JON LEIDECKER/WOBBLY
Introduction and questions by J. Vognsen, Part 2
PSF: Lately, we've seen the appearance of labels like Sublime Frequencies, Awesome Tapes From Africa, Habibi Funk Records and the work of Kink Gong and others who distribute rare, often unusual recordings from around the world to a mainly Western audience. Again, the charges of cultural appropriation have been presented.
Looking at Sublime Frequencies specifically, they explain themselves on their webpage as dedicated to "acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations." However, criticism has made of them for not giving proper credit to the musicians they release, raising both questions of them misrepresenting and exoticizing, as well at the whole issue of financial remuneration. How do you view their work?
JL: Sublime Frequencies was founded by the Sun City Girls, and it's the most perfect extension of their project I can imagine. They demonstrate how difficult it is to draw up a basic set of inviolable rules for what is and what is not OK with Cultural Borrowing; so much of their work is an attempt to show where those rules are by breaking them. Always challenging and investigating the trust of their audience. In the United States, there are a lot of first generation children of immigrants who can't speak their parents' languages. Sublime Frequencies can be read as a recovery project from the costs of Cultural Assimilation: the work does not represent the source, they represent what it is like to rediscover that heritage using ears raised within Western culture. The charges that it exoticizes the source don't quite land with me; certainly, when I hear their 'Radio' collages, I hear something in the presentation suggesting that I'm the one that's the other, and they're the people.
The last Negativland album was recorded with Mark Gergis, who brought Omar Souleyman to the West. DJ /Rupture visits the subject in his book Uproot, noting that Souleyman is not really a musician that anyone inside his culture would have picked to represent Syria, let alone the tradition of dabke music- how did this wedding singer become one of the most famous and 'authentic' Syrians in the world, how do these outsiders come to make these decisions about how we're now to be seen? That's at the heart of the real criticism to regard with releases like Radio Morocco -- 'this purports to represent us, but the editing loses our meaning'. The massive success of Souleyman is complex, but it helps to understand Mark, an Iraqi-American who grew up in the Bay Area experimental music scene, then discovered Omar's cassettes while traveling through Syria, tracked him down and licensed a few compilations that edited down a few of his longer pieces into radio-length songs -- and then everything got plugged into the machine. They get criticized for fuzzy attribution, but most of their releases have extensive notes, and the more they succeed, the more they move towards compensated single artist releases and relationships.
Out of their many releases, only the popular 'Radio' series kept attribution fuzzy, by virtue of being recorded off the radio decades ago during travels -- many people don't seem to recognize how they moved increasingly towards compensated single artist releases as they succeeded. There's a lot of positive discussion in that new book, Punk Ethnography, which for one thing includes a lot of reverse-engineered sample lists for the 'Radio' CD's. 8.
PSF: One of the conclusions in Variations (esp. #6 & #7) is that the Romantic ideal of the artist as a great individual genius making singular pieces of self-expression without borrowing from anyone is basically a myth. In fact, creativity is much more defined by mimesis, variation and social collaboration you say. If I understand you correctly, this leads to a highly fluid view of cultural creation, where ideas should be allowed to flow very freely.
At the same time, there also exists an almost identical analysis of the Romantic ideal that draws a very different conclusion. For example, Susan Scafidi argues in Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law (Rutgers University Press, 2005) that abandoning the individual creator opens up the idea of collective rights: That a cultural expression could be owned by a specific community or perhaps even a broader culture since no individual could claim to have produced something alone.
Did I present your views correctly? And how do you view the idea of collective ownership over cultural and artistic creations? Does it conflict with your view or do you see places where it overlaps?
JL: Gifted individuals do exist; their ideas are just given an unfair advantage by history when they sign their names to paper. It's also very rare that the inward person who actually has the incredible idea and also has the egomaniacal temperament to promote that idea; creative breakthroughs often come out of groups where those characteristics can be distributed across several people. And, the person with enough focus to write a good manifesto can take the previous 20 to 50 years' worth of communal work to the bank. Brian Eno's best work always owes a lot to his remarkable choices in collaborators, so despite the terrible pun I've always liked his term 'scenius' to describe communal innovations, a one word distillation of the cybernetic definitions of mind described by Stanford Beer or Gregory Bateson; wholes made from wholes, the thought and decisions that result from networks of individuals.
