Wendy Eisenberg
Wendy Eisenberg is an improvising guitarist, banjo-player, vocalist, songwriter, and composer. Along with performing in rock bands such as Editrix and Birthing Hips, Eisenberg works solo as a songwriter and an improviser equally. Wendy released the songs albums Dehiscence (2020) and Auto in 2020 to acclaim in such legacy publications as the Wire and the Washington Post. They have published pieces in Sound American, John Zorn's Arcana series, and the Contemporary Music Review.
Title of Project
Contranyms, Virtuosity, and The Sound of Artists Quitting
Description of Project
There is a contranymous relationship between abandonment, the act of leaving something behind, and abandon, subsuming oneself. These twin concepts of “abandonment” and “abandon” are most perceptible in the story of the violinist Polly Bradfield, an improviser who made 1½ stark and powerful records under her own name in the late 1970s, played with a coterie of downtown luminaries, then disappeared almost totally from what some call “public life.” This paper is an auto-theoretical envisioning of Bradfield’s life that considers her performances (with abandon) and her abandonment (of performance) in relation to the concepts of public life, the art world, improvisation, and simultaneity. I consider her exodus in relation to the artists Tehching Hsieh, Charlotte Posenenske, Sturtevant, and Lee Lozano; I hear her music resonate with the various vanishings of Jim Sullivan, Captain Beefheart, Henry Grimes, Giuseppe Logan, Betty Davis, and Connie Converse. These figures will be explored in varying depth, using intertextual and epigrammatic techniques embraced by the postmodern novelists Carole Maso and David Markson. My shorter-form engagement with these artists will encounter longer theoretical passages that relate these artists and their work to the classic essay by Arthur Danto about the idea of the “art world,” and how (art) theory can and cannot relate to nonvisual, momentary and simultaneous practices.
Project Inspiration
I am inspired to write about artists who quit or leave or disappear or are absent because few of my musician friends ever feel like we can quit; instead, quitting an artistic career is coded as failure. I don't think that has to be the case, and I think my poetic documentation of these quitters clarifies that quitting/absence is not always a mode of refusal that empowers or affirms the structures the quitter is denying, but rather just another, often freer, way of living.
Areas of Academic Interest
music, visual and performance art