These Hands: An Interview With Richard Board

Artwork By David Wojnarowicz

RICHARD BOARD: I met Bob not long after he created a piece for string quartet that was a direct transcription of sounds from a riot he recorded in San Francisco, sparked by housing discrimination against people with advanced AIDS. He titled the piece "All The Rage," and it was performed by Kronos Quartet. I interviewed with Bob to do lighting design for a piece he was working on after that called Spiral, which was a response to poetry by David Wojnarowicz. Wojnarowicz had agreed to read a text as part of All The Rage, in which all the inflections of his pre-recorded voice, describing the anger of people who took part in the riot, would be played by a cello as he spoke. However, Wojnarowicz was dying from AIDS at the time, and became too sick to actually take part in the project.

David Wojnarowicz

BOARD (cntd): Wojnarowicz's final work of art before passing was a poem, in which he described how dying felt like he was just turning to glass, and disappearing. While it's a lot more complicated than that, that idea of turning to glass and becoming invisible as you die, was translated by Bob into a glass percussion ensemble, composed of homemade glass instruments with wildly varying degrees of tone, which sort of went along with the wildly varying degrees of tone in Wojnarowicz's text. Bob had glass harps, and glass marimbas built, as well as amplified sheets of plate glass, goblets, marbles, mortar and pestle, and bowed instruments, all made of glass.

The poem in which Wojnarowicz describes the feeling of turning into glass as he died, was read and sung by live performers. During the performance, Bob used electronics to transform their voices gradually into sounds of glass, which were eventually drowned out by the real glass instruments. This "disappearance" into glass was also accomplished by pulling tape, containing a pre-recorded reading of Wojnarowicz's poem, out an old tape deck by hand. Quebecois animator, Pierre Hebert, created animated images to accompany the text during the performance, by scratching images directly onto a loop of film as it was being pulled into a film projector. The resulting animation was projected onto the glass instruments as the musicians played them.

Bob Ostertag's Homemade Glass Instruments

BOARD (cntd): And so Bob needed a lighting designer who could light glass. We had worked on several different projects together, "Spiral" and "Hunting Crows" being the two biggest tours. "Hunting Crows" was the first piece I know of where Bob incorporated toys into his work, and also used video as a direct way to trigger changes in sound. I worked with this software called Imagine, which comes from STEIM in Amsterdam. So I went with Bob to STEIM to help develop the piece. Bob would move around these toys, such as a little squeaky pig, and the color and position of those toys would make changes in the audio. In some small part it was about violence and toys, so I can see some connection between that and what would happen later with Yugoslaiva Suite. So when he wanted to do "War Games" and "These Hands," I was a natural candidate for being tech manager.

BOARD (cntd): I don't think I was out of my depth with the technology of the pieces, but when it came to Yugoslavia Suite that was definitely new to me.

ELKINS: You mean culturally?

BOARD: Yes, culturally, dealing with politics in art, and going into a situation where bombing had been taking place right before we went there. We decided that if we were going to do a piece about the conflict in Yugoslavia, we had to do it right where the conflict was taking place, not in the safety of San Francisco.

Also, we were dealing with software that was brand new. I think we were some of the first people to use it, which in a way was meant to reflect the fact that NATO bombers were some of the first to use the technology they employed for their war over there, largely due to pressure from the United States. Yugoslavia Suite was our way of exploring both the high-tech war NATO was fighting, as well as the low-tech civil war being fought by people on the ground with their own hands.

The idea with "These Hands," was that Bob would use software to make sounds I could make with my hands evolve into sounds specifically related to the conflict in Yugoslavia. Sometimes, he made the sound of my hands clapping become analogous to gunfire. Or, he would turn the sound of rubbing my hands together into the sound of wind going through a fire over which Yugoslavian war refugees were warming their hands. Bob just responded to the sounds that I could make with my hands, whether they became the sound of a cheering crowd, marching boots, or people crying. While the piece had a specific cadence, and it had recognizable signposts in it, he would improvise parts of it every night. It was never scripted.

BOARD (cntd): Through a transparent screen hanging in the middle of the stage, you see my actual hands. A camera captures the image of my hands, which Bob manipulates live, and simultaneously projects onto the screen itself, where the live image of my hands is mixed with pre-sampled images of hands involved in the Yugoslavian war. There were moving video images, not only of people who had responsibility for the war on all sides, but also images of refugees, and of people who had lost everything because of this highly technological war. While my hands interacted with the these images, I used my feet to control foot pedals that would zoom the video images in, or out. I also used my feet to control the dimming of the lights around my own hands, so we could light them from above, or below, to match the images my hands were interacting with on the screen, and look like they were really a part of the image. Whether it be the gesticulating hands of political figures lit from above by sunlight, hands of refugees lit from underneath by a fire at a refugee camp, or military figures playing chess by artificial light in their tent.

