by Alex Kovacs
OR
Blonde wig. Monocle in left eye. White bowtie. Red-and-gold dragons emblazoned over a silk waistcoat. Trousers made from sheets of pink cardboard. Green socks. Slippers.
OR
Plastic cat’s ears attached to head. Black ribbon tied around neck. Chest covered in an X-ray photograph of a chest. Plastic globe brandished in left hand. Purple satin trousers. Clogs.
OR
Hundreds of plastic replicas of flies attached to hair. Pince nez. White blouse emblazoned with a large black “M.” Red plastic miniskirt. Black fishnet stockings. Feet inside two boxes with remote-control wheels attached to them.
The Invisible Expanding Galaxy Band
(1990–1995)
After a long period of suspicion Maximilian became a full convert to the medium of pop music at the beginning of the 1990s. For years his interest had wavered because he could not relate to what he saw as the largely adolescent emotions and stances of the music, but suddenly its aesthetics became appealing to him and he began to pay regular visits to record shops. Gathering together enormous quantities of vinyl, he became highly familiar with the ritual of record shopping, the smell of plastic and damp and old cigarettes that lingered in small shops, the act of flipping through endless rows of records at high speed in order to discover items of interest that lay amidst the thousands of forgotten and neglected acts, records that were condemned to merely be glanced at for a fraction of a second before being ignored once more and consigned to oblivion.
He got to know the frequently rude and obsessively territorial men who worked in record shops, sometimes finding himself marvelling at their often extraordinary higher knowledge of the subject, which they would casually display by playing a stream of unknown records to their customers on a daily basis, as well as by assuming an aloof authority whenever they were asked a question about a specific band or recording. Maximilian suspected that many of these men had become bitter when their own careers as musicians had floundered; once they were older they often seemed to cultivate highly arrogant mannerisms. Nevertheless, he could not help but feel a certain respect for many of these men, so self-assured and well-informed.
Towards the end of 1991 he decided to commence another project, having a number of LPs pressed, which he proceeded to secretly deposit at record shops over the following years. He paid a great deal of attention to the sleeves, but anyone attempting to listen to the records would discover that they were all blank, holding no music other than that of vinyl interacting with a needle, giving out a steady hiss.
The lavish sleeves had clearly been laboured on intensively. In each case he assembled a complex array of visual stimuli, using images that contained many thousands of miniature shapes, patterns created from repeated squiggles, lines, symbols, and indentations. Tiny grains were magnified, made immediate and visible. Bright colours shone like incandescent flames. The profusion was intended to be overwhelming, striking the eye in such a way that each sleeve would halt even the most hardened record-collector’s usual frenzy of finger flicking.
Maximilian’s LPs had titles like A Mechanical History of Reduction (1991), and If You Don’t Frolic Now You’ll Never Have the Chance Again (1994). They had all supposedly been recorded by a group of musicians known as the Invisible Expanding Galaxy Band. All of the tracks had been given the title “Anything,” though the running times of each version of “Anything” varied greatly. Fictional group members and their instruments of choice were listed on the back of each sleeve, alongside often extensive notes detailing aspects of the production process, dates of composition, inspirations for particular pieces and the locations at which they had been recorded. There was no record label or contact address. On the surface, they looked like perfectly innocuous failures. Only the curious, the sort of collector who was always in search of the strange and unknown, looking out for records which had received no attention whatsoever, were likely to pay attention to these productions. Maximilian knew that his audience would be in the minority: the people likely to become interested in artworks simply because they hadn’t been considered worthy of coverage. His records were his way of trying to speak to this demographic. For the most part he expected that it would be record shop workers who found them, but perhaps a few other intrepid persons would as well.
Sidling into the shops on Saturday afternoons, the time when the shop assistants were most distracted, Maximilian would pretend to be browsing, thumbing through records and pulling them out, setting a small pile to one side before replacing them in the stacks with examples of his own records. There was the usual fear of discovery, initially, which saw him nervously glancing around him at everyone present, wondering if he could sense any mistrust in the looks that were thrown in his direction. Eventually he came to realise that the customers never looked at each other, all being preoccupied with considering their potential acquisitions, whilst the shop-workers were all too busy reading magazines or talking with each other.
Maximilian had made a careful study of the posture and mannerisms of the casual record-buyer, focusing in particular upon the sort who never seems to actually purchase any records. After some practise, he became confident of his ability to remain anonymous, barely discernible from any other lonely browser who might stroll into a shop, lacking in memorable features to the extent that he might as well have not even been present.
He would only leave his records in small specialist boutiques, the places where genuine aficionados would meet and buy records that most people wouldn’t even have heard of. Leaving a few examples of his work in each shop, Maximilian would never return to a given target more than twice, and then only after a significant period of time had elapsed.
