The Principle of Uncertainty

Over thirty years ago, I was part of a very diverse art community in Vancouver. Though I was a painter, a friend of mine, Toby MacLennan, who was a performance artist, invited me to join her in a number of her quasi-theatrical performance pieces. We began with a late-night sojourn to one of the parks in Vancouver. I was to bring my cello and she brought a tall music stand (made of wood) that was fitted with staff lines (five small tree branches), situated some eight feet high at the top of the device. The spaces in between the staff lines were left empty, allowing for the complexity of the stars in the night sky (on this clear evening) to congregate, clump together and shine through these lines, thus becoming musical notes. At first, I played the actual stars/notes as they appeared on and in-between the staff lines as though I were playing conventional cello music. However, it soon became obvious that the star-notes that came in clusters and nearly crowded out single note sounds, had to be dealt with in some other way. So, I began to trill this particular star/note configuration. And then, as there was only one giant measure from which I could work, I decided to "play" the stars backwards and forwards and from there, the "music" became improvisational. (I could tilt the staff lines up and down to form other groupings of stars/notes.)

This photo shows me looking up through the music stand/staff lines, and playing pizzicato notes. A flashlight was attached to the base of my chair so that I could see the staff lines up above. Do you see the impish white figure floating over my head?

After this particular night-sky activity, which consisted of just the two of us and a tape recorder, Toby scheduled a performance in the star dome of Vancouver's MacMillan Planetarium (1976). This performance included an opera singer and other musicians who "sang" the stars. The piece was called "Singing the Stars". Later, we performed in Toronto at the McLaughlin Planetarium and other venues which would allow the projection of a night sky on the walls and ceiling of an ordinary room.

This photo shows another variant of a music stand (see vertical posts) as sculpture, where an individual (that's me!) prepares to be both a part of the night sky (mask) and a musician. This activity, with its principle of uncertainty, is not far removed from my passionate work of assembling and layering sections of frottaged textures with figurative elements. Each art form consists of a kind of mystical faith that the spiritual, visual outcome will prevail.

Please see Toby MacLennan' s website ( http://tobymaclennan.com/ ) and hear a little "night music", or read about her other performances in the book "Caught in the Act" an anthology of performance art by Canadian women edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, pages 315-323.