reading

which suggests that memory is involved in the very moment of perception. As we watchthe film, it is already familiar, and the subtitle serves as the memory of a memory.

Bismuth has written about indeterminacy in the memory of a film. For example, wesee a film in a foreign language that has been subtitled, and we remember it as being inour own language ~ in our heads we hear the dialogue, not in the actual language of thefilm but in our own language. In a sense, the film as it continues to exist is the sum ofthe errors of our memory of it. There is a double temporality involved here: the time ofthe film, which would have been acutely, at times painfully, experienced by the tran-scriber trying, and failing, to ‘catch up,’ and the time of the memory of the film - bothour memory, and that of the transcriber. The point is that the two times are not separa-ble: the ‘first’ experience of the film is already a memory, so the memory of the film is

not a false representation of an original, but the film itsehf in its finite afterlife. It is onlythrough this afterlife that the original film has any sense, and becomes a ‘model.’ Itshould be clear that this structure is identical to the retroactive reappropriation of con-tingency as necessity in Blue Monk in Progress.

For Le_film blanc” (White Film, 1997) Bismuth read a book in a café while noting downsnatches of conversation heard in passing. Short passages from the book, interspersedwith these interruptions, were passed on to a subtitling company, with the instructionthat they should select at random a film that they were subtitling, and substitute thesepassages. The movie, however, is not shown, we see only the subtitles added to a blankfilm which is projected onto a screen. The absent and unknown movie determines therhythm of the appearance and disappearance of the text. This is, in effect, an inversionof the situation of the stenographer in the Postscript works. The pickup head playingnothing other the sound of the film’s friction on the pickup head - la bande passante - oras Bismuth puts it, the ‘wind’ of the film. Not the sound of meaning, with its telos offulfillment, of consummation, but, according to Bismuth in a statement to accompanythe work, ‘le bruit du son,’ ‘the noise of sound,’ the part of sound that is not taken up andspiritualized in meaning. A noise not of the remporalization ofspace, but of the spacingof time.

152

Meaning/ruleA distinction that, in my view, runs through art since the eighteenth century, can helpus to grasp the implications of Bismuth’s work in a way that exceeds any narrow con-ception of conceptual art. This distinction is between the art ofmeaning and the art oftherule. According to the notion of‘meaning,’ the concrete work of art is an externalizationof something other than itself: this is the case whether art is understood as representa-tion, a re-presentation of that which was present, or whether art is understood as

expression, literally the ‘pressing-out’ of inner life. Art, under this conception, refers toa ground other than itself which gives rise to it and will resorb it. The preeminentphilosopher of the ‘art of meaning’ is Hegel, and the idea that governs his ‘Lectures onAesthetics’ is that of art as representation - which is why it must be superseded - with-in an expressivist paradigm, that is, one in which spirit, or self-consciousness, expressesitself in various ways.

The philosopher of the ‘art ofthe rule’ is Kant. I have already mentioned his idea that‘nature gives the rule to art.’ The point of the genius - and here Kant is being extraordi-narily radical and prescient - is that through him what would otherwise be non-sensebecomes rule or law. Kant poses the problem of how - if what the genius produces is

‘original,’ in other words, does not fall under a pregiven concept, nor is an imitation in

the sense of a copy of some model- can we distinguish the work ofgenius from what hecalls ‘original nonsense’ (Critique ofjudgment). One of the two ways he suggests is if thework becomes the source of a law not to be followed but to be broken by the successorgenius. The question is how it is possible for the work ofgenius to be an example oforig-inality. Another way is through what he calls the ‘reflective judgment’ of the spectators,judgment that begins not with the concept, but with the particular, and seeks the con-cept on which it is based. What is interesting is that in neither case is it a matter ofexpression, or interpreting an expression - treating the material work as somethingwhich indicates, embodies, or manifests an essence other than itself

Rule works against any possible fullness of meaning, because the rule is ultimatelywithout justification -it doesn’t refer to anything but itself, and thereby may be said tobe meaningless: it is that way just because it is that way. To say that the rule does notexpress or represent anything is to draw attention to how profoundly the ‘art of therule’ differs from the ‘art of meaning.’ That such art is even the work of a subject is notto be taken for granted. Any knowledge produced by the artwork (in a reflection on its

conditions) is incidental. In the end, the knowledge it produces concerns the lack ofgrounds of its own law.

