A festival of sound poetry and text-based performance
December 2–4, 1993 | Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
Word(s)ound was a three-day festival bringing together sound poetry, text-based performance, radio, visual art and conversation. Robert Gregory and I curated it through Miami Inter Arts, an independent project operating—like Subtropics and InterMIX—under the umbrella of the South Florida Composers Alliance.
The idea began during Subtropics 4 in 1992, when Joan La Barbara told us about 73 Poems, the large-scale work she was developing with Kenneth Goldsmith. Kate Rawlinson, director of Centre Gallery at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus, arranged to present 73 Poems as part of the gallery’s exhibition season. Because Joan wanted to perform the complete work at the opening, Bob and I proposed building a larger festival of sound poetry and text-based performance around it.
We began with artists whose work we knew and wanted to encounter more closely. Bob’s list was more adventurous than mine, so the resulting program was delightfully Bob-heavy. Kenneth Goldsmith suggested inviting Jackson Mac Low; Mary Luft brought Décio Pignatari from Brazil through Tigertail Productions; and Stephen Malagodi proposed a performance by Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters, accompanied by media support from WLRN-FM.
At the center of the festival was Joan La Barbara’s complete, evening-long performance of 73 Poems—a composition in seventy-three parts. Around it, Word(s)ound moved among radio, readings, performances, panel discussions and work that resisted easy classification as either literature, music or visual art. The connection was sound. Through our own collaborations, Bob and I had become increasingly interested in artists working within that same territory, and the festival gave us an opportunity to meet them, exchange ideas and explore the medium together.
As co-curators, Bob and I also included examples of our own work. I was never entirely comfortable presenting myself within a project I helped organize, but its co-textual nature made that participation meaningful: visiting artists and audiences could encounter something of the practice from which the festival itself had emerged.
Word(s)ound became the principal manifestation of Miami Inter Arts. Although MIA did not develop into the continuing framework Bob had imagined, the festival remains an early example of our effort to create contexts in which artistic work, presentation, exchange and discovery could become parts of the same inquiry.
FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING
December 2, 1993
9:00 p.m.
Word(s)ound Radio
Produced by Stephen Malagodi
WLRN 91.3 FM
A one-hour broadcast introducing South Florida audiences to artists featured in the Word(s)ound Festival, with works by Jackie Apple, Gregory Whitehead, Joan La Barbara, Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos.
December 3, 1993
11:00 a.m.
Alison Knowles
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
Bean Sequence
A collection of stories and sounds first presented on West German radio nearly a decade earlier. This intermedia production by Joshua Selman and Dekart Video of New York was organized into a sound garden by artist and legumicist Alison Knowles.
Loose Pages
Pure flax papers created in an edition by Alison Knowles and Coco Gordon transform pages of a book directly into sound performance.
1:00 p.m.
Word(s)ound Brown Bag Panel Discussion
Alliance Film/Video Project
Miami Beach, Florida
Word(s)ound artists discussed issues surrounding text-based art with members of the audience.
PARTICIPANTS
Jackie Apple, Adrian Castro, Alison Knowles, Joan La Barbara, Jackson Mac Low, Jan Sebon!, Kiki Wainwright and Gregory Whitehead
2:30 p.m.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
No. 105
A twenty-five-minute, mathematically structured rhyming text. Its mantra-like syncopation begins simply with monosyllables and grows increasingly complex, moving between the lowest of low culture and the highest of high. Formal constraints require every polysyllabic string of semantic content to end-rhyme with the sound “e.”
3:00 p.m.
Gustavo Matamoros
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
Una Guitarra Toca Sola (2) — world premiere
The first performance of Una Guitarra Toca Sola. Originally conceived and presented as a sound installation with text by Robert Gregory that changed with every showing, it was performed at Word(s)ound with …37, for instance, or 36…, a recorded sound portrait of John Cage.
Auto-Retrato
A sound-video self-portrait commissioned by the III Encuentro de Música Electrónica de Caracas and premiered during the festival’s opening event in January 1991. Its source material comes from Con El Dedo En El Timbre (1990), a large-scale work using multiple point-sound sources, video, musicians, a dancer and a lighting operator.
4:00 p.m.
Décio Pignatari
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
A program of readings and computer-generated poems selected during the performance. Presented in collaboration with Tigertail Productions, this was Pignatari’s first performance in the United States since 1970.
