The film work Room/Raum premiered at Time & Space Limited in Hudson on Oct. 21, 2021. This event marked the formal establishment of the Mussmann/Bruce Archives and celebrates 43 years since the mining of the first verbal blocks of the piece. Linda Mussmann worked on the text from 1977 to 1984 which was performed at intervals as a perpetually-in-progress piece by Claudia Bruce and company. The piece was incepted in Mussmann's railroad storefront (room/raum) in NYC, where words were chalked and painted on the walls--an apt space to promote an unconditional surrender to language.
This current iteration as a film work is the 2nd troving of the Mussmann/ Bruce archives by Henry Munson. Seemingly ephemeral performance pieces made in Bruce's earlier days – we might have thought unretrievable except in memory –find entirely new life when Munson rifles through the boxes of tapes and journals in the TSL archives. Our dense amnesia of wild performance pieces back when, and the seeming absurdity of stuffed file cabinets and room-filling boxes of ever-evolving media, are conquered by applying fresh new mind.
Mussmann grew up in the midwest. She says that her parents spoke German when they didn't want their children to understand, so learning enough German was a survival skill for her. An abiding interest in Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein (the Steins) delivered her to the radical grammar of Room/Raum.
This film about Bruce's adaptation of Mussman's words led me to ponder how at both ends of life we struggle to fit images and our worded sense of things into our breath, with complex movements of the lips and tongue. Most of us forget this learning how to speak, but are "naturally" facile with our native tongue. Add writing to the spoken/sung word and it can become byzantine in its complexities. Add another language – in this case German – and parallels and perpendicularities of meaning leap, collide, and spar. Munson’s film lays this bare. He digitizes and & "animates" the elements of Mussmann's Room/Raum writings, and Bruce's bell-like sung/spoken performance of them. Words move about the screen incessantly, in 2 dimensional phalanxes, in ropey meanders, sliding along perpendicular and oblique planes, marching, rising like bubbles. This film makes me ponder language as a pressure –-
– The pressure words put us through from first utterance to final words
– The pressure of language on the many strata of sleep
– The pressure of language on relationships, e.g.,the pressure of the word"love
In this film piece the pressure of language is illuminated by mid-screen collisions by torrents of words and phrases. The film is insistent--it goes on and on. Anyone who meditates can tell you – language does just exactly that, and is relentless, no matter how you try to clear it from your mind. This film puts into relief the unremitting aspect of language, the skittering and word-shuttling skein of the mind.
Mussman's text is lined up along lines and points. Henry Munson's film is more of a field of words moving along planes. The near-military discipline and precision of avant-gardism is there in the original text and performance, and in the film.
So--Bruce's original performance piece is no longer consigned to taking up space as photos, notebooks, and tapes in boxes. It rises now as a new thing, and is alive. And the audience at the premier did know this.
Archived material from Bruce’s performance(s) of Room Raum mined by Munson to compose the film.
“TO GIVE UP MY NAME” extracted from this page of Mussman’s text and animated in Munson’s film. This image shows an example of the intersectionality of verbal thought and written words in both English and German.