Less creative anachronism: Tan Lin on Freelance Stenographer

ArtForum, Summer, 2007 by Tan Lin

SINCE THE START of its media restoration project, The Kitchen has evolved from an artists' collective and nonprofit performance space into a vast archive of some five thousand videotapes, five hundred audiotapes, and more recent material captured on digital video. As a home for various distribution mechanisms and artistic practices, The Kitchen seemed a perfect site for the dispersion strategies of Seth Price and Kelley Walker, in Freelance Stenographer, 2007, their first collaborative project. After all, here was not just a particular set of artworks to reproduce and redistribute but a mechanism--in fact, an institution--designed to do just that. In this sense, the pair's work was a kind of mirrorlike recording device inserted inside an avant-garde theater.

Appropriately, then, it was hard to tell where the piece began and where it ended. One evening this past March, the audience filed into The Kitchen's theater to see a woman sitting at the back of the stage and a photocopy machine off to one side. Debra Singer, executive director of The Kitchen, offered a brief introduction, and then a video collaboration by Price and Walker began: shots of the Manhattan skyline; footage (filmed by Jason Spingarn-Koff, as well as by Price and Walker) of Stefan Tcherepnin, Cory Arcangel, and Emily Sundblad reworking the 1999 dance hit "Better Off Alone," by Alice DeeJay, which they found on YouTube; the original video for the song (taken from YouTube but corrected for color and sound by Price and Walker); and footage from The Kitchen's archives of a 1982 restaging, by Debra McCall, of Oskar Schlemmer's 1923 Gesture Dance (set by Price and Walker to the reverberations of Sonic Youth's 1988 "Teen Age Riot"). Immediately following this a second film was shown, a quasi-trailer for a documentary (by Spingarn-Koff) about the virtual-reality world Second Life. Then Price and Walker held a Q & A, during which they explained that the woman onstage behind them, Casey Klavi, was, in fact, a freelance stenographer, who had been recording the event since Singer began talking. After a number of questions, audience members were invited to join the artists onstage for a beer, and the stenographer's text was Xeroxed and handed out.

What, then, was "the work"? Was it the recording made by the stenographer? The product of a Xerox machine? The film made by Price and Walker? And what exactly were the relations between the photocopy and the desultory film of a music-making session? The cross-appropriations of the piece suggested a generalized or (possibly generic) cultural event in the process of being repackaged and reassimilated to various media: video, dance, xerography, stenography, post-event Q & A. Moreover, The Kitchen staff recorded the entirety of the evening on video; that record now sits in The Kitchen's archives, making the video an archive of an archive and blurring the distinction between pre- and postarchival. With its Sonic Youth sound track, double appropriation of Schlemmer's early twentieth-century work, and retro-stenographic format, the performance felt decidedly boundary- and medium-unspecific. It was hard to say, in the end, what it was. As a cultural event, it gave off reverberations of an anachronism in a contextual network of anachronisms. And yet with its mix of time frames--from nineteenth-century technology to mid-'80s music and an avatar-based social network--it wasn't exactly nostalgic.

Thus, from the initial framing of the piece to the photocopied "output," Price and Walker's collaboration raised the question of where to insert the production activity of contemporary art into a continually moving analog-to-digital event stream, with The Kitchen itself packaged and repackaged as a form of cultural theater and distribution. To put it more succinctly, Price and Walker staged their own performance of the archival or, rather, the archival's status and rights to reproducibility and legibility: How would it be possible to not merely represent The Kitchen but also and simultaneously to enter The Kitchen archive in real time, as an event subject to filmic or performative distribution--as well as the obsolescence, decay, and amnesia that are distribution's necessary backdrops. What was produced and distributed that night was a Xeroxed stenographic transcript, which provided a partially legible and incomplete account of an event that, to echo Derrida, is always already there. This event might be called The Kitchen itself.

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In that sense, Freelance Stenographer staged various re-returns to a theme that has haunted contemporary practice, the downward evolutionary draft from the historical to the neo-avant-gardes outlined by Peter Burger. If the conclusion to be drawn from Burger is that any desire to critique commodity culture from a space outside it is naive, then even on the level of institutional critique, Freelance Stenographer functioned almost programmatically (i.e., it was designed to "fail") as a gesture directed at Conceptual art's documentary mode, which draws a line between an event and its (later) documentation. Thus, the performance employed a freelance stenographer and the "writing" known as a Xerox machine as inseparable parts of the performance, so that the two devices were used to capture an event at different temporal intervals. (For the record, the Toshiba e-STUDIO 55 produces fifty-five pages per minute; a skilled stenographer can record two hundred words per minute.) Klavi's presence was an ironic commentary on the archive's desire for total retention and cataloguing. Dating from the fourth century BC, shorthand is one of the oldest technologies for preserving rapidly evolving information.