Report : Kim Hoerbe on Pauline Oliveros and the Archive

Kim Hoerbe’s talk on “Pauline Oliveros and the Archive” was the occasion for an excellent Nonsite event that took place on Sunday afternoon, 2/21/10, at the collective’s provisional South of Market digs, Nicole Hollis’s design studio.

Hoerbe is visiting from Berlin, and his research is located at the intersection of music and philosophy. He’s currently writing about Oliveros’s work with experimental electronic music in the 1960s, and his research has brought him to Mills College, which is the location of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM). (Oliveros was the first director of the Mills Tape Music Center after the San Francisco Tape Music Center migrated to Mills with a Rockefeller Grant in the Summer of 1966, only to become the CCM several years later under the direction of Robert Ashley.)

Hoerbe had barely introduced his talk when the group began voicing a range of questions, all of which seemed to dovetail beautifully with Hoerbe’s own intentions, concerns, and ideas.

One point of orientation in Hoerbe’ s introduction concerned the way scholarship on Oliveros often organizes itself around the presumption that sexual politics (Oliveros’s lesbian relationships) and cultural aesthetics (Oliveros’s avant-garde practices) represent two mutually exclusive inquiries. One of Hoerbe’s priorities seems to be to reconcile these otherwise segregated concerns.

But the difficulties only begin here, as the archive itself — the institutional codification of an artist’s work, materials, debris —  presents another set of concerns entirely, and this seems to be informing and shaping several parallel inquiries in Hoerbe’s project.

From here, discussion ranged from the object status of materials in the archive, to the troubling distinction between “event” (performance) and “work” (artifact), a critical distinction for many disciplines and methods. During Hoerbe’s talk, I was reminded of Roland Barthes’s distinction between the volatile “text” and the factitious stability of the “work”; but also of contemporary practices among some poets invested in performance and its troubled relation to the printed piece, or “book” (for example, David Buuck’s tactical performances, or Suzanne Stein’s Hole in Space ).

In compelling ways full of implication for a range of aesthetic and archival practices across disciplines, Hoerbe’s work calls into question the object status of Oliveros’s electronic compositions.

What happens, for example, when the archivist’s or researcher’s own attention unwittingly becomes part of what might be interpreted as a “compositional” practice (insofar as pieces are reassembled or re-enacted from archival materials)?  How does musical production — be it in improvisatory performance or studio recording — generate its own material traces in excess of the “work”, and what happens when those indeterminate traces emerge from the archive as material to be “composed”, say, in the making of new pieces for distribution, feeding back into the composer’s catalog of seemingly stable “works”?

Hoerbe shared his rigorous commitment to detecting traces of Oliveros’s material practices while asking how these practices might disturb more stable ideologies of listening that find repose in conventional ideas of “works”, whose beginnings and ends are often perceived to be determinate, or fixed.

During the discussion, I found myself thinking about how works — with all the airs of authority, decision, stability, and aura that the word “work” connotes — become unhinged in the very archive meant to stabilize and preserve.

Moreover, I was compelled to ask how archival methods — including those of the researcher herself — contribute to, or destabilize, the codified status of an archive’s materials, making proper objects of some, while making “remains” of others, and how the production of knowledge is, among other things, always informed by a producer’s subject position (for example, how does the specificity of a queer or a transgendered researcher affect the production of knowable objects?).

Hoerbe’s intense conscientiousness regarding the ethics and politics of the artist / researcher who intervenes in the production of social knowledge is impressive, and the convergence of his concerns with a range of questions motivating other recent Nonsite discussions — from those around the Jack Spicer archive and Joseph Cornell, to discussions concerning the work of Amy Balkin, C.A. Conrad and Frank Sherlock — was remarkable, and remarkably useful.

Our hope is that these concerns will continue to stimulate ongoing discussions and future activities.