7:00 p.m.
Joan La Barbara
Centre Gallery
Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus
Miami, Florida
PROGRAM
73 Poems — world premiere
The world-premiere performance of Joan La Barbara’s complete vocal settings of Kenneth Goldsmith’s 73 Poems, presented in conjunction with the gallery exhibition and dedicated to John Cage.
December 4, 1993
11:00 a.m.
Anne Tardos and Jackson Mac Low
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
A Phoneme Dance in Memoriam John Cage (1993) — world premiere
1st Milarepa Gatha (1976)
1st and 3rd Four-Language Word Events in Memoriam John Cage (1992 and 1993)
Free Gathas 1 and 2 (1972 and 1981) — performed simultaneously
38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters (1989)
Thanks (1960)
1:00 p.m.
Word(s)ound Brown Bag Panel Discussion
Alliance Film/Video Project
Miami Beach, Florida
Word(s)ound artists discussed issues surrounding text-based art with members of the audience.
PARTICIPANTS
Adrian Castro, Kenneth Goldsmith, Alison Knowles, Joan La Barbara, Jackson Mac Low, Gustavo Matamoros, Décio Pignatari, Jan Sebon! and Kiki Wainwright
2:30 p.m.
Gregory Whitehead
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
Shake, Rattle and Roll; or, How to Squeeze a Living Language from a Dead White Head
An itinerary for In Transit: A Miami Navigation
The Problem with Bodies
Listen and repeat—a proposition
On the Wrong Track
Screams you would never want to hear again—radio/phone
A Head That Haunts Me
A nearly liquid mass of detestable putrescence—The Case of M. Valdemar
I Am a Degenerate
The fate of language in the mouth of time—a demonstration
The Modernist Knee
The severed joint in the Age of Autonomous Media—Morgenstern Galgenlied
Pomo Penis
The severed joint in the Age of Autonomous Media—news clip
Radio Utopia
Ou Topos = No Place—a broadcast liturgy
Sea Crow
The flight of intelligence in the play of communication—a recollection
Where My Body Flies…
Galgenlied for a dead white head
4:00 p.m.
Jackie Apple
Ground Level Gallery
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
One Word at a Time
Excerpt from GoingBetween/Docs
A live multidimensional aural/oral performance incorporating ideas from interactive media within both its text and structure. Created by Jackie Apple and Helen Thorington as a duet in “real” and “imaginary” time.
8:00 p.m.
Caribbean Poets
Stephen Talkhouse
Miami Beach, Florida
A program of selected poetry and musical sounds featuring Miami poet Adrian Castro and Miami-based Haitian American poets Jan Sebon! and Kiki Wainwright, accompanied by musicians.
10:00 p.m.
Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters — Miami premiere
Stephen Talkhouse
Miami Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
I See Chano Pozo
Find Your Own Voice
All the High Rollers
Everybody Wants to Be Somebody
Adupe
Additional works were selected during the performance.
PERFORMERS
Jayne Cortez, voice
Denardo Coleman, drums
Al MacDowell, bass
Bern Nix, guitar
Talib Kibwe, saxophone
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Word(s)ound was produced by Wolfson Galleries at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus and Miami Inter Arts, a curatorial project of the South Florida Composers Alliance. It was presented in collaboration with Miami Book Fair International.
The festival was curated by Gustavo Matamoros and Robert Gregory in conjunction with 73 Poems, an exhibition organized for Centre Gallery by director Kate Rawlinson.
Word(s)ound was made possible with funding from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Miami Visitor and Convention Authority, the City of Miami Beach, and Meet The Composer Southeast through the Southern Arts Federation.
Additional support was provided by Alliance for Media Arts, the Film Department at Miami-Dade Public Library, Intercontinental Hotel, Kent Hotel, South Florida Art Center’s Ground Level Gallery, Stephen Talkhouse, Tigertail Productions and WLRN 91.3 FM.
Special thanks to Don Chancey, Olga Garay, Kate Rawlinson, Flora Gladwin, Bob Gregory, Marilyn Gottlieb-Roberts, James Herring, Colleen Hettich of Books & Books, Alina Interian, Pat Jones, John Kremel, Mary Luft, Stephen Malagodi, Meg O’Brien, Bill Orcutt, Justin Perlman, Jenny Person and James Quinlan.