By placing empty records within sleeves that were teeming with forms and incidents, he hoped to set up two aesthetic poles. Infinite presence and variation was set against absolute emptiness. He saw this as a way of portraying the whole potential that lay within the medium, a display of the primordial state from which all music had emerged. For the stretches of silence to take on real meaning, it would be necessary for a listener to consider why such an object had ever been created. An individual of this ilk would need to enter into the mind of the creator and feel their way around inside, engaging with ideas about the possibilities of sound. Maximilian believed that upon discovery of his records, it was surely inevitable that a series of thoughts of this kind would fall through the mind of anyone who was genuinely devoted to the medium. Perhaps the records would only be of passing interest to most people who found them, but he felt certain that they would be talked about, inspiring small clusters of people, which was really all that he had ever aspired to with so many of his projects.
He hoped that these works would be interpreted as a message to create, that the silences would be seen as a potential beginning rather than as a point of termination, that the whole project would be understood as half formed, needing to be built upon for it to reach some state of completion. In a subtle way he was attempting to urge the listener to fill the emptiness of his records with their own sounds, with any kind of sound, whatever they might be. He would wonder if he had in fact managed to inspire anyone to actually make any music of their own, and if they had, he formed speculations about the modes it would have taken.
From time to time he liked to listen to his creations on his turntable, often on Sunday mornings. Reclining in his armchair, he would place the needle at the very outer rim of the disc, enjoying the familiar stab of the point sinking into the vinyl, followed by the crackles and hisses that congregated near the beginning of every record, soon giving way to the emergence of a clear, perfect mirror of silence; a soft, lulling sensation pulling him inwards, black and glossy and translucent, moving in ever revolving circles towards the inevitable click, as the arm reached the end of a side, and the tiny low humming of machine-silence was replaced by the many silences of the room, by the infinity of sounds which would follow the record’s conclusion.
As he listened he would invent movem
ents of music in his head that would fill out the empty spaces. He heard elaborate orchestrations, sounds of gliding and clattering, abrupt swellings of violins, simple chiming melodies played on dulcimers, screechings and hollerings like animal cries, discordant electronic interruptions, wavering notes that were shattered and reformed and broken once more, notes that were sustained for such a long time that they seemed to stretch away into whole days and nights. On those Sunday mornings it seemed as if Maximilian heard all the music in the world, or all the music he could imagine, a teeming chaos of impossibilites.
Visual Responses to the Period in Question
(1991–1994)
(During these years, Maximilian produced many thousands of doodles in his notebooks as well as on the small scraps of paper that he used as bookmarks. Arguably these vary a great deal in terms of their accomplishment and interest to either the scholar or the casual observer, but the careful eye will note a number of recurring themes and subjects.)
The Museum of Contemporary Life
(1992–1997)
Having reached the official age of retirement during the previous year, Maximilian decided that it was an appropriate moment to embark upon his last major project. This involved the creation of an institution named the Museum of Contemporary Life. It came to occupy all four floors of a warehouse in Wapping. Displaying a vast miscellany of exhibits, he believed it would rival and perhaps even surpass some of the city’s more famous museums in scope and ambition. Maximilian had written up detailed instructions for how he intended the museum to be run. If it was ever opened, after his demise, he wanted there to be no entrance fee and the public would be encouraged to roam through its spaces in any manner it deemed appropriate. Within its walls the curious spectator would surely discover much to savour and much that would enlighten.
In creating his museum Maximilian desired the achievement of nothing less than a complete transformation of the consciousness of the surrounding populace. He wished for his ideal museumgoer to enter the building with one idea of existence and to leave with another. Ideas of the “contemporary” were to be conceived here within considerably wider parameters than those which would be encountered in most public institutions, with exhibits being regularly replaced to keep up with the constant developments in the nature of contemporaneity.
As a visitor entered the building they would first encounter an area containing a selection of the newspapers which had been printed that day in London. These could be read at leisure whilst seated on a range of armchairs provided for the purpose. They were placed there with the intention of instigating ideas concerning the meaning and significance of the many things that might be considered “contemporary.” The room was an attempt to directly challenge the enclaves of the media, vessels that had inexplicably become popularly associated with the act of telling the truth.
Maximilian believed that reading the newspaper was usually a spectator sport, a species of voyeurism for all but those who sought to directly affect the more important of the events described within their pages. He also found newspapers to be cultural artefacts that possessed a strange beauty, a quality he found in them when thinking of their often somewhat arbitrary designations of what might be considered socially significant. Above all, it was this latter quality that he wished to communicate.
Passing through a large hollow doorway, visitors would next encounter a room containing hundreds of identical circular clocks displaying the time in capital cities across the world. These were accompanied by many pieces of ephemera associated with different locations, including pages appropriated from tourist brochures, labels taken from tins of exotic foodstuffs, covers of books whose titles included the relevant destinations, not to mention examples of T-shirts with “Paris,” “Tokyo” and “New York” emblazoned across their fronts. The room was steeped in an atmosphere of international intrigue and adventure, a feeling deeply indebted to the aesthetics of fictional espionage.
