Mark Crinson: 'Telling Lyrics'
In: Annotations 2: Sonia Boyce: Performance. Edited by Mark Crinson. London: Institute of International Arts, 1998, pp. 24-27
Whether murmring them as we walk to work, chanting them to the child in the bath, or getting high with them in the late hours of friendship, lyrics of remembered songs are carried both as ubiquitous charms and as powerful incantations of past times. Memories of music offer, as Proust observed, "the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation". [1]
But however much we seem to possess these provisional transcripts, to remake them as part of our selfhood, they still have their own existence and one which is open to appropriation by others: "while [the music] was addressed to them it did not know them ... it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, extraneous to themselves". [2]
When Sonia Boyce uses lyrics in her work they carry these multiple codes as found objects and as lines saturated with subjective experience. In workshops on the formation of record collections, she has tried to explore how far music shapes identity, from the purchase of the first record, to when certain kinds of music might be recalled or played, and finally to the collecting and handling of records as material objects deeply invested with meaning. Part of this interest is also an ethical investigation of the interaction that occurs in the workshop when participants recount these memories or perform the songs, entering them into the larger communal register, even if only in the workshop setting. (An earlier workshop with a different group had asked participants to bring in examples of body fluids.) In line with much of Boyce's recent work, the exploration of lyrics is not just a question of what might be represented but also a matter of the artist's direct exploration of the formation of identity, and how it maps onto a culture replete with images of the self-possessed individual. In the gaps between the two, tapping those peculiar reservoirs of stored feeling, lie the pleasures and embarrassments that are disclosed in the workshop. It is apt, then, that these workshops also form the groundwork for Boyce's planned video Song, in which she and a male friend inexpertly sing Marilyn Monroe's 'I Want To Be Loved By You'.
In a recent group of works - especially in Grace , Lover's Rock and the Rhythm series - lyrics are presented in apparently direct formats within the gallery space. In each the lyrics are deliberately transcribed straight from the music, together with any consequent mishearing, rather than from the official sleeve version. They are deracinated and reworked, enlarged and italicised, they are given different typefaces, and take on physical presence that area of intense visuality - the artwork and the gallery - where form is scrutinized for meaning, and words, once formalised, have their meaning subjected to interrogation. Like the other recent text-based works such as Coloured or Smear the foregrounding of language inevitably puts the referent under question. Who is speaking? What do the typefaces and other forms of presentation do to the sense of the lyrics? How are we to respond?
In Grace the words to Grace Jones's 1982 song 'From the Nipple to the Bottle' are written across the components of an installation that recalls both protest march and the carnival. The original song is a poppy jazz-funk affair in which Jones's voice insinuates itself in amongst the emphatic bass and percussion of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. The feline assertiveness of Jones's singing underscores the emotional conflicts and sexual surrenders of the lyrics ("Colour and warmth came into your world ... You don't get what you want you scream and you shout"), until finally in the call and response of the chorus a stand is taken ("Won't give in and I won't feel guilty") and reiterated in the closing lines ("You ain't gon get it, I ain't gon get it").
The installation has three visual elements that mimic the components of the song: its verses appear on two trade union-type banners in solemn, muted colours; the chorus lines are distributed amongst placards, mostly in primary colours, hanging from the ceiling; and finally, the chants that run through the song are located in brightly-coloured bunting placed high up on the gallery walls. Lyrics cannot, then, function as they might on the record sleeve. They are both heightened as form and open to distraction by the other parts of the work in peripheral vision. Furthermore the contradictory, but still overbearing 'community' associations of the banners, placards and bunting invoke three forms of behaviour beyond the normal protocols of the gallery - singing, protest and celebration. The struggles for 'private' sexual possession are thus all too crassly written onto the vehicles of 'public' proclamation.
Lover's Rock uses the words to Susan Cadogan's 1975 hit 'Hurt So Good'. Again, in Cadogan's version the suppressed emotion of the singing beneath the dominant reggae beat belies the jarring conjunction of sexual pleasure, pain and dependency in the lyrics ("well if it hurts alright, and if it kills me I don't care"). In Boyce's work the verses of the song are carried around the walls of the gallery as embossed white words on white wallpaper. Frozen and silent, more tactile than visible, the lyrics now evoke but invert the solemn commemorative functions of public inscriptions.
In its functions as incantation and as charm the lyric has also been used by Boyce as a form of screen in the domain of the visual. During her residency this has been explored by using the lyrics for 'My Melancholy Baby' both in hand-cut lettering on doors within the institutional confines of the university corridor of academic offices and seminar rooms, and as a projected installation within the Manchester Museum. Early plans for this installation have envisaged the lyrics acting as a set of placards inside and outside the vitrines, stringing the famous anthem of reassurance across the uncannily troubling and disparate collections of stuffed animals, mummies, aquaria, and displays on human evolution. This idea might be seen as an extension of Peep, Boyce's 1995 intervention in the Brighton Museum, in which screens of tracing paper were placed over the display cases in the ethnography collection, pierced only by peepholes cut in the form of the shadows projected by the displayed objects. In the Manchester Museum scheme the lyrics might then perform the task of making familiar by acting as an imaginary screen filtering or containing its estranging matter, as well as establishing a pace or rhythm of reading quite different from that of museological time. This suggests neither a direct ideological critique of the museum nor a playing with the poetics of its codes, but instead a slight but telling displacement of its phenomenology.
The lyric is, of course, not just the words for a song but also the term often given to art of an intense personal expression, an art that seems fully possessed by the maker's emotion: in T. J. Clark's words "the illusion in an artwork of a singular voice or viewpoint, uninterrupted, absolute, laying claim to a world of its own". [3] Clark's definition is part of a recent re-evaluation of Abstract Expressionism in which he suggests that modernism always had a problematic relationship to the lyric in this sense; it could never expunge it but had to keep returning to its "deep ludicrousness". [4] If there is no place after modernism for lyrical art then a kind of void has opened up that in the last few years has been occupied alternatively by set pieces unravelling the language of subjectivity, by the confessional modes of recent photography, or by the various claims made for a 'return of the real' in the form of the abject. Furthermore, now that our certainties about the public sphere have also become unsure with continuing privatisation of the public realm and the diffusion of public culture into domestic spaces via computers and televisions, the binary distinction between personal and public feeling seems hardly sustainable. The time has come to lay claim with interest, rather than pastiche, to an older concern for the place of the subjective within the monumental.
Notes
[1] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, vol. 1, p. 228
[2] Ibid., pp. 238-9
[3] T. J. Clark, 'In Defence of Abstract Expressionism', October, 69, Summer 1994, p. 48
[4] One of the key moments in the voice-over for Sonia Boyce's planned film A Short Film About Sperm comes when the female protagonist attends a lecture on Jackson Pollock.