Such art, in other words, is about nothing other than the relation of contingency -non-sense - to rule, and rule to contingency. And surely human existence is nothingother than this: a retroactive turning of contingency into law, and living with the factthat this law ~ the singular law that we are to make ofour lives - can never be groundedon anything else, and that it remains, in this sense, utterly contingent and always afterthe fact. There is something quite gloriously funny about this.

153

4

NOTES

1. The videos What, Beyond, and WhatBeyonddemon-strate our subjective relation to words by show-ing the singular itineraries traced by successivechoices; Synonyms, on the other hand, is an objec-tive representation of all possible paths. It extendsthe classic system of references from one page of a

dictionary to another. Through repeated shifts, thesynonyms gradually move away from their pointof origin (‘origin’ refers only to the arbitrary firstword), leading to the strange conclusion that fromthis random starting point, all words in the dic-tionary can ultimately be linked.2. Humming focuses on the quality oflistening par-ticular to telephone dialogues. This work startedwith a conversation I had with a friend in 1995,during which I recorded only my own voice. Inthe end I removed all the spoken words from therecording, leaving only my nonverbal expressions- the sounds that punctuate a telephone conversa-tion and indicate to the speaker that the other per-son is listening.3. What Beyond starts with the experiment of askingpairs of individuals to choose a string of synonymsfrom a list generated by a word processing program.When a word is selected from a given list, a new listappears, from which another word can be chosen,and so on. The protagonists have only to agree spon-taneously on their choices ofwords. Since the opera-tion is devoid of syntactical elements, it reveals,above all, the highly personal way we relate to lan-guage and how our preferences for certain words areformed even before we undertake the process ofcommunicating information.4. Du Grand Canyon ti... takes the form of a photo-graph album, with the aim to treat still images withthe same notion of duration as when movement is

involved. The images here provide few elements thatenable the viewer to analyze the reality being pho-tographed; they are a provisional event allowing us

to pick up an overall impression. This succession ofphotographs could be compared to the idea of anexcursion; the text presented beside them serves asthe map that makes it possible to visualize the gen-eral route taken, to locate the point where we findourselves, and perhaps to anticipate what is to come.5. From some folded shirts to... takes up the principleof Du Grand Canyon d... but puts the emphasis onthe idea of sequentiality. The images often work asa series, so that the changes of photographic sub-ject seem more like changes of camera position.Thus the installation as a whole functions like a

kind of archaic cinema.

1

6. Postscript/The Passenger and Postscript/Proj%ssion

Reporter are two video projections on the wall ofa text produced in response to Antonioni’s filmThe Passenger (English Speaking)/Pro_Rssion Reporter(French speaking). To make this video, a typist unfa-miliar with the film was asked to describe as shelistened to the film through headphones, theatmospheres and actions that came to her mind, andto transcribe as much of the dialogue as she could.The text was recorded on video from the computerscreen as it was produced; this video was in turnprojected on the wall of the exhibition space. Onecould read it silently as an autonomous text or fol-

low the typist’s interpretation by listening throughheadphones, to Antonioni’s soundtrack.Faced with the simultaneous problems of listen-ing, interpretation, memory, and speed of exe-cution, the typist produced a new script mixingobjectivity and subjectivity, one that says as muchabout the process of understanding as it doesabout the development of the film.7. The Party reverses the principle of blind listeningused in Postscript; here the sound disappears, leavingonly the image. The piece functions rather like a

silent movie in which the subtitles are no longerincluded in the edit, but represent a self-containedaction that unfolds simultaneously with the film.As in a silent movie, we have an intuitive under-standing of what we perceive visually, except thathere we are free at any moment to turn to the textfor written confirmation of what we have under-stood visually. The focus of attention can thus beswitched so that the text being written becomes themain action, and the image a simple confirmation.8. It could be said that Le Film Blanc took form intwo distinct phases: first the constitution of thetext, and then the conception of it’s mode of pres-entation. The text originated through an exercisein reading in a public space in Brussels. The opera-tion was fairly banal: I was to become absorbed inthe book I was reading while noting the conversa-tions that regularly broke my concentration. There-transcription of this experiment, lasting twen-ty-odd minutes, forms a highly fragmented textcomposed of sentences from the book and over-heard speech. In the second stage of the work,a subtitling company was instructed to simplyinsert this text in the place of the subtitles into a

randomly chosen film and then print the text onits own celluloid. The snatches of my text thusappear and disappear to the rhythm of the subti-tles in the other film and their pace loses all rela-tion to the time required to read them.

54