A m a n d a T r a g e r

E r i k M o s k o w i t z

C U C K O O

L A N D

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Hearing Voices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5Christopher Eamon

Bomb Magazine Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19Craig Kalpakjian

Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35

Production Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

Hearing Voices

Christopher Eamon

Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager’s Cloud Cuckoo Land sets to music an experi-mental narrative based on a failed utopia of the same name in Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds. In the latter, two earthly cofounders name their ‘city in the sky’ Cloudcuckooland. Set apart from humans, the city for birds floats adrift between earthly society and the heavenly home of the gods. In disrupting and intervening in the usual relation between humans and gods, the birds gain new power, becoming rulers of an authori-tarian state of their own. Utopian dreams result in nothing better than a city like that from which they had hoped to escape. Interpreted as an al-legory for contemporary Athenian events, the absurdist tale retains a powerful message about false hopes for freedom through isolation and self-partitioning.

In Moskowitz and Trager’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, the story, which is recited and acted in part by the artists themselves, bares little resem-blance to its ancient counterpart, except in the

sense that a contemporary form of commune, called an “Intentional Living Community,” fea-tures as the setting for this quasi-theatrical work. Here the work tells an intentionally fragmented story about a couple who have left the city to relocate in a planned community hoping for a better way of life and it is told in song. Recorded on multiple tracks, the artists’ voices, mixed oc-casionally with others, are collapsed into a single harmony that retains within it audible hints of its multiple sources. The voice track figures as a kind of multiplicity, even as the track is the same for all characters. Each character is dubbed with this single ‘communal’ voice, acting to blur the identities of the characters, which in realist the-ater are conventionally assumed to represent individual subjectivities. This shared voice para-doxically provides the work its ethereal unity.

The setting for the action, which, in the first scene, is a bedroom and nearby kitchen, in which father and son are seen standing in front of a photographic image of a bed as though lay-

ing on it. The bed has been photographed from above, enlarged to life-size and printed onto a hanging scrim. The wife, played by Trager, is standing in an adjacent kitchen. The scrim is not just a convenient solution to the problem of a set; it immediately denaturalizes the work for viewers accustomed to the conventions of theatrical mimesis. The printed scrims created for each scene are incorporated with variations into the resulting installation, along with props such as another bed and chairs like those used in the shoot.

The community of the ‘like-minded’ turns out to be other than it was hoped to be. Through a narrative technique borrowed from Aristophanes—the introduction of an intruder—the story develops into a crisis that shatters the apparent peace of the planned community. Next, an incident at a party invites a commentary on the nature of art. In the midst of the action, a cut occurs as the artists are now situated in an editing suite positioned, at this moment, outside the central narrative. They appear to be searching for an appropriate form for their story just as ancient Greek community founders sought one for their polis. Cut back to the party and the two are back in character, observed by a town elder played by video artist Joan Jonas. Violence erupts as the character played by Trager confronts the intruder (“Booker”) played by Moskowitz on the topic of his artistic choices. The scene is not really an agon or debate, but is rather one-sided, resulting in unleashed frustration and a slap across the face.

The search for a proper aesthetic form is no doubt a crucial question for any artist. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, this episode echoes an earlier work entitled Soft Version (2006), where the computer once again provides the leitmotif, as editing software on a computer monitor presents two frozen clips of Trager, while she and Moskowitz peer at it and lip sync their lines to the synchronized ‘multi-voice.’ At its base their collaborations take the material form of digital video. As a kind of non-form, it has ramifications for the meaning of their work, such as the effect of their voice track. Technol-ogy has never had more impact on art than it has today. Digitization has the potential to affect all aspects of daily lives, from being used in looking after household finances, to education and entertainment; Life has now at its base a truly dematerialized reality. This has its downsides too, as digital tools of

abuse are as efficacious as tools for new artistic forms. When employed in a theatrical setting, the effect of digital media (the effect of media-tization and digitalization) has unleashed new possibilities. Prime examples include the unique theater of New York’s The Wooster Group, two productions by which, Nayatt School and Sa-konnet Point, featured the theatrical debut of Moskowitz as a youngster.

Many of the group’s most important works include an embrace of multiple voices, on multiple formats—video, audio, live and re-corded. They are often simultaneously spoken or presented on audio loops. A recent produc-tion of Hamlet (2007) took as inspiration and source a film of Richard Burton performing Hamlet on Broadway in 1964 made for screen-ing in select cinemas.

