There was much food for thought in the erudite, animated and often extremely funny exchanges between the novelist and playwright Ali Smith and the writer and academic Marina Warner last night (23 November) in the anatomy lecture theatre of King’s College London. The formidable duo were the latest participants in the annual series of public Longplayer Conversations, in which a pair of leading cultural thinkers discusses ideas around Longplayer, a musical composition that unfolds in real time over the course of a millennium.
Longplayer was commissioned by Artangel and conceived by the artist, musician and member of The Pogues, Jem Finer, who was also an attentive member of last night’s audience. This most long-term of projects was inaugurated at midnight on 31 December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. (Listeners can tune in at selected locations in the UK and US or visit the Longplayer flagship in a 19th-century lighthouse in London’s docklands, from where it has been live-streaming since its inception.)
A work of art playing out over 1,000 years inspired an abundance of temporal musings from Warner and Smith. They talked about notions of narrative time, doubling time and vanishing time, with Smith observing that time disappears when making art and/or love. We were reminded of Paul Virilio’s quote that “our slowness is our power” and the recent revelation that memory and imagination occupy the same part of the brain. The authors also came up with the mischievous proposal that the current buzzword “future-proofing” urgently needs a “future-proof reader”. Perhaps inevitably, when asked how to navigate our current state of affairs in mythological terms, Warner identified the US President-elect Donald Trump as the Ogre King.
There were time frames of a different nature to consider later in the evening at a celebration of Gregor Muir’s past five years as the executive director of the ICA. He leaves to head up the international collection at Tate in January. Hosted by the photographer and art patron Maryam Eisler and attracting a huge crowd of artists, curators, dealers and collectors, the festivities culminated with the presentation of an enormous cake covered in photographs of the many high points of Muir’s past half decade. Good times, indeed.