2012 NYFA Fellowship Interview

http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=932&fid=5&sid=156




NYFA speaks with 2012 Interdisciplinary Work Fellow

Joseph Keckler photographed by Michael Sharkey

Joseph Keckler

Hi Joseph, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Can you tell us a bit about what you’re working on and what’s coming up for you? 


It's my honor and pleasure. Thank you. Right now I'm working on a project called I am an Opera, which is a performance piece, or an ongoing series of performance pieces. It is an opportunity for me to play formally. In part, I'm representing minute details from my own quotidian existence through use of opera, an art form that is often perceived as being intense, beautiful, high-class, exquisitely-- or embarrassingly-- artificial, exotic, and antiquated. The impulse is to marry contemporary content to classical form in an interesting way. (And also to do the opposite, to mix classical content with contemporary form.) I'm working from this idea that opera is a form that somehow persists, despite its often being pronounced dead. Zizek describes such a condition as "zombie-like." But I think I'm approaching opera less as a zombie and more as a ghost. A zombie is a body with no mind that ambles around gnawing away at the intelligence of others. A ghost, on the other hand, is a mind with no body. And if opera is a ghost in my schema, then I can be a medium who channels it! Becoming a medium has always been one of my fantasies.

When and how did you begin performing?

I performed as a child, in some ways that many children perform. I staged tricycle accidents on the front lawn. I enjoyed clipping clothespins to various parts of my body and also dressing up as a corpulent-bird person in a Michigan sweatshirt. I became a nine-year-old Cab Calloway impersonator. I earned and squandered social currency by performing funereal and flashy blues songs in the annual junior high talent show. Later I began wearing ankle-length dashikis, rotary phone cords, and pet supplies to school.

Can you tell us a bit about how you’ve arrived within your current practice? 

As a student, I trained in painting and classical voice. At the same time, I studied performance and writing under Holly Hughes (NYFA Fellow, Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Work, 1990 and Playwriting/Screenwriting, 1994). Through working with Holly I began to develop my own literary voice. I wrote stories, essays, and monologues. This was within the context of an art college, so writing was approached in a loose way that related not only to literature, but to text-based performance, conceptual art, and oral traditions. Connections were drawn between practices of autobiography and body-based art. The scope of possibilities felt broad. I love to paint, but at a certain point I decided that I didn't have anything relevant to say in that medium. I was working in a range of styles, but hovering around figurative expressionism, while incorporating some "conceptual" elements. Living with objects that I've made has always been difficult. They get on my nerves. I've grown to favor the immediacy of performance. By the time a performance is done, a performance is gone! Having your work be ephemeral is anguishing, of course, but it's also a relief. When I came to New York a few years ago, I began writing full-length performance pieces, both independently and collaboratively. I also built my performance skills by appearing in some operatic roles and acting in other people's work, and performing constantly in music venues, galleries, and clubs; I've continued all along to work on my voice. It's taken me a lot of time and work to be able to successfully integrate or synthesize music, text (and some media). I'd like to be ten times better but I think I'm getting there. I'm currently interested in staging conversations between different art forms. And I've always been attracted to the blur between art and life. As I continue to perform my own work live, I'm attempting to somehow embody that conversation, and to embody that blur.

What role does autobiography play in your current work? 

In my songs and narratives I've always used a lot of found-text and borrowed-text-- internet chat dialogues, excerpts of film scripts, Shakespeare sonnets, and snippets of a guard dog training manual, for instance. I seem to regard my own life as a "found-text" as well. Well, here it is, I've often thought. Let's do something with it! I've always tried to experiment formally with autobiography (through defining multiple selves, and using a lot of abstraction and absurdity, for example.) The "I" in much of my autobiographical work has frequently figured as more of an observer, or as anabsorber of the goings-on around him,rather than as a motivator of action. In the past I've made pieces that drew on experience and that dealt with trauma, identity (crisis), and failure-- some usual thematic suspects. I had an emotional need to write those pieces. For better or worse, the inclusion of experience-based episodes in my current work is motivated purely by the impish desire to see what happens when opera and autobiography are poured into the same kettle.

