Developed alongside this process of archival discovery was the “coming out” narrative of post-Stonewall activism which cast public self-identification as queer as a vocal and visual act. The very first sentence of Gay American History, Jonathan Ned Katz’s 1976 anthology of primary sources, neatly condenses this trope by conjoining sight and sound: “We have been the silent minority, the silenced minority - invisible women, invisible men” 3. I will here describe my own recording of an incomplete story, in order to suggest the possibilities of preserving productive silences in queer archives.Ī main trope of gay historiography is that of making visible what was previously “hidden from history,” to use the title of a prominent anthology of gay historical writings. 2 Instead, in Drew Daniel’s recording, the spaces left by silence suggest ways in which incomplete conversations and elided narratives allow for empathetic and embodied experiences of queer history and memory. But it is not a silence that equals death, nor is it the “hush of the archive,” Charles Morris’s evocative metaphor for the elision of queer materials from historical research. Daniel is beginning to explain why he has chosen this moment to come out then, hearing something on the other end of the line that we cannot, he asks his parents, “What is that sound?” The track ends here, and the needle moves to the center of the record.įor us, that sound is silence. This brief, touching recording ends with a sudden change of subject. When Daniel is not talking, there is a consistent sound which I take to be him fumbling with some object near the microphone-an index of his nervousness, which is then transferred to the listener. In the gaps when his parents are speaking, we hear no voices at all, allowing the ambient sound of Daniel’s room to come into play. Crucially however, we hear only Daniel’s side of the conversation. 1 Daniel’s vulnerability is palpable from the trembling in his voice, though he gets right to the subject. On a limited-edition vinyl recording, one can hear musician Drew Daniel of the group Matmos coming out to his parents via telephone. The viewer is left with faint traces of source material and the freedom to investigate phantom images, imagined narratives, and other associations.Note: headphones must be used in order to hear the recording’s binaural effect. At once a translational work, an experimental portrait, and a performative tribute, 273 Relics for John Cage explores the impossibility of the image-dismantling the photograph to render it irrelevant, as it disappears. Hard’s “The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise” (1908), and fragments of conversation recorded at the John Cage Trust on August 22, 2011.Ĭonceived for the 2012 John Cage centennial celebration, 273 Relics for John Cage was installed at “Revisiting Black Mountain College 3: John Cage’s Circle of Influence,” a conference and exhibition co-sponsored by the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and the John Cage Trust, October 7–November 7, 2011, at Highsmith Gallery, Asheville.Įach relic is numbered and refers to a single second of silence in 4′33″. The volume also includes 52 poems, generated and assembled by chance operations from Aristotle’s “On Memory and Recollection’ (350 B.C), John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1961), M.E. The book features 273 images, texts and other artifacts assembled and chosen by chance operations, including 160 photographs sampled from the single image of John Cage’s mushroom-collecting basket. x 51 in.), six limited-edition prints (silkscreen ink on paper, 20 in. each), a unique large-format photograph (archival pigment print on rag paper, surface-mounted to plexiglas, 43 in. It includes an edition of ten limited-edition books (digital print on paper, 294 pages, silver foil-stamping on linen, 5 in. Cage’s seminal work 4′33″ (1952) provides the core narrative structure.Ģ73 Relics for John Cage is an installation of printed works and video that explores chance, memory and the photographic image. That photograph, and the 30-minute recorded conversation with Laura that followed, became the source material for 273 Relics for John Cage (A Likeness Is an Aid to Memory). On August 22, at exactly 10:30 a.m., I took a single 12-megapixel photograph of the basket. She chose his mushroom-collecting basket. In August 2011, I asked Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, to select a single item from their archive-something that she knew to be of significant value to John Cage during his lifetime. 273 Relics for John Cage (A Likeness Is an Aid to Memory) (2011)
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