Rod Summers
Encyclopedia
Rod Summers born in Dorset
, England
, is a sound
, visual, conceptual artist, performance poet, dramatist, mail art
ist and book artist, publisher, archivist, and lecturer on intermedia
. He is based in Maastricht, Holland
.
The results of Summers' multiple, art-related activities have often appeared as part of his concept of VEC (Visual, Experimental, Concrete), which he originated in 1973. In 1999 CNN International
featured Summers in its Art Club show as a representative of avant-garde
art in Holland. In addition, over the last 20 years, Summers has performed his work at various festivals in Europe and Iceland, including the Reykjavik Art Festival (1991), the Polypoetry Festival of Sound Poetry (Bologna, 1993), and the International Sound Poetry Festival (Bologna, 1997), among others.
Summers features among the "second wave" of intermedia artists, the first wave including Dick Higgins
, Vito Acconci
, John Cage
, Allan Kaprow
, Joseph Beuys
, and the Fluxus
artists of the 1960s. He differs from Higgins and members of the first generation, however, in that he is less theoretical and more experiential in his approach to his art. There have been no VEC manifestos published by Summers, although one may intuit what it encompasses by examining the activities undertaken and products issued under its sign.
A photo of Summers in the midst of the performance accompanies this text. We see him clutching an umbrella, dressed in a rain coat, sitting on a folding chair in the middle of a down-pour of paper released from the ceiling of the space. A few on-lookers seem bemused, turning away, while others are clearly caught up in the humor of the piece. Humor is an essential part of many of Summers' performances, albeit the humor of a zen koan, or of the impassive presence of Charlie Chaplin
or Buster Keaton
. A broader sense of humor, however, is evident in Summers' audio drama, where change of voice, sound effects and unlikely twists of plot clearly show the artist's debt to The Goon Show
and Monty Python
. The on-going Helgisaga project (1985–present) is a good example of this mode of operation.
Network, and among the items of exchange were audio cassettes. In 1978 Summers decided, as he says to Ruud Janssen in TAM Mail-Interview #11 (see reference 2, below) "to inform myself [of]...who else was involved in the Audio Arts movement....In 1978 I travelled over to Warsaw to perform audio [at] the invitation of Henryk Gajewski and Piotr Rypson. I performed two live works there and the performances were recorded. On my return to Maastricht I assembled the first VEC AUDIO EXCHANGE cassette from works [previously] received and my own works including the two made in Poland." A post card explaining the rules of the exchange was sent out on the Mail Art Network, and as Summers says, "...reaction was rapid and enthusiastic. A total of 16 exchange cassettes were made [from] October, 1978 to the [final exchange] in 1983, and over 2000 copies were sent out in exchange for audio works." The complete AUDIO EXCHANGE is important because it documents international trends in Audio Art (and, almost as an after-thought, the beginnings of contemporary Noise music
) in a transitional period, before the widespread adoption of digital technology and the rise of the World Wide Net. Lander and Lexier's Sound by Artists (Art Metropole, 1996) gives full details of the project. The AUDIO EXCHANGE is also referenced by Peter R. Meyer (in Swedish) in his study of Audio Art Ljodkunst (Stockholm, 1997).
In addition to the Audio Exchange, Summers began VEC Audio Editions, which he continues to produce in CD format. VEC Audio Editions includes an anthology of Polish Futurist Sound poetry, performed by Piotr Rypson, as well as other sound works by noted practitioners of Audio Art.
The VEC agenda also includes publishing Fluxus
-like "multiples": limited edition magazines, artist books, artist stamps, broadsides, computer discs of art or text, stamp art, post cards, poem-objects, scores, and other ephemera. Many of these items have found their way into public and private collections.
Collaboration has been an important part of Rod Summers' VEC activities. Rod Summers has worked with, among others, Tom Winter, a Munich-based Audio Artist, Vittore Baroni, and Everarts.
