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| Su Yu-Hsien, Drummer No. 10, 2011 © Su Yu-Hsien |
The protagonist in the video Drummer No. 10 is a drummer, or shall we say, was a drummer.
Born in Zuoying, Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan, to a working class background, our protagonist started learning the drums at a young age. He later earned a living as a musician in a dance hall orchestra, but then quit because he believed a career in music was unrealistic. That was twenty years ago. Today he is listed as a vagrant with Kaohsiung County, receives his meals from the Social Affairs Bureau, and lives in a shack made of discarded materials under the Renwu Interchange along National Highway No. 10.
In
the video, we see drummer no. 10 casually beating out a rhythm on the drums for
the first time since he abandoned his music career. In the absence of other
musicians, drumming, which is usually an accompaniment, becomes a solo
performance. The stage is no longer in a dance hall, but now temporarily
located in the empty space under a highway viaduct, which also serves as our
drummer's home. The sounds of engines of cars that whizz past serve as backup
for the performance. This may seem like an unimaginable venue for a musical
performance, but really is not that unfamiliar—in music videos we always see
singers wailing out in open fields, guitarists playing solos atop high cliffs,
and pianos miraculously appearing on a beach.
Although
the Drummer No. 10's skills have faded somewhat, he is still featured in this music
video, he has invited a professional
jazz drum teacher to interpret his rhythms, and he has also published sheet
music for the drum—an honor usually reserved for master musicians. In its very essence,
Drummer No. 10 presents the pure sound of an amateur, yet juxtaposes
this sound’s naiveté with the production values of the professional music
industry.
This
is how Su Yu-Hsien (蘇育賢) and his recently established independent label, 'indi-indi,' represent outsider sound
artists. While Su’s project leaves out sex and drugs, it is still closer to
rock 'n' roll than anything else.
In
Su Yu-Hsien's hands the canonical authenticity of rock’s aesthetic is
transformed into the kind of realism we are accustomed to seeing in
contemporary visual art. In this process, all sound is inscribed with a
performer’s plight, as it is directly produced from his or her living
environment. This renders sound a combination of diverse soundscapes from the
social sphere: the soundscape in Drummer No. 10 is a shack under a
viaduct, in Su's Group Java it is the deck of a Taiwanese fishing boat
manned by Indonesian fishermen, and in Plastic Man it is the  |
| Su Yu-Hsien, Plastic Man, 2011 © Su Yu-Hsien |
Most likely, the first time they used their plastic recyclables to produce sound was for Su Yu-Hsien's video, and while their percussion skills were barely passable compared with the Drummer No. 10’s, this did not dampen their self expression. As complete musical outsiders, they demonstrated the aesthetic distance between amateur and professional in addition to producing expressive sound.
In
the three projects that encompass Sounds of Nothing, Su Yu-Hsien presents
amateur sound practices, and promotes the disenfranchised through his
independent label. To a certain extent, this echoes the rise of Taiwan's
independent music scene from the late 1990s to today, as well as the current
popularity of amateurism in globalized domains. Su Yu-Hsien's ideas about
sound, however, originate from everyone’s quotidian experiences.
Su Yu-Hsien’s setting is often Tainan, where the artist currently lives. Su usually
brings friends to play music at a practice space in a store that sells musical
instruments. Even though many of these friends know nothing about music, they
still fake it and play along, mimicking professional band members. There is an
intoxicating, joking atmosphere in the practice room during these sessions that
only results from a group of amateurs giving it their all and making art, the
result is invariably utter chaos.
Willing
to risk defending what might have been the most egregious of music scenes,
Su Yu-Hsien offers his philosophical perspective:
After two or three hours of practice and
listening to our band perform, I realized it lacked any standards from which it
could be judged, yet its scattered harmonies, which had no melody or rhythm to
speak of, were quite fresh and pure. More importantly, the inexplicable
happiness that this sound produced arose from the joy of being powerless. This
joy is fleeting, because we cannot imagine having a band that over the long-
run fears improvement. This also made me think that this kind of sound is
equivalent to the universality of non-existence (the reason for non-existence
is that its universality is built on the fact the we are all nobodies who are
not represented), which creates an opportunity to make a difference by exposing
oneself.[1]
According
to Su, 'powerlessness' is the artistic language of nobodies and is rarely established in the
cultural domain. The difference between producing and receiving sound makes it
so that outsider art practices create a distinct awareness of the cultural
domain’s limits. In his project Sounds of Nothing, Su stands at this
limit and observes the outsiders and their admirable powerlessness.
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| Su Yu-Hsien, Group Java, 2011 © Su Yu-Hsien |
The
art world certainly never lacks outsiders, but traditionally, before they are
met with approval, outsider artists successfully make their aesthetic
distinctions known with a measure of theatricality, which is possible due to
their extraordinary, if not stereotypical talent. In the last ten years, new outsider figures have been rising
rapidly on a wave of subculture fanaticism, and
introduced through curatorial mechanisms into the international art world,
raising them to the status of cultural icons.
