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Deep Time:
Basquiat and Cage 84.24

Dan Kidner

“Mitchener’s passions are deeply personal but also resonate with a broader community of artists, curators, writers and researchers who, through sonic and listening strategies, grapple with the question of what it means to pay attention in a world where this capacity is increasingly under threat.”

‘Basquiat and Cage 84.24’ marked the second edition of Fruitmarket’s annual festival of new music and coincided with the gallery’s 50th anniversary year. Programmed by composer and vocalist Elaine Mitchener, the four-night festival at the end of November showcased her wide-ranging interests and disciplines; Mitchener is not only an accomplished performer of Avant Garde and new music but also a composer in her own right. Her previous projects, many of which were collaborations with artists such as Sonia Boyce and the Otolith Group, have explored the work of neglected figures of the black Avant Garde, including Jeanne Lee and Julius Eastman.

The festival’s title signalled Mitchener’s intention to ‘imagine a conversation’ between john Cage and Jean-Michel Basquiat, drawing on the historical fact that in 1984 Fruitmarket’s then director, Mark Francis, who was present for a panel discussion during the festival, described the expedient way the pairing had come together: he had recently seen an exhibition of Cage’s prints and scores in London, and two years before he had first encoutered Basquiat’s paintings at Documenta 7. At the time there was, curatorially, no attempt to draw parallels between the two practices and, in fact, the artists didn’t meet during the preparation, installation and opening of the two shows.

Mitchener’s curatorial attention to these twin solo shows did not feel like an attempt to correct this or to celebrate a significant moment in exhibition history, but more the result of a desire to pull a particular cultural moment into the present for re-examiniation. By recasting the alignment of the two practices at a particular historical juncture, Mitchener was able to think more broadly about the confluence of the worlds of art and new music in the second half of the 20th century and the place of black and other marginalised artists within this history.

Refracting these histories through contemporary discourses on race and identity, Mitchener situates the two artists within a constellation that includes figures such as Eastman, who famously offended Cage in 1975 during a performance of his Song Books, 1970, by freely interpreting the instruction to ‘perform a disciplined action’. The instructions for Solo 8 of the Song Books echo those of Cage’s most famous work, 4’33”, 1952, but instead of an austere fulfilment of the directive, East,an delivered an improvised lecture that explored colonialism, race and sexuality, all while salaciously undressing two members of the audience he had invited on stage. Eastman’s unexpected and forceful insertion of identity and sexual politics into the piece was as much an assault on the principles of avant-garde composition as it was a challenge to the older composer. Eastman, who died homeless and impoverished in 1990, expressed his desire to be ‘Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest’ – a maximalist creed that defied the minimalist tendencies of his time. The challenges his ideas posed to the established canon have only recently begun to receive critical evaluation, his works now being performed by a new generation of composers, musicians and artists. Mitchener has played a significant role in spearheading this revival.

At the opening night Mitchener premiered two new collaborations with dancer and choreographer Dam Van Huynh. The first, Graffiti Bodies II, 2024, began with two performers positioned at opposite ends of a space deline­ ated by a rectangular rubber mat, around which the audience was seated. Communicating across the expanse through a series of vocal clicks, squeaks and pops that built to full-throated growls, the performers gradually traversed the space like two boxers limbering up for a fight. Drawing inspiration from Basquiat’s painting La Hara, 1981, which depicts a baleful white police officer, Mitchener and Van Huynh’s vocal theatrics were aug­ mented by props including fluorescent bulbs(used both as props and lighting), bells, slinkies, plastic pipes and plastic sheeting. Inch by inch, the performers moved forward, yelping, howling and coaxing noises from the various objects. At the performance’s climax, their mouths almost touched, their voices reverberating in the cavities of each other’s throats.

After a brief pause, Van Huynh left the stage, while Mitchener segued into a performance of Pauline Oliveros’s Songfor Margrit (for solo voice), 1997. Stalking the now-empty arena and listening for noises to mimic and transform, anything and everything became fair game: sniffies from audience members who had just arrived from the Edinburgh cold, stifled giggles from nervous students in the front row, traffic noise, or the gurgling sounds from the creaking pipes.

