The 181: Composition in Three Volumes.
WE WHO LOOK AFTER is a series of situation-specific compositions that took place between November 16 and November 18, 2024. The 181 (Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, and Jason Rhodes), with special guests Sage Derezin, Eloise Fairbrother, and Kristen Morgin, gathered at three different sites across Los Angeles for compositions that jammed sonic, visual, climatic, and socially dynamic influxes into jazz-like collage phenomena. Each composition is the result of a performance that followed its own set of entropic rules, encompassing the geography of the landscape, heat, light, distances to both willing and unsuspecting audiences, and, of course, tools and instruments available to compose with. Through motion, color, sound, and the use of phantasmagoric labor, the 181 and guests improvised spontaneous melodies and scenographies that lifted the audience above the doldrums of chaos and kept us there just long enough to anticipate (and welcome?) gravity.
Tools: Orange streamer (caution tape?) - Multiple mirrors - (Tripod?) - (antennae?) - Lawn cricket ball (wooden) - Walkie-talkies - Shovel - Staple gun - Plywood plank - Reflective fabric - (cosmonaut emergency blanket?) - Various electronic devices that live in a backpack - Flashlights - Rollerblades - Sticks and stones - Microphone(s) - Headphones - Chalk-line - Recorder/ or flute - Miniature battery-powered amplifier - Djembe - Ukulele - Rectangular piece of clear yellow-green acrylic - 4 headlamps - 2 silk kite tails - Sand - Canvas O - Canvas H - Glass 14” diameter convex lens - Various lengths of rope - Kite string spool - A long strip of transparent lavender vinyl - 2 porcelain coordinate systems - 4-hole harmonica - Dust - Wind - Narrow roll of cotton batting - A recently acquired ability to play "the way you look tonight," subsequently lost - Sunset - Twilight - Suitcases - Green laser - Melodica.
To write about WE WHO LOOK AFTER, I chose to return to the locations and report in three volumes. The language is journalistic, unfeathered, syncopated, surreal in its attempt to describe what I remember hearing, what I remember seeing, which image collided with which sound. I know that everything was recorded by the 181, but that is documentation: it is forever gravity-bound. Not everything could be heard equally by everyone; not because of an assigned hierarchy to frequencies and/or ears, but precisely because, during the performances, all volumes mattered equally: the sounds of the wind, the voice prompts between performers, the birds, the shovel, etc. My curiosity about what I did not hear is why I chose to return to the sites: I assume the inaudible still lives in its environment of origin. Maybe I can see if there is anything to hear here.
16 November 2024
34.00641° N, 118.49196° W
(with the idea of approach predominant)
Author’s journal entry:
Volume 1: The ocean spilled all over it
The beach, just before sunset, along the boardwalk, the Pacific is the Loudest: to be heard is to work against it. The 181 is setting up the lab, the sound lab, perhaps, a stage, also, perhaps, a transmission post, a receiving one. I plant a shovel and lay down the plywood plank against a protruding cement lip, a ripple in the landscape, halfway between the boardwalk and the water. The dancer arms her feet with tap shoes and tests the plywood against the crashing waves. The kick-ball-changes knock hard against the water and wind and salt and other masses that toes and heels can’t penetrate. A performer, not quite a cosmonaut, lays the ground, unfolding lines, sometimes pulling, mostly dragging, and pushing toward the edge: it gets louder as the day grows shorter. Is the reflective surface – at the top of the sand tower – most certainly built to help geolocate all masses – a mirror as well? Only those with walkie-talkies know for sure. I see them speaking. I try to listen. It is night, and very bright looking away from the shore. I track the long orange tail (of a sun?) streaming away from the unquieted darkness at my back. Everything was silently recorded.
