photo by S.R. Aichinger

story by S.R. Aichinger

“Why are you taking pictures of the mural?” Jordan Hiatt asked me recently. He sat at the picnic table on the north end of the patio outside the Side Door Lounge smoking a cigarette. We shared the patio space with two women seated at the farthest table at the south end. I had walked across 35th Avenue to take some pictures of the mural covering the western face of the small building — the only exterior surface not covered in a thick cushion of ivy that I can’t resist leaning into.

“I’m talking pictures of the mural,” I told him, “for something I’m writing.”

“Ah,” he said. “So what’s new?”

Art in Public Spaces

Patrick Mainelli and I had been talking about art in public spaces for half an hour already. He had recently played a few songs at the Side Door Lounge, and now we found ourselves on the topic of context.

“OK, so this pack of American Spirit cigarettes,” Patrick said, grabbing the yellow box on the patio table and leaning forward, his eyes alight. “Put it on a white pedestal in a museum with white walls, and you’re going to think only about the pack of cigarettes. But here on the table you’re going to have all of the other stuff — like other people’s conversations and the guy puking in the street because he drank too much.”

(No one was actually puking in the street. He was a hypothetical variable we had been working with earlier in our conversation.)

“Exactly,” I agree, “and that’s what I want.”

I want to see a pack of cigarettes on the patio table where two people sit, talking about the things that interest them. I want to see the context. In particular, I am interested in the context in which I found this particular pack of cigarettes, Natural American Spirit, with the image of a Native American man wearing a ceremonial feathered headpiece and holding a peace pipe — on a table where two white men sit, neither of whom have any official ties to Native American communities or cultures. Particularly at the table where I sit and in the context of my education: my master’s degree with a graduate minor in Native American Studies and my mentor’s continual reminder that a product bearing an image of a Native American is not indicative of its authenticity as an authentic Native American product. Why, in other words, do I choose this particular brand of cigarettes despite my education and understanding of the misappropriation of Native identities?

The Getty

“The museum,” Joan Didion suggested in her 1977 essay “The Getty,” “is now supposed to kindle the untrained imagination” and “set the natural child in each of us free, but this museum does not.”

“This museum” — the one Didion wrote about in “The Getty” — is more specifically the Getty Villa, a 105,500 square-foot art museum set into the hills of the Pacific Palisades on the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, Calif. Jean Paul Getty built the Getty Villa and curated its initial collection of art and antique furniture, but never saw the museum after it opened to the public in 1974. Critics condemned the design of the museum — both its structure and arrangements of art and antique furniture — as “vulgar,” “garish” and “inauthentic.”

courtesy photo

Didion’s point about the Getty Villa in her assertion that “this museum does not” (“kindle the untrained imagination” or “set the natural child in each of us free”) was its unorthodox atmosphere. Rather than the spare rooms with white walls patrons expect to find in a museum, the villa’s exhibition areas were opulent, decked out in gleaming bronze and brilliant, strident marble. The museum was not “mellow.” The art in the Getty Villa was not the focus of its patron’s attention, but one of many foci. The museum itself, according to Didion’s critique, clamored for attention, and that, critics seemed to say, was the problem.

My interest in music resembles in many ways my interest in the visual arts, interests concerned specifically in the spaces that meant — in varying degrees — to house art and the contexts those spaces develop. How an environment, a museum or music venue, can direct my attention either toward or away from the performance. How an environment shapes my experience and understanding of art. How an environment can ultimately dictate the content of a work and the meaning I find in it.

The problem with the Getty Villa, if you believe there is one, was that it tried to grab your attention, and it was too full of its own presence to effectively present the collections within it.

Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed

I’ve been interested lately in different kinds of venues and how those differences affect an audience’s experience of the music, and a performer’s experience playing.

Venues like Slowdown, The Waiting Room and the Orpheum Theater resemble museums, using a variety of visual cues, which mimic those of a museum, that reinforce psychological barriers between the art and the viewer.

photo of Jonathan Richman at The Waiting Room by Kat Buchanan

The band plays on a raised stage, like a pedestal, elevating them to a position higher than the audience and inserting an unambiguous distance between artist and audience. The lighting in the room focuses the audience’s attention on the stage, often casting the viewer in near darkness, and maintaining the performer’s position as subject of the viewer’s faceless gaze. The band often is displayed like a painting, backed up against a wall, requiring viewers to face in the same direction and discouraging interaction during the performance. This is especially true of venues like the Orpheum Theater, where stationary seating further limits movement (I have found it remarkably tedious to turn around in one of those small seats to face the person behind me) and carries the message that interaction is forbidden during the show.