In the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, fragments of the original source are played on screen be-hind the players. Overhead the same fragments of this original source are played on monitors such that only those on stage can see it. The video has been reedited to include jump cuts and fast-forwards, two aspects of cinematic and video temporality not native to the theatre. Characters on stage recite the original Shake-speare, act their parts, but all staging and on-stage movement become distanced from any di-rector’s expressive interpretation as movements are dictated by an actual mimesis, performed live, of the newly fragmented and reedited vid-eo footage including all of its jerks, jumps and rapid shifts in tempo. Each of the cast becomes ventriloquists of motion, a possibility brought about by cinematic and televisual time, one that also alters contemporary perception and there-

fore, as is clearly espoused by The Wooster Group, historical forms. Not un-like how Cloud Cuckoo Land reasserts the pertinence of Greek comedy.

Trager and Moskowitz, though not directly influenced by the Wooster Group, similarly experiment with the form of their storytelling, and in Cloud Cuckoo Land, this experimentation although directed at all aspects of the production, pays specific attention to the voice, here, taking the form of a digitally layered ‘multi-voice.’ Its choral dialogue is experienced as a form of ventriloquism because in Cloud Cuckoo Land each character speaks the words of others. This characteristic reflects a kind of ‘dialogic penetration,’ to bor-row from Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose first major book Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics was not translated or pub-lished in the West until the late 1960s. Bakhtin’s concepts of the ‘polyphonic novel,’ the invention, of which he ascribes to Dostoyevsky, resonated deeply with Western, especially French, intelligentsia around the time of the May ’68 student revolts (especially with Julia Kristeva who may have been one of the first to read Bakhtin for its potential contemporary political implications). At this time, many in Western Europe were eager to rework Marxist cultural analysis into one that was not authoritarian as in the contemporary Soviet

Installation at 303 Gallery, NYC 2009

example. And, although Bakhtin’s philosophy is not really Marxist, but rather a combination of theology and phenomenology, it does not contradict Marx-ist readings. What it does is outline the difference between a monologic work of art or literature through which the author’s omniscient voice is spoken through all characters, and the polyphonic, where each character speaks to others from her own ‘I-position.’ The “I-position” of another is interpreted from her own unified world view. This of course provides each character at least two voices, her own and that ascribed to she from others, that is if we ig-nore the voice now lingering in the background, belonging to the author. This revelatory idea, discovered in what Bakhtin considers to be the first modern novel, found fertile ground in the France of the late sixties, as monological thought was rejected and themes such as glossolalia and différence were em-braced by the, at times, Maoist leading proponents of post-structuralism.

A prime concern oftentimes left out of discussions and/or applica-tions of Bakhtin’s striking ideas is the fact that his literary theory presup-posed a social philosophy. For each character to speak both in her own voice from her unique point of view, while anticipating the response of the other from her own understanding of the other’s point of view, which does not

necessarily correspond to that other’s point of view—for this to be possi-ble—requires a community. Interestingly, it is this 1960s-era idea of commu-nity that began to take hold all over the Western world as an utopian ideal. Whether Marxist or not, the polyphonic cannot be owned by any particular ideology, yet as an artist aspiration, at its core, it evinces a deep respect for others and knowledge of one’s ontological limits, which is much more than admirable.

Since the 1960s, Richard Burton was known as “The Voice.” His deep timbre and Welsh accent resonates in one’s aural cavities. Whether play-ing Hamlet or the embattled George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, his tone transcends his Shakespearian training, becoming an early form of aural branding. As “The Voice,” Burton gave the entertainment industry what it both needs and aspires to: the logic of the known, differentiated to minuscule degrees, like costume-changes, let’s say. The Voice takes precisely the form of the 21st Century monological discourse required to sell. It can be easily anticipated and is rewarded through repetition, made knowable in advance and hence rendered consumable. For each production of Hamlet on stage or in film, many, many voices are suppressed to make this one voice recogniz-able. For Moskowitz and Trager it would seem suppression is not their theme. While the back story of Cloud Cuckoo Land is failed utopias and the self-serving ends for which they have been sought, their historicized reinterpre-tation tells us something more complex. In terms applied to the literature, Bakhtin called the monologic a “solipsistic separation.” It seems for Moskow-itz and Trager even community-minded aspirations, an admirable notion for Bakhtin, can take on a far too monological dimension.

