There was talk of a »total assault on the senses« when Andy Warhol’s »Exploding Plastic Inevitable« was performed for the first time in April 1966.1 Talk of a synaesthetic experience, breaking down boundaries in a positive sense, and tantamount to the experiences produced by the influence of psychedelic drugs. Here the focus was not so much on a »visualisation« of music, although the sound components that The Velvet Underground contributed to the performances were an important element of the work. It was much more the case that the multi-media spectacle included a whole series of other ingredients – film and slide projections, with the images projected in some cases being screened through colour filters or, in the case of the slides, dyed with food colouring, plus jerky stroboscope light, a rotating mirror ball, plus manic, sometimes sadomasochistic dance inserts, positioned between the musicians and the audience, plus mobile spotlight projections and much more. As if as many senses as possible should be addressed, indeed downright bombarded, simultaneously, in order to showcase the effect of the various media in a key that radically exceeded any ability to comprehend, or rather that went beyond a clearly defined attribution of elements to particular senses (ear to music, eye to image etc.). Implicit in this was also a new form of subjectivity, a calling into question of conventional perceptions of images, sound and perhaps also of tactile or rather corporeal elements, even encroaching upon the boundaries of the self. What »Exploding Plastic Inevitable« was seeking was, as Jonas Mekas (a reviewer at »The Village Voice« at the time) put it, »the last stand of the ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side«.2
The »Exploding Plastic Inevitable« was not to have that long a life, although – this much is certain – the egos that came into contact with it by no means collapsed. There is however a resounding echo in the form of the promise evoked since the days of what was perhaps the most concentrated multi-media show ever 3: that media, whether image or sound-based, or indeed based on any other elements, can be pushed again and again to boundary zones, which no longer have anything in common with conventional forms of visuality or musicality; to transitional terrains, where the familiar parameters of the visual and auditory are put out of action. In the era of stadium rock mises-en-scène and other mega-events it may sound like a cliché to say that this kind of »intercreative large-scale forms« creates a trance-like or boundary-collapsing effect. However »trance« or »entertainment « is only one side of the coin when considering the history of how music is illustrated or visualised. The other side consists– in a much more elementary way – in mutual interrogations, subversions, and indeed even attempts to turn the screw still further, attempts to outdo each other with the intensity of one’s own medium. In this spirit, reaching far back into history forms of visual arts operating with a diverse range of media have again and again plugged into the sound productions of their day. This has been done not so much with a view to slipping a kind of visual straitjacket over the specific medium of sound, covering it up or rather heaping impressions upon it drawn from the opulence of another medium, but quite the contrary: the aim was to genuinely bring about a kind of collapse of boundaries; capturing the sensual material or energy, which for example a particular sound presents to the ear, in another medium, in a sense modulating it further and thus calling into play another form of perceptive subjectivity.
It was indeed a promise proposed by the various forms of multi-media stagings from the 1960s on. A promise that the recipients’ egos would not longer be affected by predetermined sensual input cut off from other forms of perception, but that instead something much more fundamental would occur: viewing the entire body as the point at which orgiastic sensory bombardments intersect, meaning that the relationship between the individual senses would also to be shaken up. Didn’t you just clearly see a particular sound before your eyes? Doesn’t this projection resonate with a particular sound? Couldn’t certain sounds really be smelt, particularly if they flowed, highly amplified, out of huge loudspeakers? The historical light and multi-media shows of the 1960s, whether from expanded cinema groups such as the US Company (USCO) or groups that came more from a rock-music background, such as The Joshua Light Show or The Single Wing Turquoise Bird,4 all had one thing in common: they wanted in a sense to pull the carpet out from beneath the feet of the perceiving ego by evocatively causing the various senses to blur one into another. The notion of collapsing boundaries was to be found in the creation of as many sensory impressions as possible all at once, so that it was no longer possible to perceive this in an ordered way. A maelstrom of sensory superposition was in a sense to pull the categorising or rational ego into its force field. It is no coincidence that many works from this period refer to vortexes and spirals, to whirlpools and maelstroms, to eruptions and explosions.
If you want to see what became of this historical promise, you just need to consider an installation like Mike Kelley’s »Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Party Palace« (2009).5 Excerpts from porn films were projected from a range of directions onto a bouncy castle with several sections, accompanied by sound excerpts targeting particular chambers and niches – mostly dull, functional techno-beats, as if the vacuous mechanics of the whole assemblage needed to be underscored even more. Contrasting with the porn screenings, encyclopaedic inserts were projected onto the sculptures, comprising a brief lexicon of mostly rather obscure soundtrack composers or an enumeration of all existing psychedelic drugs. The thudding and flickering media jumble thus has a kind of lexical order held up in contrast to it, revealing the reflective character of the installation. Mike Kelley once said that it was only in the context of Sixties counterculture that so-called »transgressive« approaches, as manifested in gender-crossing or in the adulation of the weird and evil by many rock groups of the day, could be transformed into something like popular culture.6 If the counter-culture awakening was a kind of driving force, with which a new sensorium, indeed new sensory desires and capacities alike could be promoted, this thrust has long run out of steam as a historic force (for whatever reasons). The over-stimulation of the senses, long pursued with great vigour by entertainment culture, makes former scenarios of awakening and liberation appear almost pitiful. Mike Kelley’s »Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Party Palace« is an eerie monument to this dynamic, partly too in the way it bursts out of the familiar dimensions of art installations. The aforementioned aspect of collapsing boundaries, the promise of a different, expanded sensory perception is transformed here into an over-sized monster.