For me, the idea was primarily that, even though the war in Yugoslavia was highly technological, which is referred to in the first half of the piece, "War Games," no matter how much technology is involved, it comes down to the individual acts of individual people; that war, no matter what the intention, hurts people on the ground. So I like the interplay between my own hands, very small in a large, dark space, and the amount of technology that it took to project and interact with the music and video.

ELKINS: I'm curious if there was a difference between what you hoped this piece would accomplish, and what it actually accomplished.

BOARD: I hoped a couple of things. I knew very little about the conflict in Yugoslavia going in...that was Bob's department....and I was ambivalent about the use of bombing to keep peace anywhere. I could see where things could be accomplished by it, but could also see why it was a bad idea. So I hoped I would learn more by going right to where the bombing was taking place. At the same time I was enthusiastic about being involved in a new piece with new technology. I hoped I would learn more about both things, and I think I did.

In regard to bombing, I was able to see firsthand that no matter what people in chairs decide about war, people who don't make those decisions end up getting hurt by it. People on the ground, people with families.

BOARD (cntd): In regard to what the piece actually did accomplish, I think everywhere we went, it made people think about the war. It didn't tell them what to think because there was no exacting message in the piece that said "think this." But since the focus of the piece was on the relationship between games and war, and the war sounds in the second half of the piece began with live sampling of me applauding along with the audience, I think people had to really think about their individual role in the conflict, because all the sensory input of war that you hear in the piece evolved out of the audience's own applause, from their own hands. It was very important to us that the piece actually be presented in the place that it was about.

ELKINS: My understanding is that all diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and the U.S. were broken off at the time you went there, and that virtually no one was being allowed in, especially U.S. citizens. How did you manage to get into Yugoslavia in the first place?

BOARD: Bob had sent ahead our passports to the Yugoslav embassy in Canada to apply for visas. At some point, they returned both passports, and we found that Bob's actually had a visa in it. However, mine did not. There was no time to resolve this problem through the embassy, but we decided to take a risk. Both of us got on the plane anyway.

We arrived in Budapest, and I decided to try going to the Yugoslav embassy there. We had a narrow margin of time to pull off what we went there to do, so Bob had to leave ahead of me to go to Beograd. Actually, there were no trains that went that far, because NATO had recently blown up most of the bridges, so he was going to Novi Sad, where he had a contact who could provide him a car to go the rest of the way to Beograd. Bob had said to me a number of times, "I don't think you're going to be able to get a Visa." What I didn't understand at the time is that I think he had some concerns about my going at all, due to my lack of travel experience, and how volatile the situation was. When I arrived at the embassy, I found that someone had sent ahead a message to the embassy, in Cyrillic letters, regarding my arrival, and it must have been convincing, because I suddenly found myself with a visa in my passport.

So here I was, alone in Budapest, going off to Novi Sad, on my own. I took the logo off my backpack, because I didn't want anything to connect me with the U.S. I didn't say anything to anybody on the train.

Right after we got over the border into Serbia, the train stopped. I didn't expect there to be a stop, so I was a little undecided about what to think about that. I looked out the window, and there were two or three guys in uniforms, with at least one dog, who got on the train. And then, BAM, BAM, BAM...the men bang on the door of my compartment. The one with the dog took my passport from me and disappeared down a corridor. Another one said to me, "You need to come down and get off the train," and led me off in the opposite direction. I had no idea what was going through this guy's head.

When we got off the train, he put his arm around my shoulder, looked at me, and I heard him say in an intimidating tone, "You have maybe Yugoslav dinner?" I didn't know what they were going to do that I was going to be there long enough to have dinner, but I was pretty good at being nervous about it. I said, "No, thank you. I had sandwiches on the train." He looked at me like I was a complete moron. He took me to a room where I had to sit down. The guy who had walked off with my passport appeared, and handed it off to a third guy, who was behind a desk. Eventually, they gave it back, and I was told to get back on the train, but I got the impression that there was still a problem which had been left unresolved.

BOARD (cntd): In Novi Sad, I was picked up by a woman and taken to her house. I suddenly find myself in this room with five or six Serbians. They were asking me about what I was doing there, which was making the conversation get agitated and heated. One particular guy said, "Look, I know you're here to do this art piece and everything, but why did you blow up our cigarette factory?" I remember that he said "Why did you?" Not, "Why did they?"

