ABOUT

In 2021 Experimental Sound Studio invited Every house has a door to be the “Archive Artists in Residence” and make work in response to ESS’s Creative Audio Archive. Director Lin Hixson and dramaturg Matthew Goulish selected five works from the ESS archives and invited collaborating artists to remake their beginnings, sequencing them into a five-part performance, a lyrical trajectory and a live mini-essay for the camera. 5 beginnings: ESS directs new artists to perform the work of archive artists, facilitating a set of intergenerational introductions.

From dramaturg Matthew Goulish:

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 took 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.

I delight in the palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable.

— Henry James, from the Preface to Volume XII of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (the New York edition), 1908.

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?

1. Laetitia Sonami
   What Happened II, 1995
   Remake by Li-Ming Hu

2. George Lewis
   Randolph Street Gallery performance benefit October 7th, 1995
   Remake by Max Guy

3. Ken Vandermark
   Option Series Performance, May 22nd, 2017
   Remake by Corey Smith

4. Maria Gaspar
   On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous, August 26th, 2016
   Remake by Tim Kinsella & Jenny Polus

5. Mark Booth
   Quince Cabbage Mellon Cucumber, November 18th, 2000
   Remake by Madeleine Aguilar

This production was made possible in part by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts FCA Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund, The MacArthur Funds for Culture, Equity, and the Arts at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Experimental Sound Studio’s Archive Artists-in-Residence, and the generosity of individual donors.