Your show that premiered in Amsterdam last year, A Voice and Nothing More, has a very weighty title that alludes to Derrida, Lacan, and Plutarch. Do you have a “theory of voice”? Do you think singing is its own “layer” of thought? 

 I intended to make those allusions but on second thought, maybe I should have just called the show "Jukebox Joseph." I don't have a theory of the voice yet, just certain attractions to it, as well as a practice involving it. The voice appeals to me because it can be felt but cannot be seen. When I perform I like shaping my voice into different sounds and characters, both in singing and speech. I base certain voices on people I've known and others on people I imagine-- I'm the opposite of a celebrity-impersonator, I'm an obscurity-impersonator. Yes, maybe singing is its own layer of thought; sometimes we experience it as being an entity unto itself-- often a singer will talk about his/her voice as though it is a different person. You hear us complaining, "my voice doesn't want to go there today" and "my voice is still asleep" and-- my favorite-- "my voice is mad at me."

What other artists or other individuals most influence you? 

I love many living artists, but today let's stick to a few dead ones who I looked up to from an early age. I've always been pulled in by artists such as Nina Simone and Odetta, who trained in classical music at a time when the that field in this country was not very open to African-Americans.Both of them were able to use elements of that training and sensibility to channel folk, blues, and jazz-- in a politicized and stylistically hybridized, idiosyncratic way. Jean Cocteau is an inspiring for all his work, and for having been a dandy and renaissance person. Screamin' Jay Hawkins put the whamee on me with his macabre, campy, and transcendent oeuvre. I love many writers. I admire Shirley Jackson, for one-- that dichotomy of creating humorous autobiographical chronicles of daily life as well as spinning claustrophobic gothic fiction resonates for me.

You perform for radically diverse audiences in a wide variety of different contexts. What are some characteristics of your ideal audience? 

It's true that I recently performed the same short pieces within some gallery contexts, in theaters, dingy nightclubs, rock venues, art benefits for millionaires, on contemporary classical/new music line-ups, on a TV pilot, and even in an unexpected smattering of alt-comedy gigs. I'm happy when I perform at a museum and the security guards like the show.

Are there particular reactions you hope to invoke in those who experience your work?
Surprise. I like performing for strangers because they're the easiest to surprise.

How has receiving a Fellowship this year (2012) affected you?
It happened so recently that it's impossible to name all the ways that being awarded this Fellowship will affect me and my work. Being recognized and supported in this way has certainly has filled me with gratitude and boosted my morale. I was stunned with joy when I received the news. The grant will enable me to complete work that has been in limbo and will give me the resources to realize my new opera more rapidly and properly than I've been able to realize any full-length piece to date.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us Joseph!
Click HERE to watch a video of the artist

BOMB article by Cassie Peterson

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6702

BOMBLOG

 

PERFORMANCE

I am an Opera: A Deconstructionist’s Dream

by Cassie Peterson Jul 05, 2012

(Essay, Performance, BOMBlog)
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Cassie Peterson discusses deconstructions of form in Joseph Keckler’s I am an Opera.

Keckler at the Gowanus Ballroom. Photo courtesy of Gerry Visco.

