Recitativo: Of Divas and Dishes
Emotion can erupt in strange places–from the kitchen sink to the calm woods. When created through a mechanical apparatus this evocation raises questions about where the generative force lies. Is genius God-given, or does it gather force in the process or the product of art-making? Is it only found in nature, or can it be formed in labor, thought, or culture? Or rather, is genius found in the transformation, the relations and friction of spheres and identities?
Long Pond is ostensibly a tune for player piano that follows the pattern of the bark on a birch tree that Fritzie Brown collected at Long Pond in upstate New York. The melody is not a Romantic rhapsody that conjures walks in the forest and crisp blue skies and water. Long Pond resonates with the tradition of the American transcendental poets like Whitman and Thoreau but comments on our complicated relationship to nature. The tune produced from the birch bark is nature singing. However, we can only hear this mechanically through man-made systems. Mediated through the artist’s hand and broken down into a pattern of code that can be further translated electronically to sound, the birch’s music is a serial pattern of tones that sounds systematic in the tradition of minimal music. Although the perforations on the piano roll are a direct, even literal, transcription of the natural pattern of the tree bark, it does not mimic the tree precisely. Through her direct connection to the tactility of the tree, Brown’s process portrays the opposite of verisimilitude, instead presenting the elusiveness of nature and of approaching the original.
Fritzie Brown highlights an aspect of the artist that is a machine for transforming nature into culture. Brown xeroxed the bark and manually transferred the markings to a twenty four feet graphite drawing. Her artistic hand does not remain in the final work and neither do the idiosyncrasies of the slice of bark. The pattern that is created is random and predetermined by the natural wood. In the translation from visual to sound, a poesie concrete emerges; these marks, like musical notes, can be read as music.
In order to transfer the drawings to player piano, Brown searched the internet and found experimental composer Wolfgang Heisig. Heisig understood immediately Brown’s need. Their ensuing collaboration spanned several months of active email correspondence, faxes, and explanations from Long Pond to New York City to Leipzig, Germany, where coincidentally there is also a Long Pond nearby. The creative question sparks communication, transformation, connection. Every artwork tells a story of production, often collaboration, as well as individual creative impulse. Finally Long Pond was played and recorded electronically, the last step to date in the many phases in the process of the piece. Not yet played on a piano, on the occasion of this exhibition at Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, Fritzie Brown and Branko Franceschi began another email correspondence and journey in a valiant attempt to rescue a pianola (player piano). This search led in zigzags from the Museum of the City of Zagreb to the Diva’s and other private collections. Although the recital may appear on video, the real-time performance will have to wait for another incarnation of the work.
Both works are performative despite their actual presence as relatively static objects. The roll Long Pond always contains the potential for performance and the sculpture Springs Eternal resembles a stage prop. The sink with water dripping tortuously over a pile of dishes, is left unattended by the wife whose talismans–the three dishes on the wall above dubbed by Brown the “Three Husbands”–have been riddled with cracks. The player piano and the sink are rigged mechanical instruments, meant to perform, play, and work automatically. The loops of Long Pond and Springs Eternal create their own constructed environment seemingly naturally.
Brown’s dishes recall, in a different configuration, the plates of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. Chicago’s plates are arranged as if the celebration is just about to begin; Brown’s captures the detritus that the heyday of traditions can leave behind. Whereas Chicago transforms the domestic plate idealistically to a place of honor for famous women, Brown’s approach is humorous and sarcastic. Commenting on marriage, Springs Eternal is a play on the saying “hope springs eternal.” The sink of dishes may remain, however the wife has abandoned the chore and the husbands.
In Long Pond and Springs Eternal, the cultural product is an automated mechanism. Long Pond raises questions about translation and what symbolism and judgments we assign to nature. Does the artist merely take cues from nature or does she have the power to create? Is this innate or produced? Also, how is her own identity produced? Through these questions, the roll of Long Pond also refers to Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll. The language of Schneeman’s scroll, birthed from her vagina, points out that women’s difference in status and power is not natural or biological but social construction.
Brown displays the moments in translating between the languages of nature and culture, between tradition and agency, and between the quotidian and the profound, when things do not go according to plan and meanings meander. Brown starts with fairly strict serial forms of the stacked dishes and the repeating bark patterns and revels playfully in the abundance of connotations and emotions that the form itself cannot contain or completely denote. These inadequate mechanisms in “Recitativo” convey Brown’s joy in the process of artmaking which involves exploration, collaboration, and unexpected outcomes.
Katherine Carl
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Fritzie Brown
Studied at San Francisco City College, San Francisco
San Francisco State University, Metal Arts. Exhibits since 1989.
