JA, as long as I can

JA, as long as I can is a transatlantic dialogue, a duet with A K Dolven and John Giorno as performers. Both utter and vary the word «ja», the Norwegian equivalent of «yes», for as long as their energy spans to give the word different shades of colour, of energy and meaning.

John Giorno (1936-2019) was an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963) and as a poet performing internationally. Giorno and Dolven did meet in Lofoten, Norway, summer 2011.

The work is an exploration into the quality of sound as a potent signifier of many things at the same time: of corporeal and temporal presence, of emotional as well as informational meaning, of the acute experience of spatial presence and absence, of harmony or dissent amongst human beings, as well as of the passage of time.

A K Dolven’s sound piece also invites reflection on the different ways to experience time and to think about time: different time levels are being explored here alongside with a reflection of how psychological processes structure time: exhaustion and fatigue, impatience, the will of expression, of filling and structuring the flow of air, of struggling for air.

As an artistic endeavour, JA, as long as I can is also a study of the human voice as the oldest instrument and medium of mankind. Dolven’s sound piece poignantly shows that the human voice is, at the same time, markedly physical and highly ephemeral. Here sound literally travels in time and space: from Norway to the East coast of the USA, from a female European visual artist in her fifties to a male, North American spoken word artist in his seventies. Both performers stand for their respective cultural time, and both their voices are consequently tinged by time, by their differing gender, their respective upbringing, by a varying life experience as well as by their emotional proximity or distance to the Norwegian language.

In Dolven’s use of the single affirmative word «ja», she explores the material qualities of the male and the female vocal cords in motion, and the many different emotional hues these qualities can transmit to the listener. In letting these two unseen bodies physically interact with each other to the rhythm of the different lengths of breath it takes to utter the word «ja» with varying expressions, A K Dolven provokes the perceptual effect of watching movements of two shadows. This is, of course, reminiscent of her film work vertical on my own (2011).

But there are many other ways, in which this work binds together themes that A K Dolven has been developing over a long period of time: the formal, material, perceptual and emotional effects of artistic expression bordering on the immaterial, the unseen. Here, «soft» forms of expression are applied, such as bright and soft light, hazy whites, shadows, ambient sound, the sound of the human voice, movement, atmosphere, as well as the energies triggered by the interaction of humans with each other – be it in conversation, movement or, generally, in the manifestations of friendship. Dolven’s art has also been for a long time «performative», «participatory» and «site-specific» in a broader, more abstract and subtler sense of the word than it is mostly used in the art world.

Gaby Hartel