17 November 2024
34.08567°N, 118.23993° W
(mere arising [experience])
Author’s journal entry:
Volume 2: The valley below
Not quite a hill but more than a sand dune where a water tank – the type that could be full – perches at the end of a fire road. Alright, I hear the 181: mallets, cables, headphones, antennae, non-antennae, rollerblades. I use the shovel as a climbing stick. In the valley – it is no less than a valley – Andre 3000 plays his flute; thousands follow and make their way through tiny white gates and gather around tiny rollercoasters. Digging upward, the dune transforms to look as somewhere else, somewhere greener, bluer than it is. Like stepping off a merry-go-round, my legs finally land on firmer ground, around the curved edge of the tank. The shovel can rest before it becomes a drum. The orange stream is now part of the message; it has become the sentence, blowing in the wind, the sentence is blowing in the wind: letting the ones below know that there is a way up, if not out. Taps and scratches, beeps (can it be another flute?), shoes and boots against glass bottles, against spray cans: can be heard. This is the ledge, the ripple, the mid-way point. All is coming in and going out loud and clear.
18 November 2024
34.2516827°N, 118.6184718 ° W
(which it is sung)
Author’s journal entry:
Volume 3: The last bit is not a mirage
Last-minute location change: from Fred and Ginger’s grave sites to the open Chaparral a mile out or so. Our poor planning is quickly rewarded with a square foot of honeycomb – it will be used in the well, rubbed against its rippled stone wall, not too far from a sagebrush bush home to a quail choir. Come to find out, everything is useful below the surface. The rim is oval-toward-round, wide enough to lie down in it, deep enough not to be seen when lying down in it. Before descending, it seems important to record the perimeter, the dust in the space between ground and sky; all instruments come into play – the shovel (suddenly relieved it is not in a graveyard,) the modulators, antennae and other stick-like verticals –everything and everybody is prospecting along the magnetic edge, dowsing: tremolo arms, clicking tongues, screeching quails, light-fall, bats out, in unison, they all fall down. Down in the well, there is no echo. Where is the water? is replaced with Is there water? Under underground dust, looking up at Old Man’s rock, a distant glow of stop lights and stars, of uncertain orange. Bursts of green flashes spike the landscape where all is heard and seen as one.
In mathematics, an inverse function is a function that reverses the action of another function. f⁻¹(jazz): exiting and re-entering chaos. Three restorative voyages, perhaps; certainly, transformative ones, as they were to mark these sites — rather add marks to these sites — with indelible, resonant volumes.
Gioj De Marco,
Los Angeles. June, 2026.
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Bibliography:
We don’t seem to live on the same planet: A Fictional Planetarium - Bruno Latour on climate, identity, geopolitics, and Earth’s destinies /(Essay) Designs for Different Futures (Yale University Press)
The Third Table - Graham Harman (Hatje Cantz Verlag) Part of the Documenta 13: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts series.
Permissions:
Sun Ra’s music.
Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody.
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Image List
All images courtesy of the 181 and/or Gioj De MarcoImage 1 - (which it is sung)
Image 2 - (which it is sung)
Image 3 - (mere arising [experience])
Image 4 - (mere arising [experience])
Image 5 - (mere arising [experience])
Image 6 - (with the idea of approach predominant)
Image 7 - (with the idea of approach predominant)
Image 8 - (with the idea of approach predominant)
As far as they can tell, the 181 has been working together since 2007, when they found themselves gathered by the Pacific Ocean with a golden Q from Pessoa, roughly 10 yards of transparent lavender vinyl, and a broken hold on the sea’s reflection. Since then, they have appeared in places like the Arthur Craven Foundation, Milan, Italy; Stockholm Fringe Festival, Stockholm, Sweden; SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; an alley in Eugene, OR; the ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA; transmissions beamed from Maine to Sao Paulo, Brazil; Novella Gallery, New York, NY; the National Centre for Contemporary Art, St Petersburg, Russia; Slingshot Festival, Athens, GA; Herrick Cave in Lake County, OR; High Desert Test Sites HQ at the Sky Village Swap Meet, Yucca Valley, CA; a parade of sorts with Mission Street Arts, Jemez Springs, NM; live to vinyl recordings in the heart of Pisgah National Forest, Edgemont, NC; a discussion of what might be senseless at Art Weekend Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; the NEA-funded “Art on the Move” The Absolute Value of Infinity on Its Side (O Dissipation) with Locust Projects in Miami, FL; and Volcanic Attitude 2023, a contemporary art and science festival in Sicily; “Artists in Fire” residents with Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho, and are currently continuing to realize reST stOP, a non-linear series of situations composed at rest stops across the continental United States.