Scafidi's book could be twice its length and still not come to terms with the contradictions that rise out of her attempts to change a law that entirely defines accomplishment in terms of the individual. How does a 'culture' give legal permission for its products to be used? How do you protect private ceremonies or rituals in a court of law that would require they be entered into the record? I'm grateful she is looking for a way to protect foreign farmers who are getting sued when they don't pay a U.S. corporation for patented seeds. Putting collective rights into legal practice also strikes me as a potential minefield; we need a cultural shift towards appreciating communal authorship before a legal one is going to be able to take.
PSF: In his book Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), James O. Young defends the view that almost any kind of cultural appropriation with artistic intent can be morally defended, as long as certain restrictions on the time and place of the presentation are followed. I personally feel this is a very reasonable approach, but at the same time, it's clear that things are getting more complicated: Our current technological climate makes ideas of "time and place" more and more fuzzy and the ability to control the context a work of art will be experienced in is increasingly getting eroded.
How do you view the impact of the arrival of the internet on the state of cultural appropriation and the debate surrounding it?
JL: I'll have to read Young's book. Of course I believe in artistic license, and want artistic work to remain a space where you can safely examine or break otherwise inviolable rules. But that always required having control over your medium and its context, and the ability to communicate a sense of good faith to your audience. And we're still catching up to what Twitter has done to our nervous systems.
We have Poe's law, an observation made in 2005 during a text discussion on christianforums.com that sarcasm & parody are no longer functioning in the online world. The old conversational technique of saying something so inherently ridiculous that everyone recognizes your statement as self-parody doesn't work when you're posting online -- the internet is too big, you simply can't assume that a given poster is only joking. Tone and gesture still do most of the work in communication, and emoticons can only do so much. Poe's law states that everyone can only express themselves literally in order for online discourse to work; any posted statement must be assumed as sincere.
So we've instantly acclimated to social media as unmediated, spontaneous, two way communication, but it's in a radically bleached form which has brought all our social fears to life. All the strawmen are coming to life, and all the humor, the culture, the art that we'd normally use to blow off steam and build bridges are now suspect; the ability to joke about, or embody the unspeakable, in order to safely frame it, doesn't work online, not if the apparent, actual unspeakable shows up in the next post. So a lot of works from white artists meant to criticize and challenge power now come across as further works of appropriation; instead of statements of solidarity, they read as complicit. On all sides, it's like waking into a nightmare.
Of course, I still believe that artistic work can be morally defended on a case by case basis; that it should be a safe area to have these conversations. But if Young's defense rides on restrictions and control of time and place, then what can you say? Online living has destroyed that control, social media has destroyed the privacy that subcultures need in order to function. Communities can no longer have internal conversations when every statement is required to meet the moral standards of the entire tribe. Works and readings that might have the right tone for a gallery can cause global offense when they show up online (especially when only represented by fragments, framed as a condemning example). Challenging work with an ambiguous tone is getting targeted; Poe's law, when obeyed, breaks art. And of course, we then also see a reaction; one of the seemingly intrinsic aspects of Internet Art, unsurprisingly, is the evolution of trolling as an aesthetic in and of itself, ostensibly freed from belief though it's never a surprise when those people posting swastikas just to show you how easily triggered you are by mere symbol end up being bonafide fascists themselves. Social media might be untamable, but can we learn to recognize the phenomenon when subcultural conversations are crossing over into mainstream ones, utterly out of context? The long term goal is to train ourselves to suspend judgement when online media breaks factual objects out of their homes into new meanings. And of course, studying the history of collage can help with that.
PSF: Separate from the question of harmful consequences for the culture that gets appropriated from - which is often at the center of the discussion about cultural appropriation - there is a critique that says that collage work, especially using objects from other cultures, is somehow aesthetically defect, being inauthentic, shallow or simply creatively lazy. To give a specific example, here's one variation of the idea from Claude Lévi-Strauss writing back in 1977:
"What threatens us right now is probably what we might call over-communication – that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality." (Myth and Meaning (Schocken, 1995), p. 20)Does this make sense to you, as someone who often works with collage and appropriation? Do you feel the need to seek isolation from outside influence to make space for original, creative ideas to appear?
