'timing an egg to the duration of a medium duration news bulletin'
Gavin Bryars
Photograph by Stephen White
Juan and I first met when Artangel asked me to speak with him about a possible collaboration. He was in England for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and, simultaneously, he was undertaking projects outside the gallery confines.
The project which we developed, however, was for a sound piece and I was initially curious that a sculptor should be interested in working with a musician. We met and found inevitably that we had many things in common - he had studied at Croydon Art College with Bruce MacLean at about the time I was teaching in the Environmental Design department; there were details in his iconography which mirrored my passion for Twin Peaks (the recurring dwarf, the patterned floors) and so on. Coincidentally in 1992 I found myself devising a project for the Château d'Oiron in France, only to find that Juan had a piece in a collective work already installed there, the Jardin Bestarium - his 'siffleur' (theatrical prompter) yet another example of the dwarf. In that same year we both, along with Cristina Iglesias (his wife) contributed to the Seville exhibition Los Ultimos Dias, designed as a counterbalance to the potentially excessive millennium celebrations already in the offing.
The idea that Juan had in mind for our collaboration was for us to create a series of pieces for radio. Radio is a beautiful medium for many reasons. It stimulates the visual imagination; the listener can move between casual and attentive modes of listening; it moves inexorably through time, as well as being used as a way of measuring clock time (timing an egg to the duration of a medium duration news bulletin). It can also function as ambience, and indeed this is often the preferred mode of attention for radio 'listeners'. On the other hand everyday life can equally serve as an unfocused (ambient) activity while the radio itself is playing - the preparation of a meal during a radio play for example.
For our project, which was called eventually A Man in a Room, Gambling, Juan wrote 10 texts, each one describing the manipulation of playing cards - dealing from the bottom of the pack, avoiding failure in the Three-Card Trick, how to palm a card and so on. Some of this material was culled from the writings of the extraordinary Canadian S. W. Erdnase and especially his book The Expert at the Card Table which contains some of the most perfectly constructed sleights of hand in card manipulation. We decided that each would last exactly 5 minutes and should be broadcast before the last News of the evening so that the programme would be encountered, in Britain at least, in the same way as we encounter the Shipping Forecast. For his part, Juan imagined a listener driving along a motorway at night, bemused by this fleeting and perhaps enigmatic curiosity - in fact precisely the way in which most listeners encounter the Shipping Forecast.
In recording the speaking voice, Juan read each of the texts at his own pace and each one lasted a different length of time, varying in length from 3 minutes to 4 minutes 30 seconds. Each text therefore had to be manipulated both to make it fit the five-minute format in terms of the overall duration and to establish the conventions whereby after 4 seconds after the start of the programme Juan would be heard to say "Good Evening" and at precisely 4 minutes 52 seconds he would say "Thank you and Good Night". In addition, and perhaps crucially, each of the ten five-minute texts was accompanied by a string quartet, playing at exactly the same tempo for each piece, giving an overall unifying texture to each five-minute piece and to the sequence of ten programmes. The presence of the music also serves the additional function of intensifying the trickster's duplicity.
Five of these programmes, in revised orchestrations for my ensemble, were eventually released on CD (A Man in a Room, Gambling, Point Music). We also started to perform them with Juan reading the texts live. This was a new departure for him, and was something that made him extremely nervous but which he did with great professionalism and style.He was on good form when we last met and we talked about meeting up to talk about my plan to issue the full set of the original versions of A Man in a Room, Gambling, and also to develop ideas we had spoken about for a chamber opera (provisionally called Erdnase? Who was Erdnase?). His tragic death put an end to this, but I have gone ahead with the release of the full set of A Man in a Room, Gambling on GB Records. I will also make the chamber opera at some time in the future.