Around that time, the power went out. I asked them why it went out, and they said that there were magnetic particle bombs that had been used in the bombing of Novi Sad, which fried out the transformers and made the power go out. Now, anytime the wind blew, it would blow up the magnetic particles and fry out the transformers again. And this was at least three months after those bombs had been dropped. So the power went out about twice, and we were sitting there by candlelight.

Shortly after that, Bob arrived at the house, with one of his Yugoslav contacts. It turned out that Bob had also been interrogated by police. They tried to take him to police headquarters as soon as he stepped off the train. When I told Bob and his contact about my own experience with police, and the unsettling question about dinner, Bob's contact said, "Dinner? He was saying dinar! The Yugoslav currency. He was asking for a bribe." The guy just about died laughing. "These people are so stupid!" he said. "How did they win the war?"

ELKINS: In the end, was it more difficult dealing with getting into Yugoslavia, or dealing with actually being there?

BOARD: Getting in was cake compared to actually being there. I'm not just talking about Yugoslavia, but the whole tour.

First, there was the language barrier. I knew that we were at the beginning of a long trail of misunderstandings when we had asked for sandbags in our rider, to hold up our screen, and they gave us these prop sandbags. They were like gunnysacks filled with tissue paper, made to look like sandbags you would use in a flood.

Second, because we were operating under the shadow of governments who were not likely to react well to the type of performance we were doing, we were mostly limited to performing at punk clubs, and other ill-equipped venues, in war-torn cities, for a piece that was essentially dependent on the function of complex technology. All the video for "War Games" was projected from one end of the room, and all tech for "These Hands," along with the computers where Bob sat doing the music and video manipulation, was at the other end of the room. So I found myself having to resolve problems that never would have occurred to me as being possible.

For example, I remember one night, I had measured the voltage at each end of the room, and they were equal, at 220. But there was one little, tiny cable, that ran between the two ends of the room, and as soon as we plugged it in, it fried everything out. Actually, it didn't just fry out, it melted the sauter on the end of the cable, and began to cook our gear. We went through two spare cables, and the same thing happened. We were down to our very last one for the whole tour, before we figured out that each end of the room was wired differently. These sorts of technical problems were not uncommon.

BOARD (cntd): Then there were the unpredictable reactions of the audience to a piece that probed a very recent and deep wound. I remember a man in Novi Sad, who saw that we were having trouble getting our computer working before the show, who said, "I will make sure that this piece doesn't work," and grabbed the computer from Bob, held it above his head, and appeared to be trying to push his fingers through the computer screen, before smashing it on the ground. Bob managed to get the computer back from him before the man could finish what he started, but we soon found out that that would not be the end of trouble for our computer.

I think it was in Slovakia that we needed to get all of our gear into this tiny car on a narrow road with roadblocks. I had a rule that I always carried the laptop computer, so that I was responsible if anything happened to it. On this particular day, I broke that rule. The promoter...I don't know if he was drunk at the time, but my impression was that he was drunk most of the time that we saw him...I handed the computer to him, and he put it on top of a wall next to the car that was four or five feet high, and it fell off. That's why our computer didn't work in Novi Sad, the one that had the video card in it. That was the computer that I had taken with me all the way from the U.S., and then all the way on the train from Budapest, to get there, and we were dependent on it to do the performance.

I remember Bob trying to fix the computer with this little Leatherman tool. For all this highly technical piece, we were dependent on this clumsy screwdriver. We weren't able to make the computer work. It wasn't recognizing the video card. And so, when were trying to set up the day before our performance in Novi Sad, we kept restarting the computer, and restarting it again. When a computer is plugged into a sound system, and you restart, there's this huge Mac chime, so everyone knows that something is up.

The promoter, Arpad, who was completely skeptical about us and what we were doing, understandably...I mean, we were Americans, and the U.S. had just been involved in screwing up their city...he was there the whole time, and didn't take his eyes off us. He was right up on stage, next to the tables, watching everything that we did. We told him, "The computer is not working. We're not gong to be able to do the piece, 'These Hands,' because the video card is screwed up." And he kept saying, completely suspiciously, "Why do you not want to do the piece?" We kept saying, "We want to do the piece, but we can't." He just kept looking at us like we were convicts caught in the act of a crime, and trying to deny our own guilt.

After many attempts to convince him that we were not trying to pull a fast one on him, Arpad said, "What kind of a computer is this? We will get you set up with a computer," and I said, "I don't think you will, because it has a very special video card, and it's a very uncommon set-up that we are using. It's brand new technology." He said, "Don't worry, we'll do it."

