Patty Interviews Sarah Fisch
Sarah Fisch
Sarah Fisch is a native San Antonian. She attended and got kicked out of the University of Texas at Austin, lived in New York for 8 years, graduated from The New School, then came home. She has written poetry, plays, stand-up comedy, 9 published childrens’ books, and many, many reviews and articles, mostly for the San Antonio Current, where she is the Arts and Culture Staff Writer.
Patty Ortiz (PO): Can you describe your evolution to being an artist that works with sound?
Sarah Fisch (SF): What a great and terrifying question. When Ethel Shipton asked me to make a sound piece for Mezcla, my first reaction was surprise. ”I’ve never done sound,” I told her. “You record stuff on your phone all the time!” she said. Which is true. I audio-record as I interview people for my job (Arts and Culture staff writer at the San Antonio Current), but I have a compulsive tendency to record friends in social situations, too.
Also, I used to do a lot of stand-up comedy and other kinds of performance, and I’d record my sets when I worked on new material. So the actual recording of sound wasn’t new to me — I’d just never considered sound the medium. Written language was always the medium.
Working on “Ranchera Güera” forced me to think about language in a completely new way, as units of sound rather than as a visual code. And once I started focusing on manipulating these sounds, other sounds started appealing to me, and I used more and more of these random field recordings I’d made, and taught myself how to use GarageBand to work it all into the mix. Then GarageBand had all these musical options, so I explored that.
PO: What other kind of performances have you done in the past besides stand-up comedy?
SF: I started out in high school being really involved in speech and debate, specifically the speech part, or “Oral Interpretation” as it’s called; performing dramatic monologues at speech tournaments, plus plays. Then in college I wrote and performed a lot of poetry, and spent a year in Dublin where I studied theater, got to do Shakespeare and Moliere plays and all that.
Later I hosted an open mic here in San Antonio, and I started to write monologue-y-comedy stuff, having seen Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian and performers like that on TV or wherever. Then when I moved to New York, I drifted into “alternative comedy” which is a kind of BS term encompassing all kinds of monologue and character performance, but usually not in a set up-punchline, club-comedy formula.
PO: With this new venture into sound installation, can you see continuing in this medium? The piece you presented in “La Mezcla” was received very well. One visitor said that it inherently felt like San Antonio. She had memories of driving in the car with her mother as a child. That is a pretty good comment.
SF: Yeah, I plan to experiment more, for sure. It’s sort of an addictive process, manipulating these bits of sound. It uses a completely different part of my brain than writing does. I had no idea how this piece would be received by listeners, since this is such new territory for me, and I didn’t even begin the project with a sense of what the aesthetic criteria are, I sort of made it up as I went along, and in the end wound up with something really deeply felt and personal that relates to me and to my strong, ambivalent feelings about San Antonio. I’ve got no perspective on the damn thing. It’s wonderful to hear that people have responded to it.
PO: Sound art is a wide-open medium right now, with artists like Janet Cardiff taking it to a new level from the days of Laurie Anderson and John Cage. You are right about how words completely change when spoken. Enunciation and tone become highlighted. Mixed with your everyday sounds, it becomes a collage of memories and associations. Your piece still appears as a story, a beautiful sound vignette. Being so versatile, as a writer, performance artist, journalist, comic, wow… Can you let us in on what you are thinking might be your next project?
SF: Sound art is absolutely elastic, which is a lot of its great appeal both to artists and listeners. I’m familiar with Cage, Anderson, Cardiff and Miller, and with Bill Fontana, who did the sound installation for the Museum Reach section of the new Riverwalk expansion. I’d been skeptical about how his piece was going to turn out because there were no sketches beforehand, obviously … but when that stretch opened in May and I walked through his piece, I loved the feeling of immersion, and the mixture of abstraction and familiarity. That inspired me as I set about working on “Ranchera Güera,” which is very different and more verbal, but thinking about Fontana’s layering technique helped me out.
I come to sound art as a writer rather than as a trained musician, or composer, or established installation artist, I guess that accounts for my reliance on/attraction to narrative. Narrative is how the world makes sense to me, even if the narrative is fractured or associative. And I love dialogue more than almost anything. I’m a compulsive talker, writer, listener. So the vignette thing is built into my thinking.
What surprised me in working on “Ranchera Güera” was that I thought of it, early on, as a variation on musical arrangement; I wanted percussion, melody, harmony, dissonance. So I built these musical elements in GarageBand and used them as a sort of sonic substructure upon which to build the story using the dialogue and speech, if that makes any sense. Also, the ranchera aspect isn’t just a title, I listened to dozens of ranchera singers in order to find the samples I ended up using, and I think that affected my thinking. Working on that segment, with the women singing the word “corazon” was incredibly hard but really satisfying in some deep way.
I have no idea of what my next sound project will be, but I find myself doing lots of field recording and thinking in a loose way about the process. I’m eager to get started.
Tags: art, artist, exhibition, la mezcla, language, performance, sound, the mixture, writing