Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Art Goes to the Opera

 

What Opera Might Be

How Tom Phillips’s Irma – a work that questions the genre of opera itself – is being staged
 

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What Opera Might Be

Ahead of its South London Gallery performance, how Tom Phillips’s Irma – a work that questions the genre of opera itself – is being staged

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BY ADAM HARPER IN FEATURES | 15 SEP 17

Just over 50 years before its performance at the South London Gallery this September, Tom Phillips's Irma: An Opera (1969/2014) was a dusty, non-descript Victorian novel in a Peckham flea market, a mile or two down the road. In the late 1960s, London's culture of experimental art and performance was thriving, with practitioners and audiences sliding fruitfully between old disciplines and institutions in ad hoc spaces among the city's 19th-century suburbs. A seemingly limitless creativity was opening up in the wake of the increasing influence of John Cage, William Burroughs, and more, and often it was given a peculiarly English twist of modesty, humour and historicism. All of this was demonstrated when Phillips, accompanied by his friend, the artist R. B. Kitaj, found himself browsing second-hand books and wagered that 'the first book I can find for threepence I'll work on for the rest of my life.'

Tom Phillips, Irma Opus XIIB, 2014, detail from score. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

The book was the largely unremarkable 1892 romance A Human Document by William Hurrell Mallock, and Phillips went about treating it, shuffling it and adorning its pages with a quiet tenderness over a period of 50 years. The result is his magnum opus A Humument (1966–2016). The first volume was produced in 1970 and the sixth and final one appeared last year. One of the hallmarks of A Humument is Phillips's technique of isolating certain words on the page and painting over the rest, enabling a beguiling poetry to rise out. But it is not just concrete poetry, or even the visual field as a whole, that Phillips is concerned with. He soon created Irma Opus XII (1969), a large single-page score for an opera on which directions for libretto, mise-en-scène and sound were generated by that same technique of serendipitous word-finding. This was recently expanded into a score of 119 pages, again deriving from A Humument, and dubbed Irma Opus XIIB (2014).

Tom Phillips, Irma Opus XIIB, 2014, detail from score. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

The task of realizing such an elaborate graphic score fell to director and designer Netia Jones, together with her company Lightmap, and Anton Lukoszevieze and his ensemble Apartment House. The world premiere of Irma Opus XIIB at South London Gallery this weekend celebrates Philips's 80th birthday and the completion of A Humument. 'I am moved by the very fact of it now being finished, the idea that a life's work can come to some kind of completion,' says Jones. 'And yet of course, it will always live on because [Tom has] left it wonderfully open-ended. As a gesture, that's very beautiful.' Part of the intrigue of the graphic scores that sprang up in the 1960s is their open-endedness in relation to resulting sound – the most alluring ones don't make the task of generating sound more exact, but its possibilities more inspiring.

Tom Phillips, Irma Opus XIIB, 2014, detail from score. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

Jones and Lukoszevieze transformed the poetry of Irma Opus XIIB into libretto, music, characters, dance, decor, costumes, pre-recorded sound and video. Doing so involved plumbing the layers of history: the present, the 1960s, and the late Victorian origin, which finds another echo in the space and architecture of the South London Gallery. 'I felt like an archaeologist,' Lukoszevieze told me. 'All these fragments in the score, bits and pieces of material and suggestions for what could be in it.' Noticing a focus on time and timepieces in parts of the material, Jones and Lukoszevieze decided to lay a 60-minute timeline as a foundation, with performers referring to clocks throughout for orientation. They then decided to unfurl this time palindromically, inspired by one of Phillips's images: 'everything that happens in the first half happens backwards in the second half,' observes Lukoszevieze.

Tom Phillips, 2016. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

One of the more suggestive lines in the score is 'art officers in uniform, illuminated' – this was expressed as a Greek chorus of three sharp-suited men observing and judging the action. At the centre of it are Grenville and Irma, names appearing in Mallock's original text, as well as a nurse and Toge, a surrogate for Phillips himself, who reads his text on recordings played back during the performance. Jones discovered A Humument when she was 13 and has heard Phillips reading from it many times. 'For me it was very important to have Tom's voice as a central part,' she says. 'He reads it in a very particular way, of course he does, because he's lived with it every day.'

Tom Phillips, Irma Opus XIIB, 2014, detail from score. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

Diverse and open, as a work Irma begins to question the genre of opera itself, something which Phillips, Jones and Lukoszevieze weave in as a wry self-awareness about operatic tropes. Like many operas, it is named after a woman, it has pastoral and drinking scenes, even a waltz derived from a 19th-century example that Phillips cut-up and re-ordered. Jones doesn't see it as an opera – 'I see it as something that's about opera, or the idea of what opera might possibly be.'

 

Lukoszevieze goes further: 'No one knows what an opera is. The idea of opera most people have is a 19th-century construct. There has to be a stage, with curtains and proscenium arch and orchestra. The original Latin word just means ‘work’, it just means putting things together.'

