Title: Arles, Provence, 1890
Material Requirements:
- One gramophone, vintage model, late 19th century preferred
- One vinyl record-player (already in my possession)
- One Sony Walkman, modified for external speaker output
- One iPod portable music device, fifth generation or later
- One Google Pixel 3 smartphone
- An electronic control system capable of operating each of the above devices simultaneously
- A ritual connection to the shade of the muse Euterpe (already in my possession, leased to the piece for the duration of its exhibition).
- Various items of pre-revolutionary French furniture, from a variety of noble estates (a nightstand, a bureau, an armoire, &c.)
- A digital emulation of my mindstate, conditioned to serve as a control unit (already in my possession)
- Access to a 10-by-10 metre soundproofed studio with one designated entrance and a separate designated exit
- Automated locking systems, designed to yield under sustained effort
Abstract: At any time, only one may partake in my work. Upon entry, they will find a bare studio, walls unpainted, haphazardly decorated with pieces of archaic furniture. Laid on and around this furniture will be a variety of playback devices, typically in obnoxious spots which mock the celebrant’s attempts to observe or manipulate them. The precise locations are immaterial; one imagines them atop a wardrobe, beneath a grandfather clock, and so forth.
For a period of two minutes, no music will play. The entrance and exit will be locked. A truly determined celebrant may leave, of course, but they must commit, and shatter the stagnation that waits in the studio. After this nominal consideration period, the performance begins, and only the entrance will remain locked (mustn’t let an impatient enthusiast ruin the flow of the piece!).
The music of choice will be a song for the end of your world. You, dear Critic, and everyone else who hears it. Backed by our own La Marsellaise, the room will fill with the songs of the celebrant’s life, provided by the gracious Lady of Song herself. The subject will smile. They might laugh. Some will sob, probably, remembering something they lost. And all of them will feel it, that tug, that faint melody.
Because here, Critic, is the catch.
These songs are not for them. They will be distant. My other self, digitally locked into the MIDI firmware, will keep the devices closest to them dead silent. The hymns of their childhood or their lost loves will be quiet, and they’ll stay that way. As our poor subject stumbles about, grasping towards snatches of a song they remember from some hazy summer, my chained twin will tune the music up and down. No matter how hard they push, how determined their rush towards the song, they’ll only catch whispers. Like sand it will fall through their fingers. And then it will end.
I will not keep them. The exit will open as soon as the music begins. But somehow, I have a feeling they’ll stick around.
Intent: Arles is a city out of time. Raised by a dead civilisation, it meandered through the years producing little of importance. But every city is placed, with exacting care, by the Lord of Hosts. For what purpose, the ancients thought for those silent millenia, did He lay down our city, this collection of brick and turf, the abandoned round, the palisades raised so far from the sea? Generations must have wondered, and died, and been no wiser.
In the tepid summer of 1888 it achieved its purpose.
Van Gogh came to the walls, spent a scant two years, and found his calling. Of his work enough has been said by artists mundane and anomalous. I will only say this: for this reason was Arles raised, and when he left, it was left purposeless. Thousands of men still lived and loved and none of it mattered one whit. Now the city stands, at the end of history, doomed never to change or be remembered.
(This is myopia, to reduce a thousand souls to a footnote so carelessly. But I have always preferred to see the symmetries in things, the tiny flaws by which each man is differentiated from the clay of Adam. In this light, those thousands are only reflections of their great patron-martyr Van Gogh, and died when he died, even if their bodies still move.)
Arles is lost, as I have been lost, all my life.
Between any two people there is an abyss. Most can bridge it, or at least cast flares and signs across the dark.
Not me. I have been a side-character, an understudy. Nobody I have ever met has remembered my name in five years’ time. Even my electronic replica laughs at me, and me it. What my spectators will be made to feel is only a sliver of my experience. I hope it might draw us close enough for me to know them, and them to care, but I doubt it.
I do not feel that I have found my purpose, despite a lifetime of searching. Please, by God, let it not have passed me by.