JL: Collage can be a perfectly original, creative response to over-communication. It often reads as irony, especially to the previous generations getting sampled, but to those caught inside the mediated global village, it's expressive and a way to cope. And for some, it can be the beginning of the work needed to understand the culture behind the samples, a road towards time spent in person. You don't have to play the glass bead game all day. Art and artifacts point to the activity that created them, arrows leading back towards an experience or a life you want for yourself, an encouragement instead of a substitute. Of course, many of us now live mostly in the museum, and artists that also live there full time are content to make new arrows that only point back at other arrows. Blink, and you're already outside.
Don Joyce (also of Negativland) and I had a recurring argument, where he'd claim that during the 20th century, originality for its own sake had exhausted itself completely in every medium. The only potential left for vanguard creative work lay in collage. I'd argue back saying that electronic tools were evolving at a rapid clip and that I heard new sound design in experimental and pop all the time. I'd play Autechre, he'd say Buchla, I'd play Maryanne Amacher or EVOL, he'd say 'Noise music, Cage, early 1960's'. It always initially sounds like noise or more of the same to the previous generation (or in Don's case, both), but the new subcultures are always slowly showing up.
I finally joined Negativland after working with them occasionally for 25 years, and we all agreed that for our first concerts, sampling was forbidden - no media collage, no old material. We played a bunch of wholly improvised concerts utilizing these primitive feedback oscillators that one founding member of the band had designed back in the '70's -- back to basics. It was a good way to get used to being a member of a band I'd listened to since I was a teenager. Of course, the total reset to oscillators and delays began directly evoking a lot of my favorite early electronic music, so this reset to 'all original' music immediately began evoking aspects of David Tudor and Cluster. But for whatever reason, the new music didn't sound referential -- it sounded like ours.
PSF: In "Variations #3" you discuss Holger Czukay's tape piece "Persian Love" and say, "Interrupting Persia with a brief curve of Japanese Gagaku could seem like a gratuitous moment, but a musical connection on that level justifies itself simply by sounding right. And beyond the simple issue of sounding right, there is the underlying concept being illustrated that there are people who have never met who are already singing in tune. "
Are there other artistic works of cross-cultural appropriation – however you wish to define that! - that you are especially intrigued by? Could you talk about what makes them successful, interesting or challenging to you?
JL: Some people say Variations should be a book, but most of what I say about a piece of music seems to click if it's said within a few seconds of actually getting to hear it. In any case, on those Czukay records, an incredible balance is struck between totally artificial, impossible splices that announce the presence of an editor, and an ethos where the sources are left alone to be themselves, floating. Today's digital tools didn't yet exist, he couldn't nudge & pitch the timings & intervals into a perfectly tempered, locked grid -- he just mastered the physical art of playing multiple tape decks in the studio at once, and keeping the most magical accidents. So that one bit where the Iranian vocalist pauses just long enough to let that rising siren of Gagaku, in a totally different key, totally different country, totally utterly impossible and yet that harmony becomes a fact because you just heard it, the piece becomes a proof of concept that there really could be room for all of us on the planet.
The work is only a promise. Technology allows us to construct this proof of concept that could lead towards the actual conversation. And the danger is that we let it suffice as entertainment. The way Western culture even defines music as an 'entertainment' is in so many ways the exact offense the charges of Cultural Appropriation are trying to get at -- the idea that you can listen to the music of other people without having to live with them. Czukay's albums were solo albums -- they required his departure from Can, his band of the previous ten years, which was precipitated precisely by arguments with his bandmate Rebop Kwaku Baah, who was resisting Czukay's new practice of mixing in ethnomusicological samples. I truly love Czukay's albums, but they are not enough.
I keep myself naive enough to believe that love and engagement with music is the first step towards to love and commitment towards the people who created it, and it is always redefining our relationships and our environment. Music is never merely an entertainment -- it's about survival, so whenever music prompts an argument, you trust that the music is leading you to the conversation that needed to happen. I see the conflicts over the issue of Cultural Appropriation as the precise arguments most worth having, in the same way that medicine painfully focuses your attention on the parts of your body that need the most help. So I'm almost irrationally grateful for those utopian global musical collages (if allowed a sentimental favorite, I'd probably name John Oswald's WX). There's that wonderfully concise Spivak quote, where she calls the goal 'to tell another's story without appropriating it.' It might not really ever be possible, but I feel that even the most heavily reauthored works of collage still carries the potential for that -- a way for music to show ways of listening as much as it does ways of speaking. Or at least, it helps to set that intention.
