On the Working Relationship of Jill Magid and T. Griffin
By Clara Dudley | Dedicated to Joni Sadler
Feature: Arts + Culture 8 June 2021
“Every few minutes I hear a plane pass overhead. Cars honk, and dogs bark. The noises surprise me.
I would have thought that Barragán, known for his love of silence, would have built the walls of this house thick enough to hold the world at a sonic distance.
I was wrong. There is a silence, though. I can feel it.”
The narration of artist Jill Magid moves through corners and rooms, over the slow panning shots of Casa Luis Barragán. A quivering ambient hum underlies her voice, filling the house, at times imperceptible before murmuring into melody or bleeding into rhythm.
In the tranquil outdoor courtyard of the house, nestled privately in a Mexico City neighbourhood, accent walls are situated organically around a waterfall and reflecting pools, grey stone sculptures and red clay vessels. All is water, clay, leaves, and cement arranged in shifting angles, like a Zen garden in an M.C. Escher universe.
It is the preserved home of acclaimed Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988) and a primary location at the heart of Magid’s unconventional feature documentary film The Proposal (2018, Oscilloscope Laboratories). The story follows the New York-based conceptual artist’s journey into an international artworld conflict surrounding the legacy of Barragán’s archives, embattled in a tense relationship that pits cultural value against the capitalist pillar of private ownership.
The Proposal developed from a years-long personal dialogue with Federica Zanco, the private owner of Barragán’s professional archives in Switzerland, which culminates in a climactic ‘proposal’ to Zanco: the exchange of the archives back to Mexico for a diamond ring made from Barragán’s ashes – the body for the body of the work. Ultimately, Magid’s close engagement with archives establishes her as an emergent key figure in a stunning - and controversial- new chapter.
The diamond / ‘growing cell’: “the body for the body of the work” (credit: Jill Magid)
Composer and musician T. Griffin scored the film alongside the small production team, developing a deeply sensitive response through an eclectic range of influences to capture its many incarnations. Because The Proposal is genre-defying: contracting and expanding from deeply private spaces to highly public platforms, it has been described as a ‘docu-thriller,’ a ‘post-mortem love triangle,’ and “an investigation and an exhibition, a love letter and a rival’s riposte, a protest and an olive branch” (Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times, 30 May 2019).
And always at Magid’s side, the score deftly traverses the winding roads and tributaries of her shapeshifting tale, peeking into the past and peering towards possible futures.
This is an examination of the working relationship between filmmaker and composer; how the world of cinema is built through dialogues of sound and vision; and how art responds to – and shapes – our lived experience.
“Every few minutes I hear a plane pass overhead. Cars honk, