Cecilia Wee and Hayley Newman

Subway Sect is a new radio series, produced by Maria Bartolo and CR’s Eliza Williams, which is airing on Resonance FM, London’s art/experimental radio station, over the next six weeks. The shows aim to explore the complex relationship between art and music and take the form of a series of conversations between artists, musicians, writers, designers, djs and music video directors.

The shows go out each Wednesday at 1pm on Resonance (104.4 FM or online at www.resonancefm.com) and we’ll also be bringing you transcripts of highlights from the shows each week on the CR blog.

On this week’s Subway Sect, artist Hayley Newman is in conversation with broadcaster and curator Cecilia Wee, who co-curates the monthly inter-arts social occasion Rational Rec. Hayley is most famous for her performance art, and has exhibited and performed at galleries including the Camden Arts Centre, the Barbican, and Matt’s Gallery in London. The two discuss the influence that music has had on Newman’s work, as well as some of her most significant performance works. The interview was recorded in London earlier this year.

On early memories

Hayley Newman: I lived in a music-less house so I didn’t have any records. We had an old radiogram… (laughs) This is true! Which I remember took about five minutes to warm up. If you wanted to listen to anything you had to switch it on and then there was some kind of “magic” and it suddenly came on.

Eliza Williams: Were you aware of art at that time or did music come first?

Hayley Newman: I like these questions because you can be quite crude and rudimentary - because anything you know between age six and 10 is. I was really into watercolours (laughs) and I was in the local watercolour club. I used to go once a week with this fireman called Keith who used to take me to the watercolour lesson. In terms of artists, who would I have known about? Well - Monet and Gauguin… so I was already switched on to art at that age and quite self-directed and motivated even though it was in a room of grey-haired people - and I was like the child prodigy with my watercolour stuff that I was fiddling with.

On musical equipment

EW: Can you talk a bit about the musical equipment that you remember, for example, the radiogram. Was that a fascinating thing to you or just a practical thing that gave you sound - did you like the actual object?

HN: It was quite extraordinary, the radiogram. It was very magical. What I liked was listening to it warming up, more than listening to what was on it. It had this kind of vacuum sound when you switched it on and it kind of slowly came to life. Then when it had come to life you could only get Radio 4 on it which was essentially very boring – so maybe I’d switch it off again and then switch it on and wait for it to slowly breath back to life again. So in terms of technology we didn’t have any at home. Maybe my sister had a tape recorder – she was a bit more modern than me.

We had a piano and we would all sit around the piano although no one could play - it’s a really weird family isn’t it! We‘d play the piano without knowing how to play it. So maybe that’s a good start for thinking about what I do as an artist actually - playing music without actually being able to play any instruments or knowing how to play any instruments, or having any kind of knowledge.

EW: It sounds like you were able to just plunge in and experiment?

HN: Yeah, I kind of do that as an artist – just go straight in and do it. I have never really understood why you’d need to be virtuosic, it never really appealed to me. In fact I’m probably mortally afraid of it, more than anything else.

CW: Yeah, especially when you are younger and you’ve got this instrument in your house like the piano. You just feel curious about it and want to experiment whereas when you get older you feel more afraid of it and you think you have got to be good at it in order to do it. So that’s an interesting idea for keeping curiosity as a basis of artistic practice.

On Cage, Reich and Minimalism

HN: At the age of 12 I had a scholarship at The Guildhall School of Music and I’d go there every Saturday so had this very in-built hierarchical relationship with classical music – a very conservative take on what music was. I had a kind of moment or epiphany when I was 16, when we had an experimental music class and the teacher sung a John Cage score. I remember sitting in this class and weeping… (laughs) And looking at the score as she sung, crying and thinking, “Oh my god, this is amazing – this is something I can identify with.” And at that moment I realised that all the other stuff that I had been doing I couldn’t identify with. I was going through the motions, doing what you should do - you know, trying to learn the piano at 14 when your hands are like sausages. So when she sang suddenly I realised that actually I can engage with this thing and there is something I like about it. I didn’t know what it was, but it moved me emotionally and it kind of changed my life from that moment.

CW: I got really into Heavy Metal when I was a teenager. I was in a band and played gigs, and whilst I was doing that I was also a student at CYM (Centre for Young Musicians). I was getting lessons there in composition and piano, so there was a weird juxtaposition between learning classical piano and being into Metal. Then I got into a composition class and they started playing Steve Reich and lots of really interesting Minimal stuff, and Conlon Nancarrow and that was like “Oh my god!” That was one of the epiphanies for me.

Hayley Newman, Whistle Concert, courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London

First work in art and music

HN: After my Cage experience I wrote a score for hairdryers – Hairdryers and Gossip. It was a visual score, I’ve still got it somewhere. My mum was a hairdresser so it was obviously autobiographical. So people were switching on and off their hairdryers and occasionally you’d have someone going (adopts a housewife tone) “Oh really?” and “Did she really say that to you..? Oh never!” Then the hairdryers went back on and off again. And then there were sounds of scissors going “chop, chop, chop” (laughs). It was bonkers. But that’s what’s so fantastic about imagination – suddenly it’s opened up and let loose on the world and you realise, “I can do anything!” But it was all written and all scored on this beautiful notepaper you used to get if you were at The Guildhall – a drawn score of hairdryers on exquisite notepaper.

EW: So would you say that was your first artwork?

HN: Yeah, I think it was probably my first artwork and my first musical composition in one, because I suppose that Cage moment that I am talking about is to do with consciousness and maybe at 16 I started to engage in a different way. By that time I knew I wanted to be an artist.

EW: How did you know that?

HN: Because I knew I didn’t want to be a musician! (laughs) I just couldn’t handle the conventions of it and I couldn’t handle the idea that you become a technician to service a piece of music. I think that’s why that John Cage thing was so important - I could understand that you didn’t have to be a technician, you could be creative within that. You didn’t have to work within orthodoxy.

First performances

HN: Other than the “hairdryer” score, the first public musical performance I ever made was when I was in my final year at The Slade and it was at “Nose Paint” in 1996. I made a performance with a record, and on the record I had sampled my own voice singing “ooooo” and then I modulated that. Goodness knows how I did it because I was useless at anything technological, but I modulated that over an octave in pitch. So it slowly went “oooooooooo” (demonstrates the same sound on slower speed). Then I went to Porky’s and got that cut onto an acetate. I had three record styluses that I’d ripped out of the arms of various record players and I attached them to my fingers – in the performance I play a vamp, I’ve got long nails and a gorgeously silky dress on - and I play the record like an instrument but it’s my own voice. In the performance I’m standing and I put my arm out in front of me and with one finger and one needle I play the record all the way through. If you know anything about record players, the arm of the record player is weighted - it’s very delicately balanced. But if you can imagine making your own arm and trying to get that to be like the arm of a record player and being in front of 300 people and shaking… (laughs) It was quite difficult to control. So the idea was that you play it all the way through so that the public would know what was on the record and then I started generally vamping it up on the record, and playing chords and single notes and it ends up with me just scratching this record’s surface and just going crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy and then (demonstrates horrible sound of scratching) and that was it! (laughs). So that was my first ever public performance and then I carried on doing these performances which were incredibly gendered, because of course music always portrays itself as something that is genderless – those knob-twiddling sessions that you get are supposed to be neutral but it’s kind of not, it’s boys and toys. My take on that was to be overtly feminine, so this vampish woman is playing a record of her own voice with three record pick-up styluses attached to her fingers.

Hayley Newman, Microphone Skirt, courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London

Other performance works and events

HN: The next piece that I made was the Microphone Skirt piece where I had 20 high-ball mikes sewn into an elastic belt and just did this erotic go-go dancing, like serial go-go dancing. All the works are climactic so they all start relatively low key and then they just reach this climax and then that’s it, they end and evaporate. So those were the kind of works I was making in 1996.

EW: One thing I’m interested in in your performances is how you document them afterwards. I was thinking about one in which you produced a record afterwards, so part of the performance is printing…

HN: Oh yeah, Karaoke Record Cutting?

EW: Yeah, that’s the one.

CW: Oh, that was fun, I went to one of those!

HN: Did you get a record?

CW: Yes…

HN: It sounds like it was recorded in 1910 doesn’t it?

CW: …I didn’t listen to it – someone’s got mine! I don’t know where it is.

HN: (disappointed tone) Oh!

EW: (To Hayley) So how do you see that finished record at the end? Do you see that as a record of the performance, or do you see it as an art object, or what…?

HN: Well, just to explain, the Karaoke Record Cutting was an event that happened in the Barbican as part of the Christian Marclay show and it was with Alex Kolkowski, myself and Matt Wand. We are co-owners of an East German record cutting machine which is made out of an old sewing machine, I don’t know how it works – but, anyway, whatever… we’ve got this thing. So we decided to do an evening of karaoke record cutting where I was the MC, we had someone playing a grand piano and Alex was cutting records of the recordings of people singing. For me I kind of liked the old-fashioned-ness of it, like the piano and record player, but if you think of that in relation to the rest of my work I was also interested in this idea of the record as a recording device that then puts immediate distance between yourself and an event, or yourself and your performance. So people could sing their song and in the Barbican we also had a record deck where you could listen back to your recordings straightaway so there was a jump between the immediacy of the performance – the contemporaneousness of it, and then listening to a record where it sounded like it was recorded underwater in 1910! Because also the cutter wasn’t working really properly that evening, so there’s automatically this massive gap put between you as a performer and you and the technology. That did relate to my interest in documentation, but very tenuously - it was kind of a sleight of hand more than anything else, and an excuse to do an event and set a framework in which others could perform.

EW: Can you talk a little bit more about your broader interest in documenting performances?

HN: Well, like the music, it’s kind of there… but it’s not my primary focus. For example, I’ll do a performance and have someone taking snapshots on a crappy camera. In 1998 I made Connotations: Performance Images 1994-1998 which was presented as a series of 21 photographs of the fictional life of a performance artist from 94–98. So they had crazy things, like one performance where I go sunbathing in an inverted bikini, so I cover all the parts of my body other than the bit that would be normally covered by the bikini and I get burnt boobs. I was interested in how performance is represented and how it’s often represented in a single image and in a way Connotations was a critique of that - that distillation of something that is quite sprawling and confused and processed based into an image and text. So Connotations took out the experience of performing and just went straight to the document.

Rational Rec launch night, October 2005, Bethnal Green Working Man’s Club

EW: (To Cecilia) How do you see Rational Rec fitting in with these things – do you see that as a way of being able to explore and bring some of these ideas to an audience?

CW: Yeah, Rational Rec has developed in a way that we hadn’t expected, we have got much bigger audiences. The reasons for doing Rational Rec are various, everything from we know lots of different people between us - myself, Russell Martin, who is a visual artist, and Matthew Shlomowitz, who is a composer - we know people from theatre, film, visual arts, performance, music etc. The idea was to bring them together to kind of say, you know, “You two should really meet each other because I think you would have a really interesting conversation”. And also not necessarily to explore work-in-progress but things that people wanted to put on where there wasn’t otherwise space for them. The other reasons for doing RR is because at that time, and I’m not sure if there’s something now even, contemporary classical music hadn’t been given a year-long place in London. There’s lot of festivals from a couple of days to three-week seasons, but there’s no space for it all year round – and that was really important to us.

HN: Yeah, my experience of the experimental music scene as opposed to pop and rock is that it is an incredibly social space for dialogue, in which you can contribute by making a piece of music or by doing something and it’s actually a very open system that allows you to do that, in a way that our art structures don’t or didn’t. The art structure is that you have to be invited to something, so there’s automatically a hierarchy. Or you have to be in a scene or something. But with music it’s almost like you could do one thing and suddenly you were part of this whole network and you knew people very quickly. So for example, I met Steve Beresford when I was younger and had immediate access to these people in a way that you don’t in the art world. Those people, for whatever reason, made themselves inaccessible, or the system did – but with music you had direct contact and suddenly felt part of a community and for me that was incredibly important. (To Cecilia) I think that’s what you’ve done with Rational Rec. You set it up with a different focus, so the dialogue and thinking are around contemporary classical music and it’s incredibly important.

CW: Yeah, because in music the performers or artists are present visually and I guess there’s a different understanding of what the scene is and it does just seem more accessible.

HN: Well, yes and no, because it’s also incredibly obscure! (laughs)

CW: Yes…

HN: And there is this real trainspotter thing, isn’t there? Which I got really geeky about and had to stop myself… knowing all the dates of things and where people were doing things… And it’s very boyish. It was just too much. (laughs) I was just copying what all these men were doing and partly you feel competitive and you think “I need to know this stuff and do it” and then there’s a certain point when you think “I don’t need to know all this stuff” and compare notes on who drummed on this or that or whatever, it’s just not important to me right now.

On memorable music performances

EW: Are there any music performers that inspire you?

HN: I love them all! I love any live music. But one of the most intriguing ones was when I saw Vic Godard in Subway Sect - this was a few years ago, now they are like a pub band – and he was brilliant. He did the most amazing performance, he had a pair of reading glasses on and he had all these words as notes. Just the fact that he didn’t do the rock star thing – that he just read it – he sung and made the music in a very kind of normal way, it was quite extraordinary. But then I love Iggy Pop and love all the extravagant, energised… I just think it’s a brilliant space for some sort of transferral of energy and can see that happening on so many different levels, whether it’s Vic Godard reading in his glasses or Iggy Pop swinging from a bannister. Both for me are extraordinary and life-enhancing in a way.

EW: What do you think the relationship with music is now in your art?

HN: I’m completely off it at the moment! I’m in denial. I’m just not interested at all – it’s strange to say it as I came through something that had such a strong identification with music, and my formative years as an artist were so closely linked to that. Music was the space I occupied and worked in and I got my opportunities within, but actually I think the ideas and discourses in art practice are far more interesting, and I’m waiting for the ideas within music to catch up, or move more quickly or more eruditely or reflexively and to then go back into it. I found the electronic scene in the 90s really exciting and it ignited my imagination, but I haven’t felt that for about five years or so now – is that quite damning?! (laughs).

CW: That’s interesting, why do you think it is? Is it music theory that you have a problem with or the artists who are involved in music at the moment, or sound art that you just don’t think is that interesting?

HN: It’s not that I don’t think it’s interesting, there are just other things that I’m more interested in. My centre and need as an artist has just shifted. In the stuff that I did in the 90s it was very much about me exploring myself as a performer and exploring the performance space of music… I don’t know, it’s strange.

CW: It’s interesting, because I’ve had a similar thing, I don’t think my centre is in musicology and the writing about music anymore. That’s been a really hard decision, even though it’s been a very subtle shift into looking at performance and the ideas of performance more. I still see the two linked through the presence of bodies and temporal unfolding… and I’m still interested in listening, but not in engaging in the discourse on an intellectual level.

(both laugh)

HN: You can stop the interview now if you want!

Next Wednesday on Subway Sect will be director Dougal Wilson and artist/DJ Shelley Parker. Transcripts of the first two shows can be found here (Kevin Shields in conversation with Brendan Lynch) and here (Peter Saville with Dan Fox).