High art, base humor, and a fair amount of perplexed head scratching were found in the Center of the Arts last Friday night.
The performance – one of many that the CFA will host this spring season – featured two distinct groups: Buffluxus, a local experimental music and multimedia Fluxus group; and the Toronto Research Group, a poetry-performance troupe now based out of UB.
Buffluxus – which consists of local composer, guitarist, and UB alum Don Metz and local poet and curator of UB's Poetry/Rare Books Collection Michael Basinski – had its ranks bolstered by flutist and Canisius assistant professor of music Michael Colquhoun and UB poetry student Molly Melgard.
The group's material wasn't confined by any one medium – poetry, music, visual, and performance art all freely comingled.
The centerpiece of the group's performance was the free associative work "A Noted Vocabulary for Eve Rosenthal" by acclaimed multimedia artist Jackson Mac Low. The work consisted of scattered measures without key or clef and scattered words without context. To perform the piece, the expanded Buffluxus didn't have to keep to any sort of tempo or time signature, but the group did have to listen.
"This music is all about listening," Metz said. "If you can't listen, you can't play."
Without any sort of linear progression – this by design, ironically enough, as the piece's sheet music has the song's constituent measures scattered over the page, with some even being sideways or upside down – each performance of the piece is fundamentally different.
This aspect, when coupled with the vocal component of the song – single words like "loathe" or "hearse" or "at" said in an often over-enunciated fashion, so as to become pure sound, outside any sort of context – serves to highlight the fundamentally pareidolic nature of constructed human meaning.
While the free-form piece may have posed a challenge to most musicians, the members of Buffluxus were unfazed.
"I understand this type of music, this type of poetry," Colquhoun said. "It's more than a job – it's fun."
Dadaist sensibilities characterized much of the remainder of Buffluxus' performance: members of UB's PressBoardPress lowered rolls of toilet paper from a balcony into the audience, Melgard performed Emmett Williams' "Is La Monte Young in the Audience?" (which consisted of posing that very question – a comment on the nature of performance), and a rendition of Metz's own "There is no good or bad, only placement" was "interrupted" by incessant coughing fits from Basinski and Melgard.
The Toronto Research Group's half of the presentation started with hefty helpings of irony and disconcertion: Poet and troupe member Chris Sylvester beseeched those in attendance to leave their seats and proceed to the back of the room for security pat-downs, all the while mimicking the tone and disposition of airport security. The implicit political comment was not lost on the audience.
Sylvester's charged and insistent irony was immediately counterpointed by McCaffery and the rest of the Research Group – made up of the two aforementioned men plus McCaffery's wife and adjunct English professor Karen Mac Cormack – imitating the detached and sterile instructive pleasantries of flight attendants. The skit was complete with humorous instructions for various safety devices that could aid the audience throughout the rest of the performance.
Like the Buffluxus performance, that of the Toronto Research Group oscillated between the highly theoretical and the flat-out funny. One noteworthy performance involved Sylvester and McCaffery slowing spinning around while standing back to back and grabbing objects out of bags labeled "Premodern," "Modern," and "Postmodern." McCaffery and Sylvester then took turns riffing on each object – ranging from "William Burroughs' first novel" (an empty syringe) to "the menu from the Last Supper" – all the while satirizing the academic self-importance of Postmodernity.
Basinski and Metz will be performing once again as Buffluxus at the Western New York Book Arts Center on Feb. 25.
Email: arts@ubspectrum.com
