In intermittent fashion-show sequences, Humbert invites us to “escape through the world of Avant Garter,” Humbert’s own atelier, outfits by which are trotted out to an upbeat marimba-and-cowbell shuffle. To do so, Daytime Viewing’s theatrical structure interlocks song and costume, both of which arrive haunted by the television screen. Whether the warm glow of a television screen or the flash of sequins caught in a spotlight, Daytime Viewing took the surfaces used by consumer culture to stimulate and reflect women’s desires, arranging them in a charming way to tell a story about the stories mass culture encourages us to tell ourselves. Viewed as a performance, Humbert and Rosenboom’s concept of what a song might encompass swells to become a mode of live audiovisual storytelling that harnesses the hallucinatory capabilities of its subjects, among them soap operas and haute couture. These findings emphasize the degree to which visuality and theatricality are essential to Daytime Viewing’s operation, and flesh out its stance on the objects it investigates. Alongside it, the label’s head, Tommy McCutchon, digitized and uploaded performance footage and visuals that fill in the work’s longer intermedial history.
This spring, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the 1983 release, Unseen Worlds offered a 2x-LP expanded reissue. Those intense, character-driven songs presage the more ambitious conceptual musical performance of Daytime Viewing.ĭaytime Viewing is best known now through a 1983 audio recording, initially released as a private cassette edition and reissued publicly by the record label Unseen Worlds in 2013. Jasmine, a songstress whose tunes theatricalized social commentary (on sexuality, sex work, and other subjects). During this time, Humbert performed as J. Between 19, the pair were members of the Maple Sugar Group, a Toronto-based performance collective whose members included George Manupelli, Mary Moulton, James Tenney, and Ann Holloway, among others. Humbert designed costumes for the late Robert Ashley’s television-opera Perfect Lives (1983) and was later a longtime member of his vocal ensemble Rosenboom is a computer music pioneer whose work has engaged the human brain and nervous system. She gathered momentum by living within, contained by a fascination with the view: this trance, this private daytime viewing where any world awaited her arrival.”īoth Humbert and Rosenboom are part of a cohort of musical avant-gardists who play with song as a form that can, often in just a few short minutes, bridge the popular inner core and absolute outer limits of American aesthetics and consciousness. She was a survivor, addressing the struggle without by living within. The tableau is soundtracked by uneasy synthesizer melody, and a voice narrating: “She was all she had, and it was more than enough for now. Her reflection is briefly visible on the blank screen as she fiddles with a knob to turn the set on, then, screen illuminated, she pulls up a channel displaying a nested image of another woman in profile watching TV.
#GLOW SHIFT NOB TV#
She wears a bright green printed housedress-the shapeless body-concealing kind-and large fluffy slippers she nervously settles into her spotlit destination, a chair set in profile close to a TV set.
In a videotaped recording of a 1980 performance of Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom’s song cycle Daytime Viewing, a woman wanders across a dim stage.
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