Multi-media spectacles of the type that flourished in the 1960s, viewed through a prism of reflections on contemporary issues in over-the-top installations such as Kelley’s, describe one route to collapsing the boundaries between various media and/or senses: the procedure is additive or cumulative, one might say – adding as many additional media as possible to an existing medium, so that perception of the latter begins to blur, so that the capacity to clearly determine which part of the overall impression derives from the music, from the images screened or from the pulsing stroboscope light is undermined as much as possible. Artists like Kelley go one better by dissecting, as if under a magnifying glass, the promise of liberation once intertwined with this kind of accumulation of different media. The impression that remains is cold, mechanical, monstrous, disproportionate.

Close your eyes
For some time now, artists have been taking the inverse route in collapsing media boundaries or reflecting on this, by – to put it in simplified terms - stripping away elements rather than accumulating more and more components. They adopt a largely reductive approach: in other words, the question that serves as a point of departure is: how much can be left out of an image without in the process entirely departing from the medium or eliminating it? If it is music, to what extent can recognisable harmonies, rhythms, melodies etc. be stripped away without leaving behind nothing but indifferent static? Thinking about the interplay of image and sound, there has been an exploration of the extent to which the synaesthetic overall impression of visuality and sound, generally described as audiovisuals, can in a sense be boiled down, so that, whilst there is not a break with the medium as a whole, this ominous interplay is dissected into its individual components or makes it possible for audiences to experience the intricate workings of this interaction. Many of the most interesting works in this field therefore do not deal primarily with »visualisation« in the traditional sense of the term, i.e. with illustrating an existing piece of music or music that preceded the visuals. Instead these works sound out the inter-related elements of contagion and influence from a sort of tabula-rasa starting point, in other words, they turn the spotlight on the impetuses and elements of tension that penetrate from the realm of sound into the visual sphere and vice-versa (sound impulses stemming from what is seen). To put this in different terms, they focus attention on the phenomenon of cross-over between the individual spheres – the components in music with an image-generating quality and vice-verso.
A work such as »Broadway« (2004) by the duo NTSC (acronym for Not The Same Color, comprising video artist Billie Roisz and musician dieb13) 7 demonstrates how this kind of transfer of energy might look and sound in tangible terms. Although Piet Mondrian’s 1942/43 painting »Broadway Boogie-Woogie« may have been an influence in the background too, particularly as it is constructed on the basis of musical parameters, the boogie-woogie rhythm. However, the yellow that dominates in both works is not the same, which is not especially surprising, given that the artist duo is, after all, called Not The Same Color. Be that as it may, in »Broadway« the background noise and crackling of the sound track seem to find their way directly into the visual realm – the flickering, disintegrating lines certainly appear to suggest this. Conversely, the constantly disrupted pixel hatchings also seem to feed dynamically into the sound components of the work – like small electric pulses, springing from image to sound and back again. In addition both players in this game, image and sound, repeatedly withdraw into themselves, uncoupling from each other and then once again beginning to animate each other with leaps of energy.
The ego does indeed seem to have switched to the other side here, to come back again to the quote from Jonas Mekas at the start of this article: the visual and acoustic agglomerate we find here resists the ordered perceptual scheme whereby the eye is in charge of dealing with images, the ear with sounds and so on. Instead the perceiving subject is confronted with a puzzle of intertwined media which is per se impossible to disentangle, a constant jumping back and forth or ineluctable slippage between the various strata. Perhaps it was precisely this effect that historical forms of multi-media art once envisaged, but which evaporated in the increasingly spectacular and overblown style of this type of show. In contrast, works such as »Broadway« push the image-sound interaction to its boundaries from within, and it is precisely in their reductive approach (rather than in an additive procedure) that the materials delivered to our various senses blur inextricably into each other.
There are many historical precursors of this kind of »small form« when it comes to playing with collapsing borders and renunciation – think for example of Tony Conrad’s »The Flicker«, Paul Sharit’s films or Peter Kubelka’s »Arnulf Rainer«. They always appear to be particularly popular when the order of magnitude of multi-media spectacles unfolding at the same time hits a new level (such as in the 1960s with the aforementioned psychedelic shows or the immersive VJ environments 8 that have now become commonplace). Viewed in these terms, the »small«, generally abstract pieces blending image and sound are the unremitting accompaniments to the multi-media excrescences that have swelled up to monstrous proportions. Except that the former pieces have gone down the route of subtraction, tending rather to »take something away« from the cornucopia of images and sound, as opposed to the additive route of piling more and more layers one upon another. This kind of subtraction is depicted particularly strikingly in a new work by the duo NTSC. Their video »close your eyes« was inspired by the mescaline experiments of French writer and painter Henri Michaux.9
The psychedelic programme of de-conditioning or destroying the hierarchy of perception is taken at its word here. The starting point for the synaesthetic experiences is a window darkened with a blind – »close your eyes« – which becomes a kind of visual springboard into an abstracted hallucinatory world. After-images, outlines, silhouettes, yet also disruptive elements that come entirely from the digital beyond, scratches and eruptions form perceptive material that behaves autonomously and is constantly morphing, material that has largely taken leave of the outside world. Here too the sound seems to be »inlaid« into the images or conversely the images that flash up abruptly are »released« by the high-frequency soundtrack – a kind of game of deception or a hybrid relationship in which one thing does not lead to another but rather the effects that »explode media boundaries« result from elements that were always shared.
The »total assault on the senses« referred to in the 1960s may, in the light of a work such as »close your eyes«, have become considerably more modest. However, here a certain exploration of boundaries has been relocated into the medium itself. The motto is not summed up essentially in the question: how can I add something decisive in one medium to another medium? – but rather in the following question: How is it possible to do justice, in a way that is attuned to the times and the form in question, to the interpenetrations that have always existed between images, sound and other perceptual materials? This is precisely the issue that seems to comprise one of the most important challenges for cross-media cooperation.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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