Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Martin looked up from his laptop when he heard a swoosh of cloth unfurling. Nadine was dropping white fabric, rolled up like window blinds, from the ceiling to create a sort of box around the audience, the man and the woman facing the projection wall. She rushed over to adjust the amplifier under the reception desk and tip-toed back to the screening area. Patting all the pockets of her coveralls, she found a remote control and straightened her arm in the direction of the projector. Crows filled the white wall of the Black Dot Museum of Political Art. Fifty or 60 crows against a grey sky, sequenced in soft superimposition, one shot to the next, all taken within seconds of each other from a static position.
Nadine switched on an overhead projector, something out of a 1970s science class, and pulled the rickety trolley it was on into place to illuminate the side of the fabric box. She turned the contraption’s plastic handle, rolling a huge, crudely drawn crow into position, filling half the hanging panel with scratchy blackness. Dragging a heavy-duty fan into proximity, Nadine tested the various intensities until the fabric moved gently, flipping up at the bottom corner, generating an undulating wave across the surface producing a slow, rudimentary animation of the crow image.
Martin sat smiling at the reception desk, watching the orchestration, watching Nadine, now pointing a second remote at the amplifier at the desk, pointing the remote at him, basically. The sound of crows faded in through the speakers in the corners of the room as Nadine began to tap her work boots on the floor, but now, rather than wood—or cement—it was the sound of crows cawing. She’d switched Amp Farm to pre-programmed crow sounds. Nadine scuffed, thumped and tapped out a Morse code of crow speak as she moved around the museum. The man and woman, the audience essentially, watched the images of the crows in the sky projected on the wall while Nadine quietly opened the lid of a bench against the wall and brought out a mask of a crow’s beak. Sliding the headpiece into position and securing it with ribbons under her chin, the two-foot-long beak protruded from Nadine’s forehead, more like a unicorn than a crow. Circling the softly billowing fabric box of black on white, positive and negative, arms spread, beak moving in short jerky motions, she was both the inquisitive crow and the self-possessed unicorn.
Martin was riveted, not so much by the culmination of the components once everything was up and running, but by Nadine’s deft actions, step by step. That, to him, was where the art lay, in the performance, although he got the impression that if she could have been invisible that would have suited her. To Martin it was compelling to see artists engaged in the process. He sometimes tried to explain to people interested in his paintings that it wasn’t the noun, the painting, that was important, it was in the making of the painting, the verb, when the art took place. In those solitary hours of making decisions about all facets of the expression. It was that expression, as it was happening, that was important. The painting was simply the remaining artifact, a document of that activity. Having had little success in really getting that concept through to people, his explanation mostly resulted in a prospective customer deciding not to buy a painting.
The projected image, crows against the sky, progressed to a flashing rhythm, away from superimposed smoothness, faster and faster, to draw the audience back to the central screening, now that they had been made aware of the extraneous stimuli and the transparent nature of its origin.
Nadine was utilizing the light sources to create the shadow of the crow’s beak, blocking the overhead projector, stepping in front of the crows moving one frame at a time on the wall. A primitive shadow play. Black white. Literal. The timing was immaculate. There was nothing to test the patience of the viewer. The crow sounds, the blowing fabric, the slide show on the wall. Nadine’s dance with the mask could be regarded as a performance, as entertainment and perhaps this was a carefully anticipated way to allow the audience to be comfortable. Far from what Martin considered challenging, the scenario seemed ready to fall from the sky and crash, like Icarus. It looked to Martin like Nadine’s waxy crow and unicorn construction had flown too close to the intensity of art.
Not knowing Nadine well at all, Martin had casually lumped her in with nearly every other instance of cringe-worthy performance art he’d attended. He didn’t really expect much from the rag-tag assembly of notions and gestures about crows, a well-used, possibly even over-used metaphor for mystical intelligence. Martin cynically saw the use of crows and dogs in art as metaphors for metaphors, and he wasn’t shy about to whom he revealed such thoughts.
As her presentation neared the 15-minute mark, Martin didn’t think it could withstand continuing to add props; there had to be something to resolve the build-up, the saturation, the willingness to give over to being available, which she had succeeded at by not presenting anything too difficult. She was on the brink, really. A precipice of her own making; on the verge of losing any suspense she’d slowly manipulated the audience towards. A collective now what? hung in the air and as this longing for a sufficient answer swirled there, Martin looked more closely at the wall. A white cloud in the shape of a unicorn was moving slowly in front of the crows, between the crows and the viewer, in the opposite direction. It was a video, not the slide show Nadine had led the audience to perceive. The crow photos continued to flash on a cycle of about a minute and half and the cloud unicorn, head up, one leg extended shook its mane. There was something very unsettling about how this had happened. The audience trusted Nadine, in that everything so far had fortified the notion that she was allowing the audience to see everything she was doing. The set-up was part of the performance, the installation. They were, through her gestures, encouraged to believe that she would prefer to be invisible, but that wasn’t true. The positioning and operation of low tech props intended to cut her some slack in terms of expectations. Here, at the end, the unicorn cloud defied the limitations of what was plausible.
Martin could hear the man and woman whispering, moving on the bench, their feet scuffed the floor, but now, instead of crow sounds, the audio program was set to the sound of a horse, a soft burbling of contentment. When the man and woman heard their own feet making the deep, warm nuzzling noise of the unicorn, they couldn’t resist repeating it. They started tapping lightly, looking at Nadine’s smiling face. At first, they were quite independent of each other and then, they simultaneously rejected the confusion of sound they were making. Without any verbal communication they spontaneously began working together, creating a unicorn dialogue as a second unicorn cloud appeared on the wall. Nadine slowly turned the lights back on using a dimmer switch, and the man and woman stood up, as one does at the end of an event, but rather than assume the position of audience member returning to civilian, they moved around the room, taking over the empty floor space, listening to their collaboration. They became both a response and a continuation of Nadine’s installation.
