Art Metropole

#01881

A Man in a Room Gambling

Artist

Gavin Byars

Date

1997

Publisher

Point Music/Artangel Trust 97

Format

Audio

Details

CD

“For our project, which was called eventually A Man in a Room Gambling, Juan Muñoz wrote 10 texts, each one describing the manipulation of playing cards – dealing from the bottom of the pack, avoiding failure in the Three-Card Trick, how to palm a card and so on. Some of this material was culled from the writings of the extraordinary Canadian S. W. Erdnase and especially his book The Expert at the Card Table which contains some of the most perfectly constructed sleights of hand in card manipulation. We decided that each would last exactly 5 minutes and would be designed to be placed before the last radio News of the evening so that the programme, in Britain at least, would be experienced like our encounters with the Shipping Forecast, which is broadcast at four precise times during the day by the BBC. For his part, Juan imagined a listener driving along a motorway at night being bemused by this fleeting and perhaps enigmatic curiosity, in fact precisely the way in which most listeners encounter the Shipping Forecast. In recording the speaking voice, of course, Juan read each of the texts at his own pace and each one lasted a different length of time, varying in length from 3 minutes to 4 minutes 30 seconds. Each text therefore had to be manipulated both to make it fit the 5 minute format in terms of the overall duration and to establish precise conventions whereby at the start of the programme Juan would be heard to say “Good Evening” and at the end “Thank you and Good Night”. In addition, and perhaps crucially, each of the texts is accompanied by music, at exactly the same tempo for each, giving an overall unifying texture to each five-minute piece and to the whole set. Like an apparently strict musical form the five minute whole is broken into structural parts – a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards’ manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved. The presence of the music also serves the additional function of intensifying the trickster’s duplicity in the following way. When a listener is trying to follow the instructions he may encounter a passing melodic phrase in the accompanying music which takes his attention away from the description for a moment and once this happens he may be lost. Within certain programmes, too, there are additional verbal interjections. These take the form of brief repetitions of individual words by a Japanese speaker, who takes the implied role of an innocent bystander trying to practice the trick as the speaker describes it. In the ninth programme, which is presented in an apparently improvisational way, the speaker claims to have lost his prepared text and the ambience is changed with the addition of environmental sounds (the street outside tapas bars near Seville Cathedral) as though the trick is in reality being performed in its habitual location viz. the street, as well as being reflected in the bafflement of the superimposed Japanese participant.” Gavin Byars