The first time I encountered the enigmatic voice of Joseph Keckler was at the Chocolate Factory for an installment of the Catch Performance series. Nearing the end of the informal, cabaret-style show, Keckler quietly walked on stage to perform a seven minute excerpt from a performance-in-process called I am an Opera, the completed version of which will play at Joe’s Pub on July 8. I remember that I was sitting on a hard, tin bleacher. The artists from the previous performances were downstairs, talking loudly and working off their adrenaline by drinking cheap beer from a keg. It was loud, casual, a familial gathering. Keckler began his performance by addressing the audience in a very colloquial, nearly apathetic tone. He told us some mundane story from his day, chock full of minute, conversational details.
Keckler laughed as I recounted this moment over brunch recently and said, “I’m not afraid of being boring.” Which made it all that more surprising when, after that “boring” prelude, he opened his mouth and began to sing a breathtaking aria. He sang in low, bold Italian with English subtitles projected onto a screen behind him. Instantly, I felt like Jonah or Pinocchio being unwittingly swallowed by the whale. Keckler’s transition from the initial, improvised structure into a very formal, operatic structure was jarring to say the least. For the next seven minutes, he worked methodically to juxtapose and seamlessly combine the grandiosity of the opera with his more personal, pedestrian, and muted style of storytelling, something like the late great Klaus Nomi, but with a more understated, coy, and dry-witted theatricality about him.
“I like the drama and the discipline of opera,” Keckler says matter-of-factly. Typically, a lot happens in a classical opera. Worlds are upended and kingdoms toppled. But in a stark and purposeful contrast to this expectation, I am an Opera unfolds without much actually happening. The piece is framed as an internal monologue, a memory of a bad mushroom trip that Keckler had in the early 2000’s. “I work a lot from personal and autobiographical experiences,” he says. In fact, the “events” of the piece happen almost entirely inside of his thoughts and memories. “My work is not made up of events, but rather a series of inclinations,” he told me. Thus, as viewers, we are asked to exist inside the narrator’s mind, as Jonah lives inside the whale, and to follow him on his incredibly subtle and introspective journey. Keckler’s voice transports and transforms us even though there are no “actual” events to move us through the performance. It is an exquisite exercise in operatic abstraction.
In I am an Opera, Keckler gives pride of place to form and craft in this contemporary, avant-garde, “anti-performance” performance. He is a mediator of sorts, existing comfortably in what he calls the “interstitial space between forms.” As the consummate, interdisciplinary, performance artist, Keckler has intentionally embedded contemporary content/context (young, 20-something man accidentally eats too many chocolate-covered mushrooms with his friends at a party and then goes home by himself where he is overwhelmed by hallucinations and flashbacks that derive from various applications on his Mac laptop), into a classical, nearly antiquated form. It is a contemporary subject presented with a classical method. Yet within this framework, Keckler is able to evade camp and kitsch. He never mocks or fetishizes opera, nor his role as a classically trained opera singer. Rather, he believes in opera. He is opera. Keckler plays and experiments without compromising the integrity or composition of the forms that he is employing and it is this commitment that adds an element of rigor and sincerity to his performances.
I am an Opera simultaneously deconstructs and re-animates the operatic form, making it contemporary, relevant, and even urgent. Joseph is possessed by the demand and discipline of high art while continuously locating himself in prosaic realities. In this way, his work is both an elevation and a grounding. Celestial archetypes meet quotidian anti-heroes, all within the insularity of the narrator’s discursive thoughts. This alchemy of high/medium/low art subject matter elicits particular emotional responses from audiences. The sheer, visceral gravity of the aria overlapping with its irreverent content caused me to laugh hysterically while simultaneously giving me the chills that only a bravura performance can. In this way, I am an Opera operates both as a formal materialization and as a conceptual dematerialization, creating a palpable fissure that allows for new experiences and subjectivities to emerge. I can feel all of these potentialities arise (like my neck hairs) during the piece. It is a new and exhilarating sensation.

Keckler’s aria from I am an Opera. Photo courtesy of Gerry Visco.

Keckler turns the experience of tripping into the narrative structure of his piece, making his initial, structural attention to realism morph suddenly into surrealism. It is an instant framework for absurdity and possibility, and as the piece unfolded, I began to see tripping as a useful metaphor for poetics and artistic practice in general. “I can go anywhere under the pretense of tripping,” he said wryly. It is perhaps a perfect platform from which to generate material, in that it allows for what Keckler calls “total permission for radical shifts.”
And he does go anywhere and everywhere. In I Am an Opera, Keckler creates an entire, idiosyncratic, operatic world and exists within it in multiple ways. His is an opera for the streets, for our dreams, for this moment in time here, now, everywhere, sitting at brunch tables and on tin bleachers, captivated.

Joseph Keckler will perform this Sunday, July 8, at Joe’s Pub.

Cassie Peterson is a New York-based writer, thinker, and lavender menace. She works as a psychotherapist by day, and moonlights as a dramaturge, performer, essayist, & performing arts critic. Her extemporaneous musings and inqueeries can be found on her art & theory blog, Self & Other, as well as being featured in various performance publications.

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July 8th 9:30 PM @ Joe's Pub NYC

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