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On Martin Ebner´s video In a Sideshow by the Sea
by Florian Zeyfang
It crackles, it roars, it rumbles; a pile of noise builds up, enlarges, unfolds. Then a crescendo of tone-clusters sets in, later descending like a passing futuristic car, a siren, which grows increasingly stronger.
The whole audible scenario expands further into a massive cloud of noise. It is not noise; it is sound, electronic sound. It is the synthesizer, the first digital affordable one; we are back in the 1980s, it is not a program, an app mind you, that reproduces those sounds. The small text in the bottom of the image, atop a timeline divided in three parts, prevents us from guessing: It is Sun Ra! He meets John Cage, we read (though we can’t make it out yet), at a small concert in a small sideshow in Coney Island, NY, 1986. Music like divine service, in a small club, or circus, where fire eating, sword swallowing, knife throwing, body piercing, and lying on a bed of nails were performed, before the era of TV.
The green image behind the text and the timeline respond to the sound blast with aggressive triangle forms, in the next image a young woman lifts a club-like art piece, as if to strike, but her eyes are not aggressive… Before, the video had opened with a shawl, a Hockney self portrait, a rhinoceros sculpture, a demonic head with corrugated light-lines…Within the first part of this video, two minutes and twenty seconds long, the Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin will appear, along with a kissing marble couple, many faces, some clothes, rooms, drawings…a subway station, a demonstration, a boat, the sea shore, Buddha…
I am writing these dot-dot-dots; I will have to continue to use the ellipsis, from elleipsis, which is Greek for “omission” or “falling short.” For the stream of images keeps coming in at a pace of about three seconds each, all toned in the same green, seemingly random from a collection, an unknown image bank. No way to remember them all. Now, I can stop it and scroll back, since I have the pleasure and the advantage to play back Martin Ebner´s In a Sideshow by the Sea at home on my computer. (And so can everyone, it is available online.) But do I listen first? Or watch? I remember seeing it at its premiere in a cinema. The images were green but large, filling the screen and the mind, without a stop button. The question did not occur then.
An ellipsis can also be used to indicate an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence…And so, Sun Ra´s Yamaha DX-7 has, in the meantime, died down to a mere electric humming, amplified by the sound system, applause has been given. Then even the hum disappears. We are left with silence and without the stream of images; the screen has turned to a deep red and shows the word: Pause. Now I realize that the sounds in the beginning, the noise as I called it first, is precisely what makes the silence of the break that follows so silent. And yet it isn’t silent at all. We all observed that many times: that silence is only recognized as silence when there is a little bit of sound, somewhere in the background. In this case, audience breathing, whispering, some people seem to be walking by outside the concert hall.
A concert with open doors. Martin Ebner loves open doors. During the last few years, he has often talked – and written – about the time when cinemas were not limited by the start times of the movies they were screening. Instead, they simply opened every morning and then closed at night. And the film ran all day. People walked in and out, doors were left open, sound and smoke and fragrances intruded into the cinema. Visitors ate, talked. The “film” event was distorted by foreign elements. Maybe that was a way to escape the Hollywood illusion-machine: to let real life trickle in. Today, I sometimes find it hard to even watch normal crime series on TV, since they seem too tough. Tied into the cinema seat during a blockbuster movie, the experience is much more intense, and too dramatic. It is supposed to overwhelm me, using especially sound technology; the experts, incidentally, have overdeveloped this aspect. Every death in cinema is mega-real and there are many deaths…With the open door, cinema was more a part of our real life, as in street life, home life, school life…
Somehow Ebner´s image stream refers to similar instances of over-exposure on the visual level, the seemingly endless amount of images we are exposed to, and yet, here the archive is so much more intimate. The colors are toned in order to establish a distance and, at the same time, include them in an obscure narrative, despite their apparently random selection. The additive gesture with which they are subjected to a seemingly mechanic framework recalls more poiesis than poetry, the first the Greek word for “making” from which the latter is derived. Just a “making,” since we are not provided with an ostensibly prosaic meaning in this collection, neither with the theory of an archive in the tradition of Aby Warburg. A making that takes us along and allows “some unusual thoughts appear”, as Ebner formulates it, unfinished thoughts possibly, an open door for wandering thoughts. Since after accepting the format, one comes to the conclusion that the order of images might be not as random as first thought, that the pictures might have triggered an affect in the person that pushed the trigger or who decided to select them out of the cosmos of images, which includes the internet, but also many other sources. The stream of images includes a range of references, from art history to private places. They form an inner dialogue; a memory-topography that speaks to the viewer, who, observing and being observed, is now the object of his own analogies and memories.
Most importantly for these thoughts, Martin Ebner places a break in the center of his stream, and by now we did not even get beyond that break. The color had changed, the word Pause had emerged, and now we are left with it for about one and a half minutes. Suddenly, while there is no change in the atmosphere of a concert break, the images resurface: A drawing, people, a face, the mouse-opponent of Krazy Kat…Then, as a way of reflecting the piece and the situation of the concert that was part of the “Sideshows by the Seashore” held on June 8, 1986 on Coney Island, John Cage and Sun Ra appear, laughing at each other. And as a stand-in for the original presentation of the video In a Sideshow by the Sea, as part of the Kopietheater screenings on February 20 at the 2010 Berlinale´s Forum Expanded, the image of an empty cinema screen follows…
And finally John Cage´s voice! The color of the images turns orange, a ring interfused by smoke, architecture floating on liquid light beams (we recognize Cage´s friend Isamo Noguchi), a bearded head, a pieta, more smoke… Cage´s soft humming answers, a distant reminiscence of the electric buzz that ended Ra´s improvisation in the first part of the video. Some ping-sounds permeate the gentle song that foregoes understandable words in favor of dark, mellow utterings. Somehow the images seem to turn towards nature, together with the song’s careful, archaic-Asian meanderings. With another ping, a giant bird appears, more light, more images, and then a cool looking Joe Strummer from The Clash, before the video ends with the detail of a painting – two Gepards, lingering on a steppe, mirroring the two musician-friends we have just listened to…
The ellipsis is not to be confused with the ellipse. But the latter equally derives from the Greek word elleipsis, or “falling short”. Like the ellipse, which cuts through a cone by a plane producing a closed curve, the video In a Sideshow by the Sea intersects the concert given by Sun Ra and John Cage on Coney Island, evoking a curve, but leaving us without much information about the event itself. Instead, we are informed about the moment of silence just before the meeting of two artists, traveling in an ellipse around the sun, which is music. And within the cut through the concert, seemingly at a random point, we are told that the break (the pause, as an important moment within all music, within creative outcome) is the very moment that allows us to recognize and process such a production. This applies to the music as well as to the ninety-nine images Martin Ebner collected to form the image-line that carries the video and the message. The word Pause comprises the one-hundredth image, the intersection into the stream, the condition that renders all other images visible.
(written on occasion of the exhibition “Based on a True Story”, Salvador Allende Museum of Solidarity, Santiago de Chile, curated by Yael Rosenblut, Oct-Nov 2012)