Archive Dive: CAA Artists in Residence Every House Has a Door
As a part of the ongoing work of The Creative Audio Archive at ESS, we present Archive Dive - a regular newsletter featuring unheard recordings and ephemera related to the collections housed in the CAA. Items shared here are In Copyright: Education Use Permitted. By clicking the private links below, you agree that you will not make public, copy, distribute, or otherwise put to use any of the recordings featured here without the written consent of ESS and/or the rights holder(s), except for educational purposes. For more information on the recordings and/or collections included below, please contact matt@ess.org or visit: http://www.creativeaudioarchive.org.
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The Archive Artist in Residence program of the Creative Audio Archive at ESS instigates new work by inviting artists to explore our collections, give them access and support to utilize materials within, and then create opportunities for presentation and publication of the resulting work. Our current Archive Artists in Residence are the venerable and always changing performance group Every house has a door, led by director Lin Hixson & dramaturg Matthew Goulish.
Lin and Matthew are inspiration and connective tissue for so much art and performance making in Chicago and beyond, as teachers at the School of the Art Institute and as founding members of Every house has a door & Goat Island, a survey of latter's work was recently featured at the Chicago Cultural Center. The premise they settled on for their work with the ESS Collection of Creative Audio Archive is a potential expression of that fact.
For those new to their work I can recommend this wonderful feature for New City by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, where she writes on the group's formation:
...in 2008, two founding members of Goat Island, Hixson and Matthew Goulish, created the Chicago-based performance collective “Every house has a door.” Goulish, the group’s dramaturg, described the structure of “Every house” as a conscious move away from the fixed-ensemble structure that Goat Island used. “With ‘Every house has a door,’ we’re doing project-specific pieces with different specialists brought in,” he says. This loosened structure, where Goulish and Hixson are the only regular members of the collective, increased the range of possibilities. “The different members we brought in could allow for pieces where we can orchestrate different kinds of moments and that are radically different from one another.” He describes how these performance situations and collaborations with different kinds of practitioners make work that, to them, can have a heightened ability to respond.
Still from 5 Beginnings: ESS
On December 4th, via ESS' The Quarantine Concerts livestream, Every house has a door will present 5 Beginnings ESS - a new work made utilizing materials found within the Creative Audio Archive's ESS Collection.
Every house has a door presents:
5 Beginnings ESS
Premiering Saturday December 4th, with screenings at 1pm (CDT) and 7pm (CDT)
From Every house has a door's 9 Beginnings: Bristol
An update, of sorts, to the piece 9 Beginnings: Bristol - a work first commissioned and performed in 2012 as part of Performing Documents, a c-venture by The University of Bristol and Arnolfini Gallery in the United Kingdom - 5 Beginnings: ESS sees Lin & Matthew selecting five works from the ESS archives and inviting collaborating artists to remake their beginnings, sequencing them into a five-part performance, a lyrical trajectory and a live mini-essay for the camera.
Every house will direct new artists to perform the work of archive artists, facilitating a set of intergenerational introductions - reinterpreting the archival documents of 5 events within the ESS Collection of the Creative Audio Archive, from artists Laetitia Sonami, George Lewis, Ken Vandermark, Maria Gaspar, and Mark Booth - with new versions by artists Li-Ming Hu, Max Guy, Corey Smith, Tim Kinsella & Jenny Polus, and Madeleine Aguilar.
The selections come from as early as 1995, and as recently as 2017:
Laetitia Sonami - Performance What Happened II
Laetitia Sonami, What Happened II, 1995
Ken Vandermark, Option Series Performance, May 22, 2017.
4.
On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous, August 26th, 2016
Remake by Tim Kinsella & Jenny Polus
5.
Quince Cabbage Mellon Cucumber, November 18th, 2000
Remake by Madeleine Aguilar
From Every house has a door's Matthew Goulish:
What constitutes a “beginning”? That remains to be seen. Morton Feldman said, “The next ten minutes… We can go no further than that, and we need go no further. If art has its heaven, perhaps this is it.” In our case, it’s the first five minutes.
Of the seemingly infinite possibilities for selection, combination, and permutation in the vast ESS archives, we take a straightforward approach to our choices: a personal journey through the years. Non-comprehensive, with no positioning in relation to representation other than of our own memory, our collection of contrasts and fondnesses, of those moments and those years, the joy that they now induce, the renewed appreciation that time and distance afford. Concerts we attended, events in which we counted our younger selves among the audience, artists we knew and still know and admire—or, in one case, an artist we hope to get to know through this project—kinships across a decade or two or three.
This narrowly bounded project takes account of memory verging into history. While we may still recognize them, we gather the tender ephemeris of those moments, the accidental documentations of Hi8 & MiniDisc. Stored in those material traces, questions posed by the artists in their moment persist and haunt us now. How have those questions aged? How have we? How would we answer them? What have we lost, or failed to address in our daily rush into tomorrow, our chaotic progress? What modes and manner of creativity have we neglected in this strange future?
Photo from Every house has a door piece Scarecrow
Please join us December 4th on the stream. In addition to the film & screenings we will publish a 5 Beginnings: ESS publication - keep an eye out for information, which we will share as production concludes.
Thanks for reading, watching, & listening. Be in touch with any requests, comments, thoughts, remembrances... All the best,
-Matt Mehlan
Archive & Media Manager, Creative Audio Archive at ESS
About the Creative Audio Archive at ESS:
The Creative Audio Archive (CAA) at Experimental Sound Studio is a Chicago based center for the preservation and investigation of innovative and experimental sonic arts and music. With collections from Sun Ra / El Saturn, Links Hall, Malachi Ritscher, Studio Henry, and Experimental Sound Studio (its parent organization), among others - CAA was formed for the historical preservation of recordings, print, and visual ephemera related to avant-garde and exploratory sound and music.
The CAA's public programming works to fulfill its mission of stewardship, preservation, and accessibility through live events, artist commissions and residencies, and research fellowships.