Listening to art

Last night Chris Janzen the tactile artist/musician and Jesse Nathan the poet performed their piece “Dinner” at Mennonite Community Church. The venue was suitable for family and friends and it was a good couple of hours.

The piece is a mix of Chris’s experimental music made with various synthesizers, a guitar and string base, Chris’s collages, and Jesse’s poetry. All of it comes at you at once. I liked the overall effect and everyone in the audience, including our not quite eleven year-old granddaughter, stayed engaged. But how to describe a gallery display/poetry reading/concert?

Neuroscientists have studied the ability to multi-task, and it appears that there is no such thing as focusing on more than one thing at a time. Those who multi-task well are those adept at switching their attention among several things in rapid succession. The receptionist with a typing project would be an example of someone quickly shifting from typing to answering the phone to greeting a guest. A teenager texting while listening to music, watching television and doing homework could be another example.

“Dinner” demanded multi-tasking by the audience unusual for a performance. An orchestra asks the listener to hear the overall sonic experience while focusing on a theme in different instrumental sections sequentially. A rock concert creates a soundscape with moving focus and visual elements that don’t require any focus. An art display lets you look at a work in totality and then to move your focus around the piece. Looking at one of Chris’s collages on the web is like that. You can see the whole piece or magnify a portion.

At “Dinner” the visual focus moves from the projected collage image to the performers’ actions while the poetry, which requires continual focus, happens with simultaneous sounds that are difficult to predict and constantly grab away the listener’s focus. Paying attention to my body I became aware that the sounds created a good deal of anxiety which resulted in hearing the poetry and seeing the collages as more menacing than when I view the collages at leisure, or read the poems. Listening to the sounds in the safety of my bedroom does not generate the same anxiety as watching Chris produce them. The somewhat frenzied and unpredictable behavior that goes into producing the sounds creates an edge not there when they are simply heard.

My guess is that reading the poetry while the recorded sounds were played would be a completely different experience, and that the brain would simply sideline the sounds so that it could focus on the words. If Chris was making the sounds live while a recorded poet was played, I doubt that the poetry would make it through to the listener.

All this to say that the work was a worthwhile experience that has kept me thinking about it since. You can view, listen to and read the various bits at http://chrisjanzen.startlogic.com/.