Gad Hollander is the author of Figures of Speech, Video Residua (Orphic), Page, The Smallness of it All and Sleep, Memory. Hollander's most recent book, Walserian Waltzes and Benching With Virgil, are published by Avec Books. Forthcoming material from Serialscribbler is due to appear online at Narrativity. Hollander is the director of the films Diary of a Sane Man, Euripides' Movies, Background Music (Orphic) and Mnemosyne. He lives in London, was born in Jerusalem and spent (in/un-) formative years in Queens, New York.

The palaver transcription received a "special mention" award at VIPER 20th international film video & new media festival (Basel); It will be screened at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on the 25th of November, as well as at the Royal College of Art 29th of November.

The palaver is available as a book, as well as a book/CD, pulbished by Book Works, 1998. Conceived as a 'photo roman' the pocket sized book unfolds as a continuous text in which every page is accompanied by a corresponding image. The images, black and white photographs sourced in various European locations, have an elusive but familiar quality. Super-imposed over each image is a series of line drawings in blue marker pen, that operate as a form of 'punctuation' which in turn accentuate potential meanings in the images.

Hollander & Brick's audio CD complements the book version in the same way that a soundtrack complements a reel of film, providing readings of the text by Jennifer Chalmers, Gad Hollander and "Bill," a computer-generated voice. To hear a sample of the CD, go to Book Works. The Palaver CD (36 mins) is available as a limited edition together with a signed and numbered copy of the book.

THE PALAVER TRANSCRIPTION - GAD HOLLANDER (length: 37 mins.)

BACKGROUND

The word 'palaver' is trans-lingual, its meaning implying idle speech, nonsense, a fuss over nothing. But in the word's etymology we find 'dialogue' - from Portuguese palavra, 'word, talk' (originally between Portuguese traders and West Africans), which in turn is derived from Latin parabola, 'parable, speech, comparison,' and Greek parabola, literally 'a throwing beside, a juxtaposition'. Transcription is, in this context, a "writing over, writing across, re-writing." The palaver transcription allows these manifold layers of meanings to surface and explores the variety of nuances that emerge in the work's transformation from text to audio and finally to video. The Palaver was originally a text made up of a single, unpunctuated sentence running headlong into a complex narrative, in which anecdotal, philosophical and psychological elements interweave. It evolved into a serial work in a collaboration with Andrew Bick, where the text was cut up into 50 blocks, each linked to a corresponding image. The images are details from larger photos onto which Bick added blue felt-tip markings, usually loops, as visual reference points that served as quasi-punctuation marks, contrasting with the absence of punctuation in the text. The text+image blocks were individually printed on 50 laminated cards, forming a kind of storyboard effect for a hypothetical film. This "storyboard" version of The Palaver functioned as an installation at the Life/Live exhibition at M.A.M., Paris: the cards were attached randomly to a black velvet cloth draped over a table, while a computer voice (with its own "rules" of punctuation) read the text on a loop. Subsequently, The Palaver appeared as a book (Book Works, 1998), in which each page comprised the same text+image block as in the cards series but the order was now fixed to the linearity of the text. Following its publication, I made an audio version on CD (published by Book Works, 1999, in a limited edition). The audio CD introduced "harmonics" into the work by means of a layered reading of the text (male, female and synthesized voices), together with sound effects relating specifically to imagery in the photos as well as the text, and some musical fragments. Though originally designed to be heard on its own, with the book serving as a "score" for the work, the audio version now forms the soundtrack to the palaver transcription. The video thereby expands that sense of "harmonics" into the visual sphere, presenting a kind of chamber opera in which the work's various elements are continually brought into play. As in a poem, no single element survives without a relationship to every other part of the work, so that the book takes on a tactile part in the video, like a key prop in a movie. The video attempts to expose an ambiguous region between foreground and background, as well as between the visual and the aural. It challenges us to divide our attention between its parts while simultaneously focusing on the whole, as if continuously calling on a shift in our sensory priorities, drawing our imagination into that nebulous region between memory and oblivion.

SYNOPSIS

While the text deals with what Edmond Jabes calls "the impossibility of writing" - an attempt to grasp the essence of writing, the pause in speech - the video turns on the impossibility of touching, the distance of desire. The desire to speak and to touch informs the narrative and its successive digressions at every frame and every syllable. A narrator invokes "a voice in the shape of a window" while conferring that invocation on a third person, "corse" (a corpse). The voice has a shape and the corpse has a voice, and the two interlocutors face each other in an undefined space, like analyst and analysand, facets of the same character at different stages of being - alive and dead. The internal monologue of the presumed narrator is externalized in the corpse of a suicide victim, who addresses his own self in the past. The stories that emerge revolve around the narrator's sensual desires - to touch and to speak. Through this series of anecdotes we glimpse the life of a solitary figure, a writer, whose overwhelming desire - to see through a voice - remains unquenched, and for whom suicide is the window through which he observes that desire.

