Love Letter by Letter
Love Letter by Letter - Andrew Newman - 2011
The video installation Love Letter by Letter involves the translation of 500 letters between two lovers during the second world war into a colour and musical alphabet that corresponds to Newton’s musical colour theory. Using Newton, who was essential to the development of the scientific method, and his theory to represent love letters as quantitative data in an art installation challenges his rational epistemological perspective. The end result is two televisions singing to each other in a sublime abstraction of love.
This work was produced with the programming assistance of Timo Rozendal and production assistance of Janis Ferberg.
Love Letter by Letter
Gregory Corso: Do you feel there has been a definite change in man’s makeup? A new consciousness?
William Burroughs: Yes, I can give you a precise answer to that. I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
Allen Ginsberg: And if they are removed, what step?
William Burroughs: The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms — this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color. We can translate word and letter into color — Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote ‘words’ can be read in silent color. In other words, man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
Roland Barthes wrote that he does not think at all of love despite having produced a book on it. He said that he would be glad to know what it is, but being inside, he sees it in existence, not in essence. If love is shaped in the imaginary outside of ourselves, if it is shaped in that invisible collision where meaning manifested by myself and meaning manifested by the other meet, how can an artist replicate that experience? Can an artist only speak of love? Can an artist only create art as an act of love?
As I began transcribing my grandparents’ WWII letters with the intention of producing an artwork about them, about their love, I became paralysed in thought. I could not represent their love, because love as an abstract cannot be represented. I could not make work about their love, because love in its ambiguity should not be explained. All I felt I could do was methodically translate their letters, unravel the word lines that Burroughs says control thought, unstitch each individual letter of each individual word and translate it into another element. Barthes writes:
I want to change systems: no longer to unmask, no longer to interpret, but to make consciousness itself a drug, and thereby to accede to the perfect vision of reality, to the great bright dream, to prophetic love.
I changed systems. I began with the first letter, written by my grandmother in a room of the Hotel Waterloo in Wellington just after she said goodbye to her husband who had boarded a ship bound for war. I drew up a new system of language, translating each letter of the alphabet to a musical tone. Slowly I transcribed the letters again, this time to a musical stave.
I clustered the notes together just as the letters of the alphabet were clustered together as words. I made the time signature the date of the letter, 6/1, the 6th of January. After painstakingly slowly translating the letters to tones, I fed the work into the computer and had a synthesizer play back my grandmother’s first letter to her husband.
I do not pretend to be synaesthesic. I cannot see the colours in Rimbaud’s vowels nor in Nabokov’s colour alphabet. I cannot hear the colours in the music of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. But when I listened to my grandmother’s letter translated into tone I felt I could feel the love she had for her husband, it was as though I had entered the imaginary void that she had shaped with language.