Dispatch #5
Karaoke from the Archive
In 2008, the Reel Asian Film Festival featured the “Empty Orchestra” exhibit at Hart House that celebrated and explored karaoke as an art-form. This exhibit understands karaoke as an open form, one that invites participation, even if it might be self-centred, egoistic, consumerist — something about the open humiliation of a mismatched voice being permitted a moment of glory. As I looked at some of the programming material and news pieces around this exhibit, I continually found a fascination from programers, curators and reporters, with someone who is decidedly not a genius, an amateur (which delightfully shares its etymological roots with the word love), not a professional, someone desiring for stardom, fantasizing and hallucinating, and just failing—
The language around the exhibit seems to be working through these ideas of failure, fantasy, and the amateur, who everyone insists should be allowed to dream! This is also art! (I agree!) In these archival holdings, I see people coming to the defense of pleasure, of losing craft, of losing an inhibition, of losing polish and prestige, to come to a song with lovethat’sit that’sall—
I think also of the arranged marriage rishta profile of me circulating somewhere in the universe, on Whatsapp chats and email threads that I am not privy to. I have not written this profile, and once, on occasion, when I accidentally chance upon it on my mother’s phone, I see that she has listed my interests as including…..baking. All week, I repeat the same joke to my friends with abandon and exaggeration: I have not baked a single thing in the past five years. Towards the end of this residency, as a result of a series of ridiculous events, I find myself sitting in front of surveying families on the arranged marriage market in an apartment in Mississauga, who are asking me on behalf of their son, so what can you cook? Aap cooking kar leti hain?
I sit there mostly as the-woman-was-too-stunned-to-speak, and say something to the effect of, well, yes, I know how to feed myself? I don’t know about your son, he might be into baking. I think back to this language from the karaoke exhibit of celebrating the less-than-genius, the falling short, the amateur voice, and I consider this version of myself - also alive, also mine, also a world I hold close, love, cherish, am heartbroken by - sitting on a chair to be surveilled for marriage in Mississauga before I begin my commute to my artist residency. These are two different worlds, and ones that are not always easy to hold together, but I am, through this exhibit, inspired to take seriously what this baker-version, amateur lover, not-a-scholar, Whatsapp version of me would sing in the archives. What language would this version of me bring here, to this world of profession and prestige?
Singing singing mother cursing this country that keeps keeping me, pushing morning tea on to me, singing singing all the dialogues I know by heart: eat this before you leave, no, this is still half, drink more, signing singing ascending my voice in my father’s ear until he can gradually hear me, me hissing, me teaching him the remote, he in his generational determination teaching himself the operation of a television, all of us glazing over memories when we are sitting across each other, singing singing my mother appearing in the doorway, asking me: why this why this and why that? Have you? Did you? Stop it? Stop it! Singing singing the balm I offer her when I move across the floor, running for her, and orchestrating the domestic arena she knows how to see me in singing singing the land that becomes barren in her eyes when she sees me without a headscarf singing singing biryani masala, here it is, and singing singing becoming my brother for three seconds, rolling in with outside air and her offering her method in the kitchen as the most mothering thing she has ever done, singing singing that you have to remember you are a daughter not a son not a song, singing singing—
I began this residency by playing with the word archive, and now I find myself trying to stretch out the word artist, someone who is invited into the archive for the purpose of something called activation. I think about the sometimes self-indulgent, consumerist activity of cheap re-makes of a song with your own voice [Maiko Tanaka says about Wang Gongxin’s art as part of the exhibit with an interview with the National Post, “Wang Gongxin's video has karaoke singers on each tooth in his mouth. Every time he thinks he's gotten rid of them they come back. I think he's commenting on how karaoke doesn't actually provide the creative freedom that might be thought in a place like his home city of Beijing] and the parts of ourselves that are also ‘activated’ in an encounter with a cultural archive.
There are crests of different lives, countries, languages, consumerisms, sedimented over—and many voices—consumerist, domestic, artistic – whatwhich voices can be called upon for the purpose of activation? My cheap re-makes and my craft? Me not just as a researcher, a university student, but also – daughter, wished-wife, not-baker, stubborn, Ash texts me, “you’re still taking tangible actions to be your own person in a fierce way”, and I hold myself in those words a little. What are these archival voices within me, strayed from sites of academic rigour, profession and professional, craft and polish?
Singing singing - my heart is always broken from being woman, and there are no two ways to say it, singing singing the film screen, the morally reprehensible or so we are told space of the cinema, singing singing what is this first world experience of going out to see a film anyway, you know? Singing singing blacking out the word ‘cinema’ from public presence because singing singing - there is another life where one can be hunted
The responses to this exhibit also feature an appreciation of karaoke as a form allowing for shared spaces of languages – ones we are bringing, some dominant, some mired in histories of nationalism and revolutions, some marginal, some violent in their reach toward nationhood - how do they move and activate an archive outside of English? What is an archival voice that moves across languages given that our professional training exists here, within the container of theory that I read and write in English; how can my own other-languages move me?
From Madeleine Foote’s review of the exhibit published in Demo Magazine in 2008
In the absence of a final material footing, in the archive misleading and misreading you, the only thing to think about, really, is your own orientation - what is the voice that you can bring sing, sing bring!
Singing singing, a child on someone’s shoulder at the student encampment singing singing “in my lifetime I will see Palestinians living free”
Singing singing your voice, your voice, what does it clamour for? Can you ask it to clamour for something more? Can you shift the parameters, not of the archive itself, but of what you sing from it?
Singing singing, a child on someone’s shoulder at the student encampment singing singing “in my lifetime I will see Palestinians living free”
Singing singing your voice, your voice, what does it clamour for? Can you ask it to clamour for something more? Can you shift the parameters, not of the archive itself, but of what you sing from it?
And finally, the exhibit works through the thread of fear and humiliation, which may come with the vulnerability of desiring or occupying centre-stage with an amateur tool-kit. I consider what it would mean to think about fear and risking vulnerability as part of our archival method. What might archival method have to do with courage, fear and humiliation? Of course, attuning ourselves to our own voice histories requires a confrontation with what we sell, consume and make under the designation of art.
Á la Orwell, all art is equal, but some art is more equal than others. I think about the webs and networks of words I am myself trained in, bring to my tongue, the usual: community, tenderness, body, identity, belonging, thirdness, searching, looking, roots, grief, loss, repair, connection. I think the taller task as part of building my own practice is to find the courage to go looking for another set of words, ones that I might not recognize, ones that might ask me to imagine my life as a baker, ones that make my own language unrecognizable to me. I think that might be the most radical function of art - to tear down a way of thinking for yourself, to confront something you know, and upturn it, to go looking, not for what’s missing, but for what we might be missing to speak -
Singing singing a life lived where you are gifted ways of seeing, rewards for bravery
Singing singing a life as method, singing singing, the craft of deluging oneself with someone else’s history
Singing singing there will be new worlds in this deluge, singing singing hope time
Singing singing love as a force of invention
Singing singing always Alice Walker’s question:
Was Phillis Wheatley’s mother also an artist?
Singing singing a life as method, singing singing, the craft of deluging oneself with someone else’s history
Singing singing there will be new worlds in this deluge, singing singing hope time
Singing singing love as a force of invention
Singing singing always Alice Walker’s question:
Was Phillis Wheatley’s mother also an artist?
From Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”