So, fast forward, I find myself in this little car with Bob and Arpad, going through all these narrow streets, and we wind up at this big, square-block, unfriendly looking apartment building. As if to underscore the tension, Arpad points out a building directly across the street, which I believe was their city hall, which had a hole blown through the roof from the recent NATO bombing. So we go into this apartment, right next to this blown-up building, up some stairs, and find ourselves in this room that has maybe six or more computers set up, with young guys sitting at them. I was seated at a couch next to a coffee table, on which I noticed catalogs for computer hardware, and catalogs for guns. And I thought, "Where are we?" Some guy approached me, and said, "We will make this piece work."

They actually had a Mac laptop, just like the one we had. I sat down at the computer and started it up, and it was all in German. I said, "Well, I can't understand anything on this computer, because I don't speak German." The guy looks at me, and says, "Yes, I know. It was stolen from a German tourist." I thought to myself, "What kind of situation have we gotten ourselves into," and that's when we realized that we were in Novi Sad's hacker central. You wouldn't believe the stuff these people were doing in there with their computers, but I can't talk about it anyway, because they made us vow not to discuss their work. In the end, we didn't take the computer, because it didn't have the video card in it that we needed.

An Untitled Photograph By David Wojnarowicz

BOARD (cntd): They were extremely disappointed. They really wanted to see this piece, and had gone through unbelievable amounts of trouble to get us there. We really had to figure out what we were going to do about this, and fast. At a certain point, Bob said, "Well, we can't do 'These Hands,' and we can't do 'War Games,' but I am a musical improvisor, and I can do a performance of improvised music." Arpad, now more suspicious than ever, folded his arms, and said, in the tone of an interrogator, "What kind of music?"

In the end, Bob wound up performing a beautiful piece of improvised music. Not everyone in the audience stayed, because many of them had come specifically to see "These Hands" and "War Games." But when we were done, we were taken out for drinks and food, and received a lot of warm claps on the back. People were really glad we were there.

ELKINS: You went through all of this to learn from the people over there. What did they want to learn from you?

BOARD: Everywhere we went, people had a lot of specific questions for us, not only about art and politics, but about our understanding of their particular situation. We found that, even if people were sometimes not 100% certain what our motives were, it was extremely important to them that someone from the U.S. was there. Not that we were representatives of the U.S. by any means, but the fact that this piece happened at all meant to them that we were actually thinking about what was happening over there, or more importantly that someone was thinking about it.

But the fact is, I had a lot more to learn from them, than they did from me.

Two conversations really stood out. One was, I think, in Slovenia. We spoke about the piece with a woman who was involved with us being there. She started talking about what it was like to sit politely at dinner every night, and hear the NATO planes flying overhead. She said that the first few weeks, they would stop dinner. Then, after a while, they got used to it, and just kept on with dinner.

I heard that "I got used to it" notion again in the living room of another woman. She said that during the bombing of the local oil refinery, she was so scared, that she just sat in the middle of the living room, huddled over her kids. Every time a bomb went off, she worried that it would drown out the sound of her childrens' final breaths. And then she looked at me, she looked at me quite pointedly, and she said, "But you know what? I got used to it, and we could have taken more."

That's when it really hit home, to me, what bombing does in the lives of individual people. I was not sitting in San Francisco doing an art show that had been advertised on every street corner. That is very different from sitting with this woman in her living room, by candlelight, because the power had gone out from the wind reactivating fallout from the magnetic particle bombs, which had been dropped on her town by the pressure of my own country, and hearing her say, "We could have taken more." And on that tour, I heard similar statements even from people whose nation-state had avoided direct involvement in the war. That was actually the sentiment that I found was the common denominator between those people directly involved in the conflict, and those who were not directly involved: "You got used to it."

ELKINS: Did this experience change your relationship with Bob in any way?

BOARD: When you go through a stressful situation like that, you tend to have a firmer foundation in your relationship. Actually, Bob's an expert sea kayaker, and I'm an intermediate kayaker. I've learned from kayaking with him, just as much as from going to Yugoslavia with him, that he's got my back. In retrospect, I see that he clearly had concerns about me going to Novi Sad on my own, and I think they were justified, but we worked it out.

ELKINS: Was there ever a point in Yugoslavia when you felt that all the obstacles you had to overcome gave way to a sort of hopelessness about what you were doing, and why you were there?

BOARD: When the guards asked me to get off the train, I did get a sense that I was in way over my head, but I never felt a sense of hopelessness. But let me tell you, it's a long time from when you press Restart on a Macintosh computer, to when all the software is up and running again. And we had to go through that over, and over again. I wouldn't say that the experience was fun, but these kind of experiences are important to go through, and I'm glad I did.

-San Francisco, California
April 2008