Tom Phillips, Irma Opus XIIB, 2014, detail from score. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

The word gesamtkunstwerk – describing a work in which every form and medium of art is employed and determined – has reached the point of cliché, but it's worth remembering that it was first used to describe opera, specifically, those of Wagner. Jones sees Phillips as 'the archetypal cross-media artist – he doesn't even see the boundaries between art forms.' As a result, Phillips has been slow to gain the recognition that many of his monomedia contemporaries have. The rich aesthetics and histories of opera – whatever opera is – provide the ideal site to encounter a figure who has played a part in many aspects of postwar British creativity, from graphic design to film. But Phillips is no Wagner: rather than trying to be the absolute ruler of the gesamtkunstwerk, Phillips is a connecting node between disparate strata of the past and present and all the scatterings of creativity among them. As Jones puts it, his task, and that of those adapting it, is to 'open up as much interpretive space as possible.' Just as Phillips curates Mallock's texts, so Jones and Lukoszevieze and their teams (and the audience, ultimately) curate his.

 

Performances of Tom Phillips’s Irma: An Opera at South London Gallery, 16-17 September 2017, are sold out – the audio-visual installation during the day, animating the score through soundscape and video works, is free to enter.

 

Main image: Tom Phillips, Irma Opus XIIB, 2014, detail from score. Courtesy: the artist and Flowers Gallery

Adam Harper is a lecturer in music based in London, UK, and the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (2011).

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European Will Say to Me

 

What I Imagine Every European Will Say to Me, an American, When I Explore Europe

A person holding a beer over a canal.
Photograph by Alexander Spatari / Getty

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“Holland is not the Netherlands. It is a region in the western Netherlands. Did you not study geography at university?”

“Swimming trunks are not allowed. You must swim in the nude. We do not hide genitals in our culture.”

“You Americans. Your houses are too big. Your beers are too small.”

“The E.U.? Do you mean the Schengen Area? You are confused.”

“However, Holland is the Netherlands when we are talking about sporting events like korfball.”

“Sausages are an always food.”

“Do you play the violin or just the glockenspiel?”

“The Schengen Area? Do you mean the eurozone? You are confused.”

“It is illegal to ride a bicycle here unless you are nude. Do you understand?”

“Dutch people are from the Netherlands, not Dutchland. There is a country of Deutschland but it is many kilometres from here. Are you feeling O.K.?”

“My uncle operates a nude windmill in Luxembourg.”

“Luxembourg is not a duchy. It is a grand duchy. You did not study the duchy at uni?”

“I studied neoclassical horses and heavy-metal guitar at the University of Zurich.”

“You Americans. You have too many trucks. And not enough sausages.”

“How many languages do you know? I speak twelve, not including Romance languages.”

“Liechtenstein is in the Schengen Zone. It has a prince. His name is Hans-Adam II, and he gave me a sword. We are cousins.”

“How many bicycles do you own? I own twelve, not including Romance bicycles.”

“Would you like some chocolate? It was made by a master Swiss chocolatier in a secret chalet. It pairs well with potato stew and twenty cigarettes.”

“In this country, it is frowned upon to speak badly of our princes or our nude windmills.”

“You know, Liechtenstein. The country between Austria and Switzerland. It has as many people as ten per cent of North Dakota. You didn’t study geography in upper secondary school?”

“Where is your cigarette? Where is your beer? Beer is an always drink.”

“Prince Hans-Adam II follows me on the Phötölikenhaus application. It’s like your Instagram but exclusively for nudes and images of cheese.”

“The eurozone? Do you mean the European Economic Area? You are confused.”

“Dutch is a language. Hollandaise is a sauce. Some Dutch people also speak Frisian. I speak Frisian but I am one-quarter Saxon rather than Dutch. You seem confused.”

“Where are you going? Take the train. My family rides the train from Antwerp to the Shire to pick brambleberries every Midsommar.”

“I studied abroad in America at Middle Tennessee State University under the tutelage of your Albert Gore. He taught the seminar on windmills. He is wunderbar.”

“My house is inside a castle. It does not have air-conditioning because it was built a thousand years ago. If you are hot, you can cool off in the moat.”

“Cheese, beer, nudity—in that order.”

“You Americans. So many guns. So few swords. It is sad.”

“The Netherlands is like your Canada but with better beer and The Hague. Does this help?”

“Why do you ask for ice with the water? You are confused.”

“The E.U. is not the same as the European Union. Wait. Yes, it is. I am confused.”

“We have sausages for every occasion: breakfast sausages, lunch sausages, holiday Koningsdag sausages, and pre-sausage warmup sausages that we eat before the main sausages.”

“In European schools, we know English at age four. In American schools, at what age do you learn French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese?”

“Do you Americans feel that you got a good deal at the Treaty of Paris? Your country is very new. It has big problems. You look confused. You don’t study your own history in kinderschoolen?”

“I am a strong liberal and a monarchist-progressive. I am in favor of beer, swords, princesses, bicycles, and nude, chocolate windmills.”

“You Americans. Your politicians are very bad. Except for Albert Gore. You should make him your king, or at least a duke.”

“I ride fifteen trains per week. Wheeeee.” ♦