About
Distortion: you ask me why some of my work is so dirty, and I think of “dirty pictures” and how the association we have for uncleanliness suggests aversion to dirty corporal conditions, body taboo…the sign system in which sound has certain prefered stock is also in my work the product of a sterilization of the overflowing body-presence, it’s muted opacity and its shrunken aurality both, this paralogical complexity and all its distortion of the media in which it is carried are points of forced commitment for me…forced upon me, I agree, because of an almost instinctive form of resistance to an over-bridled passional culture…it evinces my “conditioning” by certain subterranean ideologies of modernity (surrealism, abstraction, op-art, serialism and the post-serialist challenges—including indeterminacy…and I am a bit stubborn, maintain a continuity between the supra-rational poetries trade-marked as “dark” by decadents and moralists (two-sides of the same coin) , the so-called irrational, and the interruptive strategies of indeterminacy, such as Cage’s or Stockhausen’s or Rowe’s or Cocteau’s or Spicer’s radios, for example. Distortion represents conflicts in ideologies. Distortion and the clarity viz honesty=lack of corrective cosmetics, remains an attempt to be basic or even pure. So even things called glitch or this very dubious phraseology employed by microsounders, “aesthetics of failure”, are not simply failures so much as situations I can identify in, and as an expression of, the history of distotrtions.
Spectral Methodology: the easiest comparison is the classically over-coded text of Joyce’s Finnegan. The idea that visual, aural and verbal puns create a straining to carry any meaning rather than any emptying of the signifier or throw it into the random “open work”. Its not even the opposite direction of what happened in that situation where authority lost such grounds, that it told itself so in art school, without getting kicked out! Because even under that there was another river running. If there is a river running above us, like Nietzsche sd, there is one below us, like Mickiewicz suggests in his poem about ice…we are in some karmic mixture of these rivers, meeting face to face daily with things especially designed for us by our own conditions of desire, buried in organs, flying out from organs around us…do you ever wake up at night with a word being spoken to you? Dream is the perfect, more enigmatic cinema, I think, there is a type of mechanism inside that wants more organic and personal varieties of the things we get on the silver screen, which I don’t see anyway… It involves us all the more with artistic responsibility. The world is not finished, it is something waiting to happen all around us…
Jeff Gburek, born 1963 in Buffalo, New York, continues to be born in other places. Currently in Poznan, Poland.