Inoli Murphy forming an Inuit net; behind him is Carrie Gundersdorf’s Diagonal composition with laser lemon. — Photo by Paul Cox
When the artist-run exhibition space Regina Rex opened in June, we knew on first visit how different it was: clean-cut, intellectual, and rarefied without being clubbish. So when they posted notice of a Saturday afternoon event in conjunction with their current show, Hand’s Tide, we knew what not to expect: cheap beer or someone’s roommate’s band playing a set in the back.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, Bushwick, but sometimes a mental cleanser is in order, such as Indian classical music theory or topological mathematics. Or maybe the traditions of Native American string figures, or narrative explorations of a single vowel. As it turned out on Saturday, we got all of these in two hours.
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The Hand’s Tide exhibition is inspired by the ancient string figure traditions found in cultures all over the world; as curator Angelina Gualdoni puts it, the "repetition, handmade gestures, and reference to things larger than what’s going on in your hands." The iced hibiscus juice we were offered as we entered the gallery, sharp and astringent, cleared heads for the dense gestures of the artwork and the discussions to come. Alongside the eight artists represented on the walls, Gualdoni invited two experts to add their voices to the inquiry: Hindustani vocalist Achyut Joshi and string figurer Inoli Murphy.
The double workshop was as engaging as one would hope from two NYC high school math teachers (active and retired, respectively). Despite sitting on an Oriental rug behind a tanpura – a large Indian string instrument – Joshi eased us into his subject with his best classroom tricks. He started off with a singalong of the Four Tops’ I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch), which he then transformed into a Hindustani arrangement one element at a time, finally slowing the melody down fourfold and dropping all but a single emotive vowel.
The aaa was all he needed: the aim of Hindustani singing, he revealed to us, is "storytelling through a vowel," stripping away all unnecessary language to tell of things translatable to neither Hindi nor English. At this point the odd decision to bring a musician to an event on string figures became clear, as Joshi showed us how to weave a single vocal strain into intricate meanings, with the schematic of Raag Yaman, a traditional raga framework, controlling the results like ten fingers.
Taking over for the second half across a table of prepared loops, string figurer Inoli Murphy tried to bring some substance to the show’s binding analogy. Murphy, an immensely likeable retired teacher, grew up and taught in a Cherokee community in Texas. Faced with restless, failing math students, he started using string figures as a hands-on way of introducing concepts and spent decades refining the curriculum, in Texas and later New York City. His idea was not just to teach archetypal figures, but to give his students "the facility to try and make their own figures, which requires you to conjecture, explore, remember, and re-conjecture."
His too-brief demonstration of traditional and variant figures was impressive but gave little time to get into the mathematics of universes, inverses, and primes he hints at (some time with his web sites and a loop of string is better for this, and recommended). What does come through is the way in which this process of creation makes use of topologically stored data: twists and diamonds generated early on that lie dormant in the string until the final figure is revealed. The thinking needed to work with and recombine these virtual forms is definitely a good, mind-stretching sort, no doubt sharing some of the brain regions of modular computer programming. For a generation of children currently engrossed by the encoded virtuality of Silly Bandz, maybe there is something to learn from these ancient methods of toroid manipulation.
Like computers, string figures are a tool for generating complexity, but only on a comprehensible human scale. In string figuring, as in Hindustani raga, as in the works of Hand’s Tide, there are no shortcuts for spawning emergent complexity, no algorithms that don’t have to be carefully implemented by hand or by voice. The artist is still doing the work, but not quite all of it: some of the structure is right there waiting to be found. "Sometimes you have to sing to yourself to keep a rhythm," Murphy says with a nod to Joshi, giving up on trying to talk while he moves his fingers. "Sometimes you have to get rid of the words and let the melody take over."
