“I delight in unmixing the omelet in order to sunnyside-up some new poem”
Gary Barwin on language, music, and relentless experimentation
If the Canadian art scene has an equivalent to the coveted five tool player, sought by baseball scouts, it’s Hamilton, Ontario’s Gary Barwin. No one label fits him. Barwin may be an award-winning author, most recently receiving the 2021 Canadian Jewish Literature Award for Fiction, but simply calling him a writer doesn’t begin to describe his talents. Barwin is a poet, animator, musician, writer and multimedia artist, and still, these descriptors seem inadequate. We spoke to Barwin about his process, jazz and about finding harmony among so many mediums.
Conventionally, films begin with a script that is then performed and shot. A soundtrack is composed to accompany what is shot. In “Saying Chaos like Cows,” we see three art forms (poetry, music, and visual arts) that are married together yet capable of standing on their own. How did you create this film? Did the various components come into existence separately to be merged later?
Each time I make a film, I end up using a different process. In “Chaos,” I began with the poem and remembered that I had made cow-related images sometime before. They seemed to connect in some uncanny way to the poem. I then created the music and then the animation video. I think of the different elements as three different instruments woven together in a synesthetic counterpoint. As somehow occupying their own dimension in analogous ways. But at the same time, like with good musical counterpoint, the way that they engage with each other enlivens each other. There’s a productive frisson. I look for the affordances of each individual media, but also what can result when they are put together: woven, entangled, parallel, entangled, blurred, sandwiched, and/or layered together.
“Language is the slip of iceberg. Is it resonant with whale song and giant ship vibrations? Is it an archive of frozen time? When it melts, will meaning rise, words overheat, and we’ll hear the defrosting mermaids singing?”
How do you find the harmony between the music, lyrics, and visuals in your videos? Once that harmony is reached, do you feel they can be separated or are they permanently one in your view?
I always wonder if any creation has an ultimate form, or if what we see if just one manifestation or iteration. I love the idea that elements or aspects of a piece can exist in other forms, in other contexts. Of course, each particular form of a piece is implicitly its own thing—form and content, context and form are the same. An egg can be bread, an omelet, tempera, meringue, pysanka or thrown at a window. But unlike an egg, creative work can be remade and appear in another form. I delight in unmixing the omelet in order to sunnyside-up some new poem.
In “Blackbirds,” your saxophone is conspicuously silent as the call and songs of the blackbird take centre stage. Is it fair to say that the saxophone and the birdsong fill the same role in your composition, making the sax redundant for this piece?
We should ask Charlie Parker about the bird/saxophone continuum, I think. He’d know. I remember reading Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra where he speaks about organisms finding their own acoustic space in the soundscape. The sounds of the different creatures in an environment are pitched so that they are distinguishable—an owl is pitched differently than a cricket or a wolf. Maybe my saxophone, knowing there are birds present, has chosen to remain silent. Or to wait until these particular blackbirds sleep. I do like the notion that birdsong fills the same role as saxophone. I do have music which has both birds and saxophone. Or neither. Is there a B-flat alto nightingale, a C-melody jay? What of the murmurations of the saxophone section of Ellington’s band, Harry Carney a sombre, flightless yet elegant light-treading emu looking longingly at the Johnny Hodges-filled sky?
You’ve spoken and written about the saxophonist John Coltrane, as an influence on your work as a sax player. Is there an artist who has had a similar influence on your visual art style?
I feel like I always answer the same way for almost everything: bpNichol. He has been a huge and abiding influence on me in so many aspects of my imagination. I am inspired by the curiosity, play and willingness to create very conceptually sophisticated post-modern “folk art” in his visual work and poetry. He makes tremendously effective, intriguing and rich results with often very simple techniques. I bring an immense amount of lack of training to my visual work, but believe that through continual experimentation and relentless play, I’ve been able create some interesting things.
If you could bring in any musician to be a sideman to accompany your saxophone playing, who would it be and why?
Now, I’m tempted to say starlings. Or timber wolves. A whale. Or maybe Mark Rothko or Twyla Tharp. Perhaps Pablo Casals or David W. McFadden. How do you think Franz Kafka would be on Hammond B-3. Or Samuel Beckett on blues harp? I don’t trust Orpheus and his smug little lyre but Pan would kick out the jams.
Letters, words, and punctuation marks appear in all of these films, as though revealed to the viewer, just to disappear once more. What is the significance of these fleeting revelations?
I have the sense that language is always in the process of slipping through some glyphic-space-semantic-orthographic-syntactic time continuum. Or maybe language is the slip of iceberg. What part of language don’t we know about? Is it resonant with whale song and giant ship vibrations? Is it an archive of frozen time? When it melts, will meaning rise, words overheat, and we’ll hear the defrosting mermaids singing? And maybe our eyelids move up and down so slowly that even eons seem fleeting, unless language moves so quickly, is so changeable, quantum, spooky, that is never is in one place.
Do you self-identify more heavily as a musician, a visual artist, a poet or a filmmaker? Or have all these skills merged into one, like a well-rounded MMA fighter?
I’ve never made the distinction between different artforms in terms of making things. I really do just think of myself as a “maker of things.” To return to the egg metaphor, I’m just some kind of chef let loose in a kitchen with a bunch of ingredients and ways to work with them. What the ingredients are, and what the means of preparing them may vary but I’m still wearing that big white hat. Oh, am I’m also lean, and sleek, and fast as an MMA fighter. Yes, that’s me. I can beat an egg like Georges Rousey or Ronda St. Pierre.