| [july 08, 2009 | #318]
This is a picture
of the Hotel de Carcassonne in the rue Mouffetard in Paris. A couple of weeks
ago I snapped it in Google's Streetview (click to enlarge).
I could have taken a metro or I could have hopped on my bike and go have a look
for myself, but as Google's images of our cities are relatively recent,
Streetview is a pretty good way to check
whether something or other that used to be some years ago in a certain streetviewable
spot is still there.
Some half a century ago there was already a Hotel Carcassonne at 24, rue Mouffetard
in Paris. That was in the early 1960s, and
it is not unlikely that it was there long before.
The drawing below shows a topographic layout of the table
(
** ) in room 13 of the hotel Carcassonne, as it was on october 17th,
1961, at 15h47.
The image-map is from Daniel
Spoerri's booklet Topographie Anecdotee du Hasard
("An anecdoted
topography of chance") ( ** ).
Spoerri at the time
was living in room 13 of the Hotel Carcassone. The drawing (on scale) shows
the outlines of (80) objects that that day were lying on his
table. They are numbered, and the map is an index to the booklet. It invites
the non-linear lecture of its 80 pieces of text, of varying length, in which
the artist describes the objects along with memories and associations
that they invoked.
I remember how thirty years ago I came to see Spoerri's drawing as a
faithful picture of the universe. Besides being
pretty funny at times, and an interesting document per se,
his rigorous
and meticulous description, as in a scientific report, of the chance
constellation of
the objects on the table as
he found them at that particular
time and day, struck me as a profound expression of the elusiveness of each of
our individual lives, all of which
transcend both each other and
themselves.
Even the smallest and apparently insignificant among a life's material manifestations
branch out
and relate to a myriad of past and
future lives and events. Yes. It seems obvious that once taken to its logical
conclusion, a full description of a
random freeze, like the one
Spoerri set out to execute, will be iso-form to a collective 'memory dump' of
pretty much all of living mankind.
For not a single one of a life's
details exists in a void; and given whichever two seemingly unrelated facts in
whatever two lives, these
eventually will be found connected by at least one associative
memory path -
and therefore (that's unavoidable) by many different ones ....
Thus every table - be it full or empty, whether a mess or neatly laid
out - at any given moment in time
will reflect most of the describable universe.
(Any other odd object would do just as well.)
Which is a triviality as much as it is a mystery.
But as things go, tables do have that little something extra
...
The table
is emblematic
for - at the very least - our western society's history. It is an accessory
that is at the heart of several
of our culture's day-to-day rituals, and as such played a role in many of its
defining moments. Be
it historical (just think of any odd treaty signed in the 20th century) or apocryphal
(as in Christ's
last supper or King
Arthur's round table).
Human anatomy made the table, pivot of two of
our favorite activities: eating and writing. Both are best and most comfortably
done while sitting, using a horizontal
support for food, paper or - more recently - a keyboard to be posed upon.
Homo sedens.
We are sitting. A seated species.
And tables are what we sit at.
For me personally, as probably for no few of our viewers, a life without
tables is difficult to imagine.
Whenever I get to a place that for a certain time (days, weeks, months, years)
must be my home, the first thing I will
do is set up 'my table'. If there is none present, the
first thing I do is get me one. Or construct one.
I indeed have been constructing tables, over and over again.
At any instant each of these will, by extrapolation, reflect all of our
universe, beginning with the parts of it that
are closest to the table's user/owner. When one contemplates someone's table,
it's like peeping into
the person's head ... By clicking to enlarge the following pictures you may peep
into mine. The colored ones froze
all that was the case on each of my 3 tables, just a couple of days ago, in France
and the Netherlands. The black and white photograph
did the same to my table in the Amsterdam Quellijnstraat almost thirty years ago,
in june 1980. As you see,
in a way, nothing much changed
(but there is no longer a cat, neither here or there, as, over the years, I grew
allergic to cats ...)