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Bomb Magazine Interview

Craig Kalpakjian

Cloud Cuckoo Land set and performer Robert Janitz’s bedroom

CRAIG KALPAKJIAN I’m interested in the way you use music, the vocal storytelling. Do you see yourself in relation to someone like Rob-ert Ashley and to an avant-garde art tradition?

ERIK MOSKOWITZ Not particularly, but I do relate to it as a way of working with a narrative through song. The voice is so expres-sive that it becomes musical in and of itself.

AMANDA TRAGER Joan Jonas spoke her lines in that Ashley piece.

EM For me, her way of speaking and in-teracting with the music became emotionally heightened and accessible—like a song.

CK The theatrical stylization of everyone singing the lines together evokes a Greek chorus.

AT Technically, it’s just the two of us sing-ing the lines of all the characters.

EM The idea for the artists-as-chorus was to incorporate a kind of unreliable narrator who may, in actuality, be the central focus of the piece. The chorus acts as something the viewer can hold onto while the narrative runs off the rails.

CK The scenes in Cloud Cuckoo Land with your characters editing the video of themselves make me think of Gimme Shelter, showing Mick Jagger in the editing room as he goes over footage of his concert where the person in the audience gets stabbed. Altamont is always seen as the end of the ‘60s, the “death of the Wood-stock Nation,” one of the moments when it all crashed.

EM Growing up in the art world I wit-nessed a similar the crash-landing of a similar idealism in New York’s downtown art scene. There had been was a notion of: “This commu-

nity is special. Being a part of it is special. And then there are those other people—”

AT Like my people on the Upper East Side?

EM “—and they’re outside of this community.” But the notion of a dif-ference between the art world and another world was obliterated at a certain point. I think that unspoken hierarchies are common to supposedly utopian communities. A line is drawn that separates something from something else. Initially, that was my interest in this project: to look at that line and how it gets fucked up. So we created characters that are specifically geared toward making a mess of the situation.

AT In Cloud Cuckoo Land the character I play is really uptight. As she joins this community it’s revealed that she can’t deal with Erik’s character. He’s completely accepted by the others although he’s walking into things while reading books or crawling into bed with couples in the middle of the night so he can cuddle. Creating this piece, I definitely envisioned my actual self with my own hang-ups in this scenario. I wouldn’t have done well. An-other thing about this return-to-the-commune story: it’s unfolding in the present moment. There’s a dovetailing of the manner in which people today, including artists—with all of their neurotic, super-controlling attitudes—are implausibly trying to do something inspired by the ‘60s.

EM Looking at this kind of society through a lens and the editing pro-cess—and that’s why I like the Altamont reference—relates to the Panopti-con, a kind of violence, which is somewhat inherent in the imaging process itself.

EM: Or retelling the story of personal trauma. Maybe it’s more of a per-sonal message than a social statement. This relates to our latest piece, The Story of Elfranko Wessels, where our dynamic as an “artist-couple” is enmeshed with

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our subject’s socio-political struggles. We emphasize the home as opposed to a site of production.

AT: That’s also from the 60s, mostly feminism: the personal being the political.

EM: But specifically in terms of the art world — that seems to be a ques-tion now in terms of the institution and the possibility for intervention. How does that situation function — or not? Questions like these seem easier to deal with on a personal level. Relating the issues around Amanda and I mak-ing a particular work and presenting it in a particular way feels like a manage-able way of looking at the situation.

CK: This returns to what you were saying earlier about an us-vs-them mentality. The idea of defining a group or community by drawing a line is very much like Carl Schmitt and his politics of the enemy. This Outside or Other complicates the usual ideas of Utopia in an interesting way, as does the crisis or external catastrophic event. Do you know Hanecke’s Time of the Wolf?

AT: We talked about that film a lot.

EM: His films are amazing. Not just the way they tell stories but the ways in which they interact with the cinema audience. He’s really adept at address-ing the context and architecture of the cinema and how it’s expected to oper-ate, but in really weird ways.

CK: Like the interaction with the viewer in Funny Games.

AT: The self-reflexivity. But if you’re not interested in those things, there’s always just the story itself. That notion is attractive to us; there being different entry points to our work.

CK: Erik, you were in the Wooster Group, right?

EM: I went to an alternative public school in the West Village. When I was in elementary school, we never had to do anything, literally. We would come to class and the teacher would ask: “What would you all like to do today?” Eventually I kind of stopped going because I got involved with the Wooster Group. I’d go to school for half the day and then Spalding would pick me up and bring me down to the garage for rehearsal. Talk about utopian refuge!

