File Note 104: Sam Belinfante

Roughly 45 minutes into Aryan Kaganof’s Night is Coming: A Threnody for the Victims of Marikana (2014) we are shown (it is not spoken) the following quote from the South African jazz bassist Johnny Dyani: “When you start talking about music, you start lying.” This repeats, although slightly out of phase, Martin Heidegger’s observation from his 1959 lecture on language: “to talk about language is presumably even worse than to write about silence”. Taken together such formulations direct our attention, our eyes and our ears, to the essential difficulty that animates, even agitates, the corpus of Sam Belinfante. This is not quite the classical problem of what the Greeks called ekphrasis, that is, the difficult work of transposing an image (the shield of Achilles) into poetry (the language of Homeric epic), but what separates these insights is less time than thought. What Dyani and Heidegger are stressing are the stakes of acknowledging the paradoxes that beset virtually all work with sound whether realised as music or as silence. This work is not only difficult, challenging, it may be impossible; not in the sense of being unachievable, but in the sense of constituting a form of achievement that is marked conspicuously and repeatedly by its own limits. These limits are not signs of failure for they are hugely generative and Belinfante insists that we retrace his own encounter with them. To take “listening” as an example: Belinfante is not only inviting us to listen in various settings and to various sounds, but he is insisting that we also attend or attune to the difference between hearing and listening, that we, in effect, listen to what listening is, how it takes place. Put differently, he is reminding us that one cannot listen without hearing, but one can indeed hear without listening. And, in that sense, he is reminding us that neither hearing nor listening are essentially, or exclusively attached to the ears.

What this tells one directly is that Belinfante agrees with the German writer Friedrich Schlegel when he insisted that the theory of the novel had to itself be a novel, suggesting two things about him: firstly, that he treats art-making as a rigorous form of thinking, not merely beautiful, sublime, kitschy or ugly; secondly, his work is not approaching its concerns from the outside. Belinfante does not make art about audiovisuality. Instead, he works to involve us in the thinking that his materials call
forth from within him. 

In Belinfante’s choral piece, The Full Gamut (2015), for example what he systematically explores is the musically expressive potential of the tonal rudiments in Western music. Such movements, made memorable in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, are deployed by Belinfante to trace the work of sound as it plunges listeners into the oral cavities from which it resounds. Structured as a round, loosely working through the circle of fifths, The Full Gamut makes gesture, that decisive demarcation device in Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, vanish between the sight and the sound of the body emptying of its sonic contents. It thus sets us to thinking about where the work of audiovisual art is taking place, or, to dig out another forgotten ancestor, to cite Baruch Spinoza: what a body can do.

Similar points could be made about Belinfante’s short, Accordion (2014), where musical sound is generated by the reversible handling of the bellows, keys and buttons. Sonic gestures indeed. Here, on these pages, these gestures are being written about. If what Dyani says is true then you are reading lies. But with consummate artful dodging Belinfante is working precisely on and at the places where writing, speaking, singing and filming stage the paradoxes they don’t quite succumb to.