It resembles classical theater, with its invisible fourth wall and position of actor as the agent who has control over the content and shape of the performance. And similar to the theater and the museum, the viewer/audience behaves in certain ways we consider appropriate to the performance. In a museum, we keep our voices down, at the symphony, we do not speak, and at a rock show, we make noise intended to communicate our approval to the band — we clap. And similar to all three, we pay attention to the performers or art.

photo of Big Harp at Slowdown by Daniel Muller

The result is a sense of separation between musician and audience. The band is “up there,” I am “down here,” and despite my best efforts, I can’t cross the space between us.

In the 1960s, Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal began teaching theatrical techniques, called the Theatre of the Oppressed, to address this very issue. He suggested that with a redistribution of power and agency between bodies in a performance, theater could become a productive site of social and political change.

This redistribution involves granting agency to the audience, giving them the power to affect the content and direction of the performance. This redefined position, which Boal called the “spect-actor,” smudged the line between passive audience and active participant, and created an opportunity for the viewer to take part in the show. The performer, then, is put in a position of dialogue with the audience, making it beneficial for him to interact with those he performs for.

So I have it in my mind that venues like the Side Door Lounge and the recently closed Commons are (perhaps) unintentional embodiments of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Those psychological barriers present in museum-like venues are absent or diminished. There often is not a raised stage but merely an area of the floor at even level with the audience marked only by musical equipment. Lighting over the performance and seating areas are more equitable, allowing for visual connections (and interactions) between performer and viewer. Seating, if it exists, is not stationary, allowing for backs to be turned to the musicians. The space between the band and the audience is reduced, sometimes merely by proximity, other times positioning the band within the audience.

photo of Gordon at the Side Door Lounge by Michael Todd

I do not mean to suggest that one is preferable over the other. They both have their merits, and it’s in the best interest of the musician to be conscious of those merits.

Patrick Mainelli, for example, seems to need a museum. He needs a quiet, attentive audience. “He needs,” Adam Roberts said a few weeks later when we met at the Urban Wine Company to talk about these ideas, “people to gather around for storytime.” Patrick does not impose himself on a space. Nevertheless he hopes people will listen, but more specifically he hopes they want to listen. Perhaps Patrick Mainelli the musician is Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party hung on a busy street corner — worth noticing but lost in the noise of the city around him.

Kwala Bee, on the other hand, is loud enough that Adam Roberts isn’t concerned about being lost in the noise of a place like the Side Door. A museum isn’t necessary for their sound to be heard. But Adam sees some other benefits to those venues. I asked him which kind of venue he would prefer. “I want to play Madison Square Garden,” he responded. Straight to the top for this guy. He wants the kind of environment where people go expecting to be entertained. But he also recognizes the benefits of a venue like the Side Door. “At Madison Square Garden, a fan can’t come talk to me,” he said. “If someone in the audience at the Side Door is wondering how we’re making a guitar sound a certain way, we’re right there. They can look. And after the show it’s easy for them to start a conversation, and I can just show them.”

Physical and Psychical Contexts

“So what are you prescribing?” Pat asked.

There’s that question again, I thought. He had asked this very question before, verbatim, about my assertion that a photograph’s contextual meaning is fleeting because photography is in the business of history, its subject always and necessarily locked into a “then” rather than a “now.” On both occasions and in both contexts, a significant part of me suspected — or hoped — he was playing the devil’s advocate.

“I’m not suggesting that one sort of venue is better than another,” I responded, making air-quotes around the problematic word: better. “I don’t know that I’m prescribing anything. Maybe just that it’s worth thinking about when we go to concerts.”

Pat looked at me as if to ask, “You want people to think about the venue when they go to a concert?”

That look, and his request for my prescription, left me uncertain of my position. Had I recommended that we pay attention to the venue? That certainly wasn’t initially what I intended to mean. But upon further reflection, and after talking with Adam Roberts, that is precisely what I want people to do — at least in part. What I’m prescribing, Patrick, is a method of experiencing music performance that is inquisitive of not only the performance but also the space in which it occurs. Inquisitive, in other words, of the ways in which art engages with the physical world we live in, the distances we construct between musician and listener.

Music venues, the results of countless transparent and opaque decisions, affect musicians and audiences in equally countless and immensely interesting ways. And what I’m prescribing, if I can speak so simply, is that we — musicians, audiences, and venue owners alike — recognize the implications of these decisions and use that critique to better enjoy the show.

S.R. Aichinger is a Hear Nebraska editorial intern. Reach him at sraichinger@hearnebraska.org.