Less creative anachronism: Tan Lin on Freelance Stenographer

ArtForum, Summer, 2007 by Tan Lin

One needs a tool to stage theatricality or point to its intervention. Someone to mark the performance and prepare it for distribution. That figure might be Hal Foster. Or it might be the Xerox machine (xerography was invented in 1937 and introduced to American offices circa 1960). Or it might be the stenographers, who transcribed some of the language of the evening, imperfectly. Or The Kitchen itself, which since 1971 has played a role in the continual reframing of materials: The Price and Walker event was filmed, as all performances at The Kitchen are, as part of the economy of the avant-garde. In this sense, no distinctions need to be drawn between the distributions made by the marketplace or by art institutions. One is a copy of the other. Any given copy is either more efficient (it generates profit) or less so. And so it is with all the various actor-distributors of the performance: They distribute copies of copies. Freelance Stenographer is a copy (Xerox) of a copy (stenographer's record) of various copies (the McCall re-re-creation, the band's reworking of a '90s song, the Second Life film-within-a-film, and so on).

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What in the end is The Kitchen? Price and Walker suggest that, like the performance and perhaps indistinguishable from it, The Kitchen is a mix of various formats and methodologies and distribution strategies, which tend, in the words of Price and Walker, to render themselves as nonassimilable at any given moment in time, and that might be in need of retrospection brought about by repetition, appropriation, or sampling--or whatever is used to bring something into a temporary focus. Price and Walker worked to dissect The Kitchen and reveal it as a series of distribution strategies and formats that are indistinguishable from the cultural material it is transmitting at any given moment. A performance exists in one form, until it is distributed, when it becomes something else, and then it is redistributed, and it becomes something else again. In this sense, there is no such thing as a single performance, locked in an archive--just a set of temporal parameters that are constantly being eroded as a particular piece gets retranslated and redistributed. Price and Walker outline a destabilized cultural situation where it is hard to tell the difference between a cultural event, its distribution, and the particular format in which it unfurls. In this sense, distribution is the new theater.

If temporality is a porous container for events, so are media, as are the genres that contain those media, as perhaps are the various human and mechanical "actors" that go into composing them: avant-garde work from the '80s that reconstructed an avant-garde work from the '20s, which was folded into an avant-garde work from 2007. The flip side of the equation is: All forms of distribution are forms of distortion and theatricality. Casey Klavi's stenographic account renders much of the evening illegible--e.g., "Q. I was [WO-PD] determining if the step nothing as is and all the media today can change Realty you can [KHA-EUPLG] fake the [RAO-ELTS], the second part"; the artists' re-rendition of the original leaves us with something stripped to a few sampled bass lines; and the Xerox flattens both the stenographic record and the performance. Attention is not a form at all but something punctuated by amnesia, unlicensed appropriation, obsolescence. Attention is a hole in the system of distribution. Anyone who has downloaded music for free knows that. In this regard, the piece was at times too readily assimilable to The Kitchen's multiformat programming. The work did not disperse to any area outside the realm of avant-garde art practice--despite its mix of sources, there was no mistaking it for a particular form of artistic practice circa 2007. Thus, it was less dispersive than some of Price's other products (such as his "mix tapes"), a point reinforced by the not-so-incongruous clip of young art stars sitting around and sampling music on the fly. The Kitchen itself coded the activity as such from the beginning, as well as during and after.