The evening’s programme concluded with a second premiere from Mitchener and Van Huynh. In Moving Eastman, 2024, Mitchener appeared alone, yet seemingly possessed by the voices and bodily presence of others. Her demeanour, now less inquisitive and more agonised, saw her prowling across the floor, twitching, jerking, and gurning as if she were a spirit guide, ecstatically summoning the physical form and words of Eastman. Her disjointed incantatory monologue drew on the words of other black performers and thinkers, including John Coltrane, bell hooks, Stuart Hall and Jeanne Lee. At once absurd, serious and deeply moving, her channelling carried profound intent. Her final words, dragged from her throat and barely comprehensible, were ‘detoxifica­tion through insistent confrontation’, taken from an essay on Eastman by Renee Levine Packer.

Mitchener invited one of her frequent collaborators, Anton Lukoszevieze of Apartment House, to programme the second night of the festival. Lukoszevieze’s approach was contextual, choosing to focus on the New York downtown scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Apartment House began proceedings with a spirited performance of Cage’s Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts, 1974, before launching into a new work conceived by Lukoszevieze: ‘musical interventions’ played over David Wojnarowicz’s Cross Country, Tape Journals, February – June 1989. For this, Miles Lukoszevieze, who had played bass on the Cage piece, abandoned his instrument and strode to the front of the stage. Here he stood for the duration, staring down audience members while Wojnarowicz’s comic and mournful narration drawled sentences like: ‘I want to experience those things com- pletely surrounding me, so that it’s like a body within a body looking out from the dark recesses of the backs of the eyes.’

On Friday, following a subtle and oddly moving perfor­ mance with found objects by Rie Nakajima called The Details of the Whole, 2024, a group assembled by composer Aidan O’Rourke performed an interpretation of Cage’s late work Scottish Circus, 1990, retitled Scottish Circus (revis­ ited), 1984/2024. Commissioned by Eddie McGuire and the Scottish traditional music band The Whistlebinkies, Scottish Circus was one of the last scores completed and published by Cage. McGuire met the composer when the Whistlebinkies were invited by Francis to play at a celebra­ tion of Cage’s birthday during his Fruitmarket exhibition in 1984. Fascinated by traditional music, particularly in later life, Cage stayed in touch with McGuire and in 1990, for a showcase of the American’s work at the Musica Nova festival in Glasgow, he premiered the work. The score calls for the individual musicians to improvise forms of tradi­ tional Scottish music – such as the pipe march, lament or Gaelic song – and to play without attempting to harmonise or keep speed or key with the other musicians. In the reimagined version, O’Rourke and his Scottish Circus Ensemble introduced instruments and forms from other folk traditions, such as the tabla from the Indian subconti­ nent and the Middle Eastern ney flute.

The festival concluded with performances by the Rolling Calf(Elaine Mitchener and Neil Charles) featuring special guest petals, and a set from DJ NikNak, literally merging the sound worlds of Basquiat and Cage. Mitchener success­ fully brought together the diverse strands of her practice, though the question of what it means to think of Cage and Basquiat in tandem remained somewhat opaque. This ambiguity may have been addressed by the conversa­ tions that were held before and after some performances, which included interlocutors such as Esi Eshun and Kate Molleson. Yet these discussions were largely stilted, possi­ bly because their proximity to the performances left little room for illumination or critical reflection.

As a composer – most notably demonstrated in her excellent recent release Solo Throat(from Cafe Oto’s in-house label, Otoroku) – Mitchener works with, interprets and deconstructs existing scores, texts and histories to create something new. She places elements in proximity rather than forcing connections. For ‘Basquiat & Cage 84.24’, she created an acute sense of remembrance that was in the spirit of Cage’s Musicircus works initiated in the late 1960s. Here, each voice, each text and each life had autonomy, leaving it to the listener to make sense of the whole and forge connections.

Mitchener’s passions are deeply personal but also resonate with a broader community of artists, curators, writers and researchers who, through sonic and listening strategies, grapple with the question of what it means to pay attention in a world where this capacity is increasingly under threat.

‘Deep Time’ was at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh from the 27 to 30 November.

Dan Kidner is a curator and writer, and director of the Contemporary Art Research Group at Kingston School of Art.