)--a gesture both precise and humanly generous to the present- (in artifact) -yet-absent artist--and is carried out by Summers almost as an end in itself. Some may see a similarity to Kurt Schwitters
' Merz
constructions, but Summers' VEC ARCHIVES is more systematically—even meditatively—done. Summers himself signals the importance (and the praxis) of the ARCHIVE in the Janssen interview (See reference 2), in which he tells of an early VEC action (1977) in Den Appel in Amsterdam. At the end of the performance the first VEC Mail Art Archive is destroyed, but as Summers says,"....noted artists participated in full knowledge of what would happen to their work at the end....A little documentation exists...including the shredded remains of the work destroyed." That is, destruction/ conservation of the object are obverse sides of the same coin: both extremes exist on the same continuum in which gesture takes precedence over content, action over being.
The VEC ARCHIVES constitute the palpable archaeology of the VEC agenda, with a chronology—and therefore an on-going narrative—of the activities, as well as a concomitant tracing out of the boundaries—of Summers' various interests. In addition, the individual contributions of artists known and unknown add to the multiplicity and complexity of this single project, which, finally, can be appreciated as a work of art in itself.
, Summers inhabits the enviable position in which the subjunctive mode is the operative norm in daily life. That is, Summers' life is his art, (or as Summers would undoubtedly say, "Vec c'est moi!"). Similarly, like Beuys, (or Duchamp, for that matter) Summers achieves many of his artistic goals through maintaining a network of personal contacts and exercising a certain charisma both on and off the stage.
For Summers, VEC can sometimes take the form of political action.
Thinking of Summers' art and of VEC, we recall an illustration for a 17th century diving apparatus we once saw: A man walking upright inside a large leather tub of captured air pushes the device before him as he searches the sea-bed for gems. Just so does the subject of this article carry his self-defining art on his shoulders, uncovering whatever treasures his talents allow.
Or, as Rod Summers puts it, illuminating yet another facet of his art: VEC is "cultural intercourse between consenting artists." Perhaps that says it all.
Summers is one of the interviewees in Ruud Janssen's Mail-Interview Project
Summers performed Metaphvsical Island with Pole
Andrzej Dudek-Dürer in 1984.
Summers participated in the Polypoetry festival of Maastricht with Lucien Suel, Jaap Blonk
, Fernando Aguiar
, Enzo Minarelli, Tom Winter, and Jesse Glass
, among others. He contributed to Suel's magazine Moue de Veau sometime between 1989 and 1999.
Dorset
Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, is a sound
Sound art
Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....
, visual, conceptual artist, performance poet, dramatist, mail art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
ist and book artist, publisher, archivist, and lecturer on intermedia
Intermedia
Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
. He is based in Maastricht, Holland
Maastricht
Maastricht is situated on both sides of the Meuse river in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands, on the Belgian border and near the German border...
.
The results of Summers' multiple, art-related activities have often appeared as part of his concept of VEC (Visual, Experimental, Concrete), which he originated in 1973. In 1999 CNN International
CNN International
CNN International is an international English language television network that carries news, current affairs, politics, opinions, and business programming worldwide. CNN is one of the world's largest news organizations. It is owned by Time Warner, and is affiliated with CNN, which is mainly...
featured Summers in its Art Club show as a representative of avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art in Holland. In addition, over the last 20 years, Summers has performed his work at various festivals in Europe and Iceland, including the Reykjavik Art Festival (1991), the Polypoetry Festival of Sound Poetry (Bologna, 1993), and the International Sound Poetry Festival (Bologna, 1997), among others.
Summers features among the "second wave" of intermedia artists, the first wave including Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
, Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
, John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
, Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
, and the Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
artists of the 1960s. He differs from Higgins and members of the first generation, however, in that he is less theoretical and more experiential in his approach to his art. There have been no VEC manifestos published by Summers, although one may intuit what it encompasses by examining the activities undertaken and products issued under its sign.
As VEC Performer
A typical example of a Summers performance is Rain, the text of which first appeared in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee's Cream City Review in 1983.-
- Rain
- Performed poem with
- prerecorded sound.