Armies of improvising electro-acoustic musicians, working
with objects
and small instruments, or with laptops, are comfortable using
the floor to spread out and manipulate the sound producers they use, while
being cross-legged, half hanging or lying among them. But not me. I very much
prefer to have them laid out before me on a table. That is why already early on I came
to think of
my practice as "tafelmuziek". Table music.
Which then
became the title of the
ookoi's first CD: "Tafelmuziek/Muziektafel (2004)".
With Jean-Jacques Duerinckx such reflections led us to chose "A
Table!" as a theme to guide us in a
series of duo-performances. Whereas English speakers will see a noun followed
by an exclamation mark,
French speakers know that same expression as the yell that
in french households
summons family members to interrupt whatever other activity they are engaged in,
and come and sit down
a table, for one of the daily meals.
Each of the different tables that in different places we stumble upon
we want to be like the Wishing Table in the
Brother Grimm's household tale: we 'ask' it to 'cover itself' with the objects
and things that over time
we gather, use, discard or keep and - as much as possible -
collect locally, at or near the venues where we come to perform. Some of these
will be used to make sounds, some of
them won't.
The following are photographs of the tables we sat at during our
'little table tour', in the weeks following the
Brass residency.
A traffic sign just like the one in the picture lay discarded somewhere
along the highway between Braine-l'Alleud
(Eigenbrakel) and Brussels. We passed it in JJ's car when
we were
on our way to play at l'Ecurie in Brussels, on sunday march 29th. It was
not possible to stop to pick that one up, but as I liked the idea of that sign
in the middle of our table, I kept an eye open. We indeed then
found another one, somewhere in Brussels, not far from l'Ecurie ...
Thanks to an assortment pottery that was left at the Place du Jeu de
Balle, our
next two tables - in the Brussels Cafe Dada on may 6th (right) and in the
Cultureel Centrum Oratorienhof in Louvain (Belgium) on may 7th (left) -
had a strong post-funeral touch. (The little plate on the music stand at
the back end of the Louvain table reads: "Le passe comme
l'avenir c'est
du present qui se deplace". If you look closely
you can spot it also
in one of the pictures of my tables above.)
After the Louvain adventure, a savage nightly ride through flemish inlands
was followed by a short nap in the Hotel Afrit 28 in Heusden-Zolder,
where early morning we enjoyed a Belgian breakfast animated by large-screen
lip-synced american tele-commercials full of fat burn and meat cuts (thank you
Timo
and Metaphon,
for all of it has been the greatest pleasure!), we arrived in the Artspace Rondeel
in Maastricht (the Netherlands).
There, as a consequence, funereal symbolism gave way to sort
of a neo-colonial scenery. More than merely logical, it felt merely
appropriate.
[ Click the picture to view "Missie :: Broeders",
a short uTube extract of our performance at the Maastricht ArtSpace. ]
notes __ ::
(*) "... he took his
little table of his back, set it down before him, and said,
'Cover thyself,' and then everything appeared that his heart desired."
(from: 'The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass,
and the Cudgel in the Sack' - Brothers Grimm, 'Household Tales'.)
[ ^
]
(**) "A table is an
item of furniture comprising a surface supported by a base or legs. It may be
used to hold articles such as food at a convenient or
comfortable height when sitting, and is therefore often used in conjunction with
chairs [...] A table specifically intended for writing and office work
is a desk [...]" - (Wikipedia
/ july 6th, 2009)
[ ^
]
(**) I first read Spoerri's Topographie
in
1981 or 1982, in a Dutch translation by Jean Schalekamp (Geanekdoteerde
topografie van het toeval), which was published in edition 7 of the
literary magazine Randstad, from 1964. Later in Paris, in 1991 or 1992,
I got the facsimile reedit of the 1962 original, published by the Centre
Pompidou in 1990. [
^ ] tags:
A Table!, Daniel Spoerri, chance
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