CRITICAL APPRAISALS

Comments on an early "rough cut" version:

It's very intense, quiet, moving, and fastened on the forever-central question at the heart of things -- I mean, suicide. Fanny Howe, poet & videomaker (La Jolla, CA)

Students' comments from "Magnetic Speech" seminar March 2000 at Art academies in Bergen, Malmo and Oslo

On the audio version of The Palaver (Book Works, 1999) compiled from a lecture tour by Clementine Deliss:

- cruel to the reader.
- an imitation of micropsychosis.
- one felt at rest at the end of the piece.
- voices become outside of our head.
- differences between the computer voice and the human voice: not so enormous. There is always a mixture between man and machine. It is a non-stoppable process.
- very beautiful.
- the attention span drifts in and out. Trance-like.
- The listener faces a personality loss, is agressed, frightened. I didn't know if it was me thinking of him talking... floating thoughts mixed with one's own.
- is about one's attention span and monotony, without added meanings.
- reminds one of serial music; Bill Viola.
- evokes a fragmented community, unstoppable material. Continuity is against the fragment.
- as with advertising it makes use of an information overload.
- Enjoyed listening to the Palaver (Gad Hollander): like reading the subconscious, or a book in bed, moving in and out of the text, and then dropping the book when you fall asleep.
- Listening to Fahlström's Birds for Sweden and the Palaver: using words to talk about words.

review of The Palaver (Book Works, 1998) in Art Monthly (March 1999) by

Cathy Courtney

The Palaver is subtly erotic throughout, caressing the act of writing with as much engagement as any physical enchantment. ... [the book] is a hand-sized, taut presentation that does much to strengthen the text and the near-perfect balance of Hollander's writing is reiterated in the spatial relationship between the rows of type and the empty furrows between them, and also, by the rhythmic allocation of the proportion of page space allotted to Andrew Bick's photographic images and the framing whiteness of the whole sheet. Bick's contribution has a hypnotic consistency in harmony with Hollander's punctuationless flow, similarly controlled so as to encompass complexity within an overt stylistic device, using sections of black and white images as an equivalent to the slightly deadpan writing style, and determining points of added focus by means of roughly drawn ovals sketched with what looks like a felt-tip pen.

Hollander's writing is derivative -- perhaps parodic -- but nevertheless the internal world he depicts is vivid, often bleakly funny ('I know it's not easy for you being difficult in the current climate which has been relentlessly the same throughout your life') and The Palaver has the feel of a work which began as deeply personal but has been filtered through a welcome degree of self-criticism. None of the layered textual references is too oblique to be available to the reader, just as Bick's images are not in themselves hard to decipher; yet the treatment of both renders them enjoyably distanced, just as the glossy green fold-out cover presents a twice repeated scene -- a glass building with an undulating low roof towards which two solitary figures are walking -- which is familiar as a shorthand image yet also mysterious in its specifics.

From "a round-up of short stories and little magazine" in Time Out by Nicholas Royle

'The Palaver' is a combination of images and text apparently designed to thwart the expectations of readers/viewers in search of a story. If there is any connection between Hollander's words (that tumble on to the glossy, small-format page unhindered by punctuation, capital letters or any pressure for coherence), it's lost on this perplexed reviewer.

From The Palaver by Gad Hollander and Andrew Bick, Book Works, 1998

...whereas in the context of another writer be it you or I it doesn't matter a critic might be a cretin in the context of a writer who calls him a cretin not in the sense of christian perhaps in the sense of human being but what sort of human being other than one of whom it's quite accurate to speak of as cretin though not I said it I merely endorse it without knowing if any one specific critic is a particular cretin if all critics are generally cretins or all cretins critics...

Brief history of The Palaver & the palaver transcription

1996 - live reading (45 mins) of The Palaver at Sub Voicive Poetry, London

1997 - excerpts from The Palaver in Ribot, Los Angeles, CA. (ed. Paul Vangelisti), and Intimacy, London (ed. Adam McKeown)

1997 - The Palaver (installation with Andrew Bick) at Life/Live (c/o David Medalla's space), Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist

1998 - The Palaver (with Andrew Bick) published by Book Works, London

1999 - The Palaver (Book + Audio CD), limited edition, published by Book Works, London

2000 - the palaver transcription - video (screenings: VIPER (Basel) film, video & new media festival; ICA; RCA; OMSK; The Dactyl Foundation; etc.)

CREDITS

Writer-editor-producer: Gad Hollander
Video camera: Bob Goodliffe
Rostrum camera: Ken Morse
Stills photography/Artwork: Andrew Bick
Super-8/bumpycam: Gad Hollander
Soundtrack: Gad Hollander

Voices: Jennifer Chalmers, Gad Hollander
Bodies: Dina Jacobsen, Gerry Cookson, Gad Hollander
Crew: Duncan Smith, Bayo Abefila, Bob Goodliffe
Special thanks to: Heather Deedman, Julia Lancaster, Joe Dunton Cameras, Ken Morse

Photographs by Andrew Bick taken in various cities in Europe over the past five years. Shot in London, 1999-2000, on DV & Super-8.

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