-
- From the sky drop
- 100,00 pieces of
- blue paper with
- a word printed
- on each.
-
- Tape sound multi-
- tracked voice copies
- words.
-
- Words: Drip, Drop, Splish,
- Splash, Pitter-Patter,
- Drizzle, Plit-Plat.
-
- Performed at Sur and Hasselt,
- Belgium, on 4 September 1982,
- With Liz Summers and
- Theo van der Aa.
A photo of Summers in the midst of the performance accompanies this text. We see him clutching an umbrella, dressed in a rain coat, sitting on a folding chair in the middle of a down-pour of paper released from the ceiling of the space. A few on-lookers seem bemused, turning away, while others are clearly caught up in the humor of the piece. Humor is an essential part of many of Summers' performances, albeit the humor of a zen koan, or of the impassive presence of Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
or Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the...
. A broader sense of humor, however, is evident in Summers' audio drama, where change of voice, sound effects and unlikely twists of plot clearly show the artist's debt to The Goon Show
The Goon Show
The Goon Show was a British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, with occasional repeats on the BBC Light Programme...
and Monty Python
Monty Python
Monty Python was a British surreal comedy group who created their influential Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series...
. The on-going Helgisaga project (1985–present) is a good example of this mode of operation.
VEC Producing/ Publishing
Summers began to experiment with recorded sound as early as 1961. By 1973, he became an active participant in the Mail artMail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
Network, and among the items of exchange were audio cassettes. In 1978 Summers decided, as he says to Ruud Janssen in TAM Mail-Interview #11 (see reference 2, below) "to inform myself [of]...who else was involved in the Audio Arts movement....In 1978 I travelled over to Warsaw to perform audio [at] the invitation of Henryk Gajewski and Piotr Rypson. I performed two live works there and the performances were recorded. On my return to Maastricht I assembled the first VEC AUDIO EXCHANGE cassette from works [previously] received and my own works including the two made in Poland." A post card explaining the rules of the exchange was sent out on the Mail Art Network, and as Summers says, "...reaction was rapid and enthusiastic. A total of 16 exchange cassettes were made [from] October, 1978 to the [final exchange] in 1983, and over 2000 copies were sent out in exchange for audio works." The complete AUDIO EXCHANGE is important because it documents international trends in Audio Art (and, almost as an after-thought, the beginnings of contemporary Noise music
Noise music
Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically...
) in a transitional period, before the widespread adoption of digital technology and the rise of the World Wide Net. Lander and Lexier's Sound by Artists (Art Metropole, 1996) gives full details of the project. The AUDIO EXCHANGE is also referenced by Peter R. Meyer (in Swedish) in his study of Audio Art Ljodkunst (Stockholm, 1997).
In addition to the Audio Exchange, Summers began VEC Audio Editions, which he continues to produce in CD format. VEC Audio Editions includes an anthology of Polish Futurist Sound poetry, performed by Piotr Rypson, as well as other sound works by noted practitioners of Audio Art.
The VEC agenda also includes publishing Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
-like "multiples": limited edition magazines, artist books, artist stamps, broadsides, computer discs of art or text, stamp art, post cards, poem-objects, scores, and other ephemera. Many of these items have found their way into public and private collections.
Collaboration has been an important part of Rod Summers' VEC activities. Rod Summers has worked with, among others, Tom Winter, a Munich-based Audio Artist, Vittore Baroni, and Everarts.
The VEC Archives
The final category of VEC activity is the extensive (and growing) INTERMEDIA ARCHIVE, that is in a very real way a key component of Summers' art, not so much in what is collected, but in the gesture of creating descriptive entries (including log-in times and precise categories) for each object as it is added to the collection. This impeccable note-keeping and care exhibited for ephemera raises the act of collecting to the level of Sado (Tea CeremonyTea ceremony
A tea ceremony is a ritualised form of making tea. The term generally refers to either chayi Chinese tea ceremony, chado Japanese tea ceremony, tarye Korean tea ceremony. The Japanese tea ceremony is more well known, and was influenced by the Chinese tea ceremony during ancient and medieval times....