Su Yu-Hsien is mostly concerned with a hoi
polloi made up of nobodies lacking family connections, which are
different from those outsiders in the two categories above. If the so called 'voice of the multitude' is a formulaic metaphor used to describe the object of
realism in art, then Su Yu-Hsien insists that this metaphor serve as a ready-made,
inserting it into the contemporary art production line, and this time the
masses will make their voices heard—through CDs, music videos, and even
merchandising.
This
mass of common folk also includes the artist. Su speaks for a collectivized we, coolly writing about my people
with grave sentimentality:
No one I know, and this includes myself,
has ever had their land expropriated by the government, been adversely affected
by a factory’s heavy metal pollution, or, with the exception of those who have
had to expose their head and ears against a plain white background for a
passport photo, faced with the predicaments of foreign relations. Many
situations that are worth following have not really affected us.[2]
Although
the people of Taiwan regained their voice with the lifting of martial law in 1987,
there began a surveying, labeling, and assigning of social space to individuals
with respect to status, ethnicity, gender identity, and political ideology. In
this context, the masses, when depicted in art, are society’s fringe minority.
If this phenomenon has shaped some aspects of the politics
of representation in today’s Taiwanese art world, then Su Yu-Hsien's project
reveals a different kind of impoverishment, namely that most of us rarely face 'real
tragedy,' but rather dwell on the mediocrity of everyday life. In the art world, this sort of hoi polloi is either absent from the
genealogy of the margins, or all too briskly
marginalized, a move that neglects the disparate perceptions,
experiences, and life skills that each person may offer.
Su Yu-Hsien rewrites the way in which these hoi
polloi have been represented, using practices of amateur artists
to supplant the label of fringe minority. His strategy entails using his
independent recording label to empower the masses to use their amateurism as a
means of entering the art world. Su imports the productive power of art into
the art world while strategically, and with deliberate bias, representing
amateurs. These amateurs voice their perceptions of daily life and predicaments
while undertaking what may seem like failed simulations aimed at the art world.[3]
Su combines two discursive trajectories on the politics of sound introduced by
this year's Taiwan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale; as Su says, 'Social-political significance of sound and social-political movements using
sound are the same thing.'[4]
In
addition to being the object of representation, the masses are also agents who actively
criticize the politics of representation. In Sounds of Nothing, the
loose professional relationship between the aesthetics of sound and the experiences
of performers draw us nearer to the many realities in which the masses have
been located by the cultural domain. We cannot ignore the sheet music entitled 20
Years in the video Drummer No. 10, for it is not the culmination of
twenty years of drumming experience, but rather, twenty years of silence. For
this period of time, sound was no longer the Drummer No. 10's mode of expression,
and his identity was transformed into 'vagrant' by the government bureaucracy. The
sheet music therefore not only records rhythms, but also a suspended
subjectivity and the politics behind sound.
Sounds of Nothing indicates that a greater portion of the masses do not
regularly experience tragedy in their lives. Actually, being at the fringe of
the art world means that it is likely that their amateur sound will never be
listened to closely enough. Therefore, Su Yu-Hsien’s attempts to make
amateurism into a means of resisting the politics of representation continually
remind us that silence, deferment, and powerlessness are all as important as
having a voice. This is the melancholy state of sound, and the positions of
radical politics that reveals both the sign and bottom line of the contemporary
cultural domain.
*Translated by Eric Chang (Chang Chih-Wei). Originally written in Chinese. Published in the exhibition catalogue The Heard & The Unheard: Soundscape Taiwan, Taiwan Pavilion, The 54th Venice Biennale, ed. Amy Cheng (Cheng Huei-Hwa), Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2011.
[1]These extracts are taken from Yu-Hsien Su’s earliest, currently
unpublished, project proposal for the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th
Venice Biennale, 2010.
[2]Ibid.
[3] Traces of the
strategy known as “errorism,” which emphasizes the significance of deliberate
failure, could already be seen in the group Wonder Boyz (萬德男孩) which Su Yu-Hsien
started with artists Chiang Chung-Lun (江忠倫) and Huang Yen-Ying (黃彥穎). It seems Wonder Boyz
was the first art group in Taiwan using dance and a variety show format to
emphasize ’errorism.’ Their creative project deliberately pointed out failure,
parodying the phenomenon in the art world. The name for their group was an
allusion to the Korean girl band called Wonder Girls who became popular with their
hit song Nobody (2009). This song,
which with the help of the Internet was a global pop-culture phenomenon, was
parodied in many countries. In their early days the Wonder Boyz made it their
primary mission to imitate this Korean pop band.
[4] Su Yu-Hsien, unpublished project proposal for the 54th
Venice Biennale, 2010.
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