Telephone Art

Tania Ørum

Abstract

The essay explores the implementation of everyday technology for experimental use by the Danish artists Knud Pedersen and Eric Andersen.

The technological experiments of the 1960s did not necessarily deal with the most recent technologies. Although computers and the possibilities of rapid global communication fired the imagination of artists, such high-tech appli- ances were hard to come by, expensive or bureaucratic to gain access to. Many artists created works based on the idea of what technology could do, but realised in more accessible low-tech technology such as cassette recorders, Super 8mm cameras or even telephones. One of the most imaginative organisers on the Danish art scene in the 1950s and 1960s was Knud Pedersen. In 1952 he invented “Byens billede” (City Picture), a wooden case with a glass front in which art exhibitions could take place in public spaces in major towns in Denmark. In 1957 he established Kunstbiblioteket (The Art Library), whose members could rent a painting or a sculpture for the price of a packet of cigarettes and take it home for three weeks. Both of these projects still exist. In the 1960s his art library was housed in the former Nikolaj Church in the centre of Copenhagen. Here he took in Arthur Köpcke’s avant-garde art gallery when it had to close, and here the first Scandinavian Fluxus festival took place, in November 1962. In 1964 Knud Pedersen made an agreement with the Tuborg brewery that works of art could be displayed on beer vans on their delivery rounds all over the country. At the Art Library he had a jukebox with works of sound art installed, and he offered to rent jukeboxes to any interested institution. In order to make modern art available to everyone, Knud Pedersen established a network all over the country, including a telephone list of high schools, which he kept informed about recent art events. From these networks sprang the idea of trying out the telephone as an art medium. Knud Pedersen has described an experiment that took place on 15 March 1966. (Pedersen 1968:105–108). This involved the two artists Eric Andersen and Arthur Köpcke, who participated in a conference call of forty people, which Knud Pedersen had set up. Pedersen explains that what appealed to the artists

454 Ørum was the idea of organising a meeting that would give a new medium an artistic status and which would bring out interactive possibilities: “Everyone was in ‘the speaker’s chair’ at the same time and, in contrast to a radio or television broadcast, everyone had the opportunity to participate and ask questions and have them answered immediately. As we were soon to find out this provided an exceptional intimacy.” For this interactive media experiment Eric Andersen had composed his Opus 65, which is “a telephone performance for any number of people at these telephones”. Before the start of the performance each participant had received three pages of typed instructions, which specified the procedure:

1. The performance starts when Eric Andersen begins to read aloud the enclosed poem “Annabel Lee”. 2. YOU can direct this reading by asking any question. 3. OR YOU can take over the reading of the poem by: pro- nouncing YOUR name + the sentence: “Takes over the reading” […] 4. The time when you want to take over the reading (IF YOU do want to take over) is entirely decided by YOU just as the time and the matter of your question are decided entirely by you.1 andersen 1966

On the day of the performance Eric Andersen started out by reading aloud Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”. As indicated in the instructions, there was a recurring statement after every second line: “You are taking part in a telephone performance. You may direct this performance by asking a question, after which the text already read will be repeated, or you can say your name and the statement: ‘takes over the reading’, after which you may read aloud the text from the start.” Pedersen reports that on this occasion a question was asked after the first four or five stanzas of the poem had been read aloud, so that the reading started over again. This continued endlessly. At the slightest noise the reading was resumed from the beginning, so in the end you could sense that everyone was sitting very still and not breathing in order to reach the end of the poem – something that had not been the intention at all. When the poem was interrupted in the last stanza as “one of the participating artists asked the question, ‘What is adequance’, and the other artist immediately

1 Quoted from the three stencilled pages issued by Eric Andersen. The first page has instructions. The second page has the text of the poem by Poe, and the third page a programmatic statement by Eric Andersen. Translated by Tania Ørum.