Solo Solo Solo

Approach solo work rather more like call and response. Take up antiphony as a model of reading.

If we think against the grain of the solo as discrete, we can begin to hear solo in collectivity - and not just by tracing influence in uni-directional lines of influence, but lines of influence or reverberation that, rather than Klein's leap, shoot the call backward as well as forward, anticipate misrecognition, court it, and simultaneously, redirect the past as having become itself through re-enactment. We can approach solo rather in the way that "solo" is indicated in jazz or blues - as an artist makes a call and another responds and another responds to that response as a call and response is made, which, agai, becomes a call citing, or reciting, a response as call.

Solos, in jazz, cite each other, bleed into each other, react to each other, re-enact each other, and perform an entire cross-hatch of work, in which the "solo" quality of any one action becomes profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the fore-cast of future response (as one waits for the response after a call, mishearing that response in the call, before a response is even uttered). We might make a cross-hatch of works to produce a kind of visual or performance jam where we read sets of solo performance works as "riffing" across media, and across time, undoing any clear access to "origin" (mythic or otherwise). [...]

After all, this kind of play - this sense of playing, even play-acting - is the primary principle of postmodern production. But what kind of historical "lineage machine" can fully adopt this as scholarly practice? Since such a history could not offer a lineage that allows for singularity or discrete or unitary origins, "lineage" seems like a profoundly inadequate word. Perhaps an illegitimate history, a history of illegitimacy - that which we leave out, put back - is more (im)precisely the point.

from Solo Solo Solo by Rebecca Schneider, included in After Criticism (ed. Gavin Butt) (p.37)