VIII.

Intro I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. next

The 2014 performance was preceded by a day-long itinerant Patterson minifestival, in honor of his 80^th birthday. The programme included pieces by Patterson and other Fluxus artists. My response to this occasion manifested in two ways.

1. I chose to make ‘Variation VIII’ a focal point of my performance, referring to a piece by Geoffrey Hendricks that I had performed earlier on the day of the concert:

A Project for Ben Patterson

Transpose Nam June Paik’s score
One for Violin Solo, 1962
to the Double Bass

(and I’ll paint sky on the inside
of all the fragments)¹

In Paik’s One, the performer slowly raises the violin above his head and smashes it to bits on a table in front of him — a martial arts-like act of clarity and concentration. While Hendricks’ piece is an inside joke between two old friends, it also represents a unique and difficult set of problems for the performer if the parody is to be made apparent. Violins are relatively small and fragile, and thus easily hoisted and annihilated. However, the size and weight of the bass make this gesture a near-impossible task. I spent several days experimenting with techniques for raising the bass slowly above my head, holding it steady, and pretending to smash it efficiently. (As if by divine intervention, the site of the performance — a concrete square at the foot of Berlin’s famous television tower at Alexanderplatz — had access to a high terrace above the square where the audience stood. Without the help of height and gravity, smashing the bass would have resulted in little more than a few cracks.)²

Since I was preparing my performance of Variations at the same time, my attention was naturally drawn to ‘Variation VIII’ (‘holding bass by fingerboard upside-down, balance on scroll’). I decided to include this variation in my performance as a gesture of continuity with Project. I was particularly sensitive to the way in which the bass should be inverted, which like most instructions is not defined in the score. Having practised a dramatic technique for Hendricks’ piece, I resolved to also employ this in ‘Variation VIII’, and inserted variations 'XIV’, ‘XVI’, and ‘XII’ before ‘VIII’ in order to make the bass raising more climactic.

2. I integrated party favours into the instrumentarium. In ‘Variation II’, while tuning, I used a party whistle as one of the ‘four different toy whistles, animal or bird imitators or calls, etc.’ This object returns in ‘Variation XIII’, attached to a ‘flexible tube to which is attached a balloon’ that sounds when the balloon deflates. (The balloon itself reads ‘80!’.) Instead of covering the scroll of my instrument with a camel head in ‘Variation XVI’, I used a party hat.

And? Performative decisions in Variations sometimes simply resist explanation, despite one's methodical intentions. As Patterson says, ‘any piece is just this: a person, who, consciously, does this or that.’ Not all archives are resolvable. Enter the anarchive.