Beyond this lay a room devoted to statistics, in which calculations of different phenomena were arranged in a number of fonts and sizes, often with brief accompanying texts placed beside them which sought to elaborate upon their meaning. In large red numbers a digital screen held continuously evolving estimations of the population of the entire world. Oceans, deserts, mountains, and jungles were awarded approximate dimensions that were given in inches. Rates at which different nations consumed a number of universal commodities were compared in a series of coloured bar charts. A large piece of paper held a number of dots representing every last person who lived in Liechtenstein.
In the next room many “ordinary” objects were held upright by a series of white neoclassical plinths, including umbrella racks, fire extinguishers, plastic spoons, portions of carpet, paperclips, and road signs. Small typewritten cards described the exhibits in a number of ways. For the most part they held a solemn tone of high seriousness, possessing an air of objective authority, even when they were describing an exhibit that was plainly ridiculous. However, many of the “facts” related on the cards were deliberate falsifications, outrageous lies of the highest order. In some cases the cards made no attempt to describe the objects at all. Instead they proposed questions, made cryptic statements or responded to the objects in a number of poetic forms. With some of the less straightforwardly descriptive cards he had changed around their original locations after writing them, so that a card originally describing a painting was now underneath a clock, a flower was being described as a television set, and a wine glass had become a bicycle.
Opposite this display, crowding a number of antique mahogany cabinets, there was another collection of objects, artefacts that could not easily be come across in London, or indeed, anywhere else. Items of conventional beauty alternated with those that some would describe as kitsch. A wooden voodoo doll with straw hair and piercing eyes stared outwards, emanating a mesmerising force of weird unsettling splendour. A cigarette lighter crafted in the form of Notre Dame Cathedral was illuminated whenever asked to produce a flame. Ear trumpets from provincial towns in Scandinavia had been decorated with rustic scenes bordered with a motif of flowers and vines. A plastic telephone, manufactured in the ’70s, bore the resemblance of Marilyn Monroe, who lay horizontally upon a chaise longue with one eye winking in invitation. Next to her a pine marten was suspended in motion, a victim of taxidermy who evidently intended to pounce on some prey that was unfortunately absent.
Another room held examples of the many different kinds of clothing being worn in a given year. They were placed upon a series of mannequins, each one manufactured in a slightly different style so that it almost seemed as if each was in possession of an entirely separate personality. Their limbs had been manipulated to form a number of unusual shapes and there was no evident pattern in their arrangement around the space. Certain of their number appeared to be excitable and others morose. Whilst one hovered close to the ceiling, seemingly engaged in the act of hang-gliding, another had placed her ear to the ground, evidently straining to listen to sounds that she believed would be of considerable interest. As fashions changed, their positions and gestures would also, but somehow, with an eerie persistence, their bodies would remain fixed in their exterior form, with identical physiques of an admirable quality, never becoming tarnished with the ravages of time. It would be impossible to predict exactly what they might be wearing in future years, but it was certain to involve choices that kept abreast of what ought to be considered suitable attire.
In January, each year, Maximilian would amble through the streets taking a series of Polaroid photographs that possessed only one factor in common: without exception all expressed aspects of the “contemporary” and in a myriad of ways tended to involve different forms of banality. He avoided depictions of all locations and objects that were obviously the consequence of previous eras, but besides this one criterion, which was haphazardly applied in any case, all he sought to do was to take as many photographs as he possibly could in rapid succession. They were to avoid all fo
rms of aesthetic merit, embodying instead the pleasures of randomness. He attempted to discover scenes which would give rise to “bad” photographs. Poorly lit and framed, they existed without any overt forms of composition. Once enough had been taken each year, he placed them upon the walls without any ceremony or explanation other than the inclusion of the dates on which they had been taken.
During the course of 1993 Maximilian went out of his way to discover objects that heralded the name of the year across themselves. Calendars, diaries, annual reports, books, and T-shirts were all sought after and hoarded together. Once assembled in one place they formed a veritable collage of 1993 as seen from many different viewpoints, competing visions of a year that was shared by all who accepted this particular calendrical convention, but which could give rise to as many different experiences as there were people who lived through them. If the museum were ever to be opened after Maximilian’s death, one of the duties of those running it would be to provide annual replacements of these objects.
On the second floor hundreds of television screens played a constant stream of footage taken from a number of stationary cameras that had been placed secretly within the confines of the city’s many High Streets, picking up facial gestures of pedestrians who generally spent most of their time either shopping or going to and from their workplaces. They also recorded the occasional fight in parts of Hackney or along the Old Kent Road. Maximilian believed that in doing this he was providing an artistic response to the growing amount of surveillance taking place in the culture at this time, but there was also the blunt fact of the present day available within these images, clear evidence of the large amounts of vague shuffling from one location to another that most of the populace regularly engaged in. Nevertheless, he saw a certain amount of hope in the images and he believed that the voyeuristic desires they encouraged were difficult to dismiss with ease. There were undeniable joys to be gained from having simultaneous access to the evident visual and internal differences between, say, Chelsea and Greenford, or Hampstead and Rotherhithe, or Tooting and Saint John’s Wood. Sometimes Maximilian would spend hours gazing at the screens absorbed and fascinated.