Song for Hellos & Goodbyes
Tommy Becker (in person) - 2011, 2:44, DV, San Francisco
Constructed from a variety of gift cards from the local grocery, this short poem is dedicated to limited involvement relationships we step in and out of throughout our lives. It presents us with the purchased sentiments we use when falling in love and disposing life’s transient encounters.
Tommy Becker attended the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate before receiving his MFA in New Media Arts from California College of Arts in 2001 where he was awarded, The All College Honor Award”. A poet trapped in a camcorder, Becker continues to feed video poems into his never-ending saga, “TAPE NUMBER ONE”. Often Becker’s single channel works are translated to live performance. In 2005, he was awarded an artist in residency at Headlands Center for The Arts and included in the Bay Area Now at the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts. His work has been presented at White Columns, New York; Aurora Picture Show, Houston; PDX Film Festival, Portland and Hallwalls Media Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo.
Questions & Answers
ATA: Is the script taken entirely from greeting cards? Where did you "source" the text?
TB: Not entirely, there's a sort of call and response that is going on in the work. The main voice is scripted entirely from Hallmark greeting cards, but the backing voice, the response voice, comes from short phrases I've inserted. With the call and response, you end up having these awkward juxtapositions between the artificial sentiments of the cards and the more genuine thoughts and intentions of character in the work. I had an earlier version of this work without the second voice and it was much less effective.
ATA: Song for Hellos & Goodbyes is the 16th track in the larger mixed-video-tape compilation TAPE NUMBER ONE. Tell us a little about this project and its formation, its organization, and how this film in particular fits into its trajectory.
TB: TAPE NUMBER ONE began its journey in 2001. Every year I've added a couple new works so it's hovering somewhere around 25 tracks at the moment. TNO is a mixed videotape. It blends poetics, performance, costuming, hand-made props, found footage and homemade music. The tape is an incomplete visual monument, a documentary continuously being built upon through bits of poetry honoring the past. I originally came up with the concept for Song for Hellos and Goodbyes in the midst of ending a both a personal relationship and beginning and ending professional relationships. I was reading Alvin Toffler's, "Future Shock" at the time as well, which was a big influence for the piece. Toffler talks a lot about the "modular man" and our unconscious way of creating limited involvement relationships in order to access particular modules of a person's personality. This is all in regards to urban society, where life is frequently a series of transient encounters. The neighbors you have one month are gone the next and co-workers are continually replaced as well. I got to thinking about the gift cards as simply a purchasable tool, something like a hammer, first used for pounding and later used for prying.
Q&A by Liz Wing
