Michael Brewster @ AFH

"I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, to believe in something which has no form and no color - something which exists before all forms and colors appear."
-Shunryu Suzuki

Think about it. The words are carefully chosen.

When someone says "I believe in nothing" we generally (mis)understand them to mean that they don't believe in anything,(and the way people generally misspeak, that probably is what they mean). But Suzuki does believe in something, which he makes explicitly clear in the second sentence: something that exists before all forms and colors appear. To him, nothing is a thing of great substance. Indeed it must be -- quite independent of Zen, physicists have determined that the universe originated from this same sort of nothing.

Standing on the sidewalk one Tuesday evening, Paul McLean asks me "Is it possible to photograph sound?"

My answer is no. I can photograph the effects of sound, or a visual interpretation/representation of sound, but not sound itself.

Paul accepts my answer and asks me to try anyhow.

Acoustic sculptor Michael Brewster came to Art For Humans Gallery the following evening. I am told that Michael is one of the unsung OGs of the Conceptual Art movement from the late 1960s. What he does, Paul explains, (as best I remember his explanation, which didn't make much sense to me at the time and so I might remember the explanation wrong), is he tunes a room, figures out the best frequency for it and then plays that frequency as a continuous tone.

This is indeed what he does. That is to say, those are the technical details of what he does that Wednesday evening, and Michael is not sure why anyone would want to photograph this because very little actually "happens" in the process.

The technical details of what he does are not so important as the effects of what he does. The effect, to me, is as good as representation of Suzuki's quote as I have experienced. Of course, any representation of something (of reality) is going to be inherently flawed by the need to impose concept and definition on something that defies conceptualization and is undefinable, if only because reality is perpetually impermanent but a definition is a statement of permanence.

What happens is this: Michael moves around the room, clapping his hands, stomping his feet, and determining the sound. It's interesting -- the sounds change dramatically depending on where he is. Once he's collected the information he needs, he plays a continuous tone. Because I've been asked to photograph this experience, I am compelled to move around the space. As I move, the tone, which is steady and constant at its source, changes. This makes perfect sense, but the thing is that listening is generally done passively -- we just stand there and absorb sonic information -- and I don't think its ever occurred to me that a continuous sound can be experienced actively; that my perception of it changes in accordance to my actions. Moreover, other people's experience changes in accordance to my actions, and my experience in accordance to theirs, as we absorb sound, reflect sound, form a barrier between the source of the sound and someone else who is listening...

Here's another zen quote from Suzuki:

"When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say 'inner world' or 'outer world' but actually, There is just one whole world."

If this is an acoustic sculpture, we are not only within the sculpture but a part of it. It's not a hollow form that surrounds us but a solid form that includes us. There is no inside, there is no outside.

Afterwards, we all talk. I'm fascinated by the experience of "oneness". Paul is more interested in the map the sound provides of the space. Maps, to me, are static and "permanent" (because I associate them with paper maps), and so I am inclined to reject this idea because it doesn't take us into account and seems limited to the confines of the space being mapped. Paul's reply addresses the first of those -- the map is impermanent & changes as we move through the space.

Paul is very interested in maps. His work is built out of intricate patterns. The pieces are hung very precisely. The patterns might be his maps, but they don't conform to my more restricted idea of what map is. Any pattern presented in a precise frame nevertheless expands infinitely beyond the confines of the container -- that's the deal with patterns -- and maybe that's the deal with maps, too. It's the deal with everything, actually.

That "oneness", the absence of "this" and "that", of "here" and "there" is my big interest these days, perhaps because I've been feeling especially restless the past year or so, not in harmony with what's around me and/or what I'm a part of...which might in part explain why I almost punched a guy out last week. It was not a harmonious situation.

Michael Brewster's acoustic sculpture was.