)--a gesture both precise and humanly generous to the present- (in artifact) -yet-absent artist--and is carried out by Summers almost as an end in itself. Some may see a similarity to Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
' Merz
Merz
Merz is a German surname and may refer to:* Aaron Merz , American football player* Alfred Merz , Austrian-German oceanologist* Charles Hesterman Merz , Pioneer of the National Grid UK...
constructions, but Summers' VEC ARCHIVES is more systematically—even meditatively—done. Summers himself signals the importance (and the praxis) of the ARCHIVE in the Janssen interview (See reference 2), in which he tells of an early VEC action (1977) in Den Appel in Amsterdam. At the end of the performance the first VEC Mail Art Archive is destroyed, but as Summers says,"....noted artists participated in full knowledge of what would happen to their work at the end....A little documentation exists...including the shredded remains of the work destroyed." That is, destruction/ conservation of the object are obverse sides of the same coin: both extremes exist on the same continuum in which gesture takes precedence over content, action over being.
The VEC ARCHIVES constitute the palpable archaeology of the VEC agenda, with a chronology—and therefore an on-going narrative—of the activities, as well as a concomitant tracing out of the boundaries—of Summers' various interests. In addition, the individual contributions of artists known and unknown add to the multiplicity and complexity of this single project, which, finally, can be appreciated as a work of art in itself.
A Summation
Following Beuys, and other artists of the 60's like Jerzy GrotowskiJerzy Grotowski
Jerzy Grotowski was a Polish theatre director and innovator of experimental theatre, the "theatre laboratory" and "poor theatre" concepts....
, Summers inhabits the enviable position in which the subjunctive mode is the operative norm in daily life. That is, Summers' life is his art, (or as Summers would undoubtedly say, "Vec c'est moi!"). Similarly, like Beuys, (or Duchamp, for that matter) Summers achieves many of his artistic goals through maintaining a network of personal contacts and exercising a certain charisma both on and off the stage.
For Summers, VEC can sometimes take the form of political action.
Thinking of Summers' art and of VEC, we recall an illustration for a 17th century diving apparatus we once saw: A man walking upright inside a large leather tub of captured air pushes the device before him as he searches the sea-bed for gems. Just so does the subject of this article carry his self-defining art on his shoulders, uncovering whatever treasures his talents allow.
Or, as Rod Summers puts it, illuminating yet another facet of his art: VEC is "cultural intercourse between consenting artists." Perhaps that says it all.
A Miscellany of VEC Facts
Picasso Gaglione took impressions of Summers' rubber stamp collections, reproduced in Reference 1 which is an important eyewitness account of perhaps the most important exhibition of Rubber Stamp Art ever staged.Summers is one of the interviewees in Ruud Janssen's Mail-Interview Project
Summers performed Metaphvsical Island with Pole
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
Andrzej Dudek-Dürer in 1984.
Summers participated in the Polypoetry festival of Maastricht with Lucien Suel, Jaap Blonk
Jaap Blonk
Jaap Blonk is a Dutch avant-garde composer and performance artist.Blonk is primarily self-taught both as a sound artist and as a visual/stage performer. He studied physics, mathematics, and musicology for a time, but did not complete his studies...
, Fernando Aguiar
Fernando Aguiar
Fernando João Lobo Aguiar is a retired Portuguese-born Canadian footballer who played as a defensive midfielder....
, Enzo Minarelli, Tom Winter, and Jesse Glass
Jesse Glass
-In America:Glass first began to write and publish experimental poetry in c. 1972. Starting in 1976, he edited and published the mimeographed Goethe’s Notes Magazine and Goethe's Press from his family home in Westminster, Maryland...
, among others. He contributed to Suel's magazine Moue de Veau sometime between 1989 and 1999.