Walking up on Ro(b)//ert Lundberg’s by-passing-upon, the looming Red line reverberated above the loosely structured groove being played by Will Greene, Deidre Huckabay, Jeff Kimmel, Lia Kohl, and Sam Scranton. The performers traversed the street, shifting the sonic environment, while weaving between the audience and architectural nooks. As the swinging rhythm evolved, each performer altered the groove through subtle improvisations. The positions of the performers shifted as they played, sometimes attracting towards each other or repelling away. The performers steadily migrated inside to the gallery, visible and audible from both the front door and back-alley window.

        The music corresponded to a score, plastered on the sidewalk and building walls, divided into four parts comprising both musical notation and fragments of theory, questions, and instructions. Examples of these fragments from the score include “might we mingle the commons back together,” “curb stop: a shut off valve in water pipes running from a water main to a building, also marking the division between publicly and privately owned pipes,” and “embellish… solo-ish.” ¹ As the ensemble settled inside the building, the groove slowly wound down, being performed more quietly and slowly until the melody seemed to disintegrate.

        A second performance was by the artists Crystal Mslajek and John Marks. Their installation at Roman Susan, Permanent Fixture, contained several films located around the gallery which rotated through a series of close ups and wide shots of architectural facades, interiors, and details culled from the surrounding neighborhood. Performing in the alley behind the gallery, Mslajek played piano delicately and drenched in reverb while softly singing. She was accompanied by Marks who mixed field recordings from the neighborhood into an ambient cloud of sonic textures. A seagull in the distance, gurgling water gushing onto pavement, and the soft staccato of passing conversations seemed to shimmer into existence for only a few seconds. Mslajek and Marks’ duet was routinely consumed by a chorus of the train’s guttural rumbling and metallic screeching breaks emanating from above.

        Both offerings were regrettably underwhelming. I found their language and framing to be divorced from their execution. In particular, the use of terms like ‘improvisation’ and ‘site-specific’ ultimately promised more than the resulting works delivered.

        Lundberg’s score, in my opinion, did not embrace the communal qualities embedded in improvised music enough. Its essence was fragments of academic discourse interjected into musical orchestration. In watching the performance, the viewer is never really invited to question any of the socio-economic issues raised by the sporadic quotes and thoughts positioned between the musical notations. This stands in stark contrast to other forms of improvised music which either creates a spontaneous composition that cannot be reclaimed or experienced live (in that a recording of improvised music becomes a fundamentally separate artwork once captured) or an invitation for the audience to participate in the music making itself, erasing the barrier between performer and audience.

        The questions presented such as “can we muddle the commons back together?” were insufficiently answered by the conventional presentation of musicians performing in front of an audience. In unpacking the question of muddling the commons back together, the suggestion is that in bringing together a plethora of disciplines to address a particular issue, new perspectives and solutions can be found. However, what disciplines were brought together here? The piece was a dialogue of musicians responding to a composer—the de facto relationship set forth by the Western classical music tradition. The actual performance was antithetical to the radical suggestions of examining public versus private space or the role infrastructure plays in a community and, thus, undermined the intentions laid out by Lundberg.

        Mslajek and Marks also seemed overly constrained by musical conventions to the detriment of the execution of their piece. The sounds Marks utilized in their work were culled from the neighborhood surrounding the gallery. Yet, in listening to these sounds I began to question: can one distinguish the sound of a particular street? Does the sound of a particular street evoke that specific location, or does it really evoke the sound of every street? There are particularities to consider: a busy downtown street versus a fairly suburban street by a college campus. However, the question still stands, could one identify the neighborhood just from hearing the sounds of the place? The answer was inconclusive. From my perspective, there was nothing sonically unique to any particular place to be found in Marks’ ambient musique concrète (experimental music created from recorded natural and man-made sounds). Regarding Mslajek’s soft piano and singing, I am still unsure how this rendition connected to the ideas of place and community which the pair claimed to be discussing in their work in this installation and presentation. Again, I think the ideas behind the artists work were far more compelling and interesting than their execution.

        The shortcomings of the performances called to mind Miwon Kwon’s book, One Place After Another, which discusses the history and theoretical discourses of site-specific art. Kwon states that site-specific art “…can be mobilized to expedite the erasure of differences via the commodification and serialization of places.” ² This site-specific project is not generated by and for the local community, but it involves a process in which the artist adopts the site as a material through which they impose their own ideas upon the local community. Both Lundberg and Mslajek and Marks’ work seemed to fall into this category unfortunately, using the language and form of site-specific projects to impose their own meaning upon a place instead of addressing Roman Susan’s particular location and the underlying socio-political, environmental, and historical issues inherent to the site.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.

Footnotes

1.   Excerpts from Ro(b)//ert Lundberg’s score for by-passing-upon.

2.   Kwon, Miwon. “Unhinging of Site-Specificity,” in One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 55.