AT: When we bought this building there was an offhand notion to real-ize utopian dreams, you know, in a small way. Our first tenant downstairs was a theater company from Bushwick High School mentored by... the Wooster Group! They’d use the space to rehearse and to present classics like Shake-speare to people in the neighborhood and beyond. Initially it was an amazing experience but it turned into a kind of hell. The kids were given the keys to the space to rehearse but they’d use it on weekends to party until 4 am. I mean a lot. So it was like: the Utopian Dream is over — I need to get some SLEEP.

EM: They did this version of Paradise Lost where they used the building as a physical metaphor: they were on the ground floor but they referred to the upstairs (our space) as heaven and the basement as hell. There was this little trapdoor they used to descend to hell. It was genius. It pointed out the ridicu-lousness of us being up here, playing the Landlords, the Artists.

BOMB 115 | Spring 2011 and http://bombmagazine.org/article/4914/

Installation at Momenta Art, Brooklyn 2008

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager are collaborating artists whose creative partnership began in 2008. Their audio-visual work inhabits ideas around collectivities and self-determination. They produce narrative installation and video works featuring characters whose voices are baffled, replaced or augmented by dubbed singing to a ventriloquized effect. These voice-tracks, which they compose, perform and record, mesh identities in a fauxtopian gesture while tapping darker desires to control and manipulate.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Writing, Direction, Editing : Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager

Sound track composition/performance : Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager

Lighting/Camera : Marcus Burnett

Choreography : Elke Rindefleisch

Cast

Bianca. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Amanda Trager

Booker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Erik Moskowitz

Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Robert Janitz

Joan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Joan Jonas

Son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Elio Bourcart

Residents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elke Rindefleisch Company

(including Adriana Chavez, Chris Woltmann, Caroline Copeland, Kerry Stichweh),

Stephanie Vevers, Ronnie Bass, Karl Wenninger, Katie Kehoe, Myles Kehoe,

Karly Kehoe, Colin Duck, Hermine Ford, Robert Moskowitz and Zina.

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Presenta t ion His to r y

EXH IB IT IONS

2010 Rencontres Internationales, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin New Media, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown

2009 Mary’s Choice, 303 Gallery, NYC Pulse Miami Art Fair, Miami, Florida Cloud Cuckoo Land, Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, BC, Canada

2008 Cloud Cuckoo Land, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York

SCREENINGS

2013 Artist in Focus Retrospective, The Pompidou Center, Paris Images Sometimes Tremble, The Showroom, London (programmed by The Otolith Group) Experiments in Cinema, 9th Berlin International Director’s Lounge, Berlin

(programmed by Bryan Konefsky)

2011 Cloud Cuckoo Land, Meridian Gallery, San Francisco (curated by John Zarobell) Expecting the Images, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon A Purpose on Image, Beton7, Athens, Greece BOS Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY (programmed by Microscope Gallery)

2010 Carte Blanche Catherine Baÿ, The Pompidou Center, Paris Circuito Off, Venice International Short Film Festival, Venice, Italy Double-Bill, Art in General, NYC (curated by Redmond Entwistle)

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2009 Rencontres Internationales, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Rencontres Internationales, Reina Sofia National Museum &

Edificio de Tabacalera, Madrid My Librarian, Participant Inc., NY (curated by Laura Parnes) Hors Pistes 4, The Pompidou Center, Paris Hors Pistes 4, (Traveling) Institut Culturel Franco-Japonais de Tokyo, Japan &

Pera Museum (Istanbul Biennial parallel event), Istanbul, Turkey Constellations, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France High Fidelity (disambiguation), Horton & Co., NY

(NADA Video Night curated by Matthew Lyons) Let’s Stay Together, The Boiler, Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY Experiments in Cinema V4.2, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

2008 Rencontres Internationales, The Pompidou Center & Jeu de Paume, Paris

GRANTS

2009 Distribution Grant for NY State Artists, free103point9 – Catalog production

2008 Fellowship in Video, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Cuts and Burns Artist Residency Program, The Outpost, Brooklyn Finishing Funds Award, Experimental Television Center, NY

C L I C K

To watch the video component of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

www.americantrance.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publication of this catalog was made possible through the support of

Free103point9.

We wish to thank Christopher Eamon and Galen Joseph-Hunter for their extraordinary patience and support.

Interview reprinted with kind permission from BOMB magazine.

Unless otherwise noted, all images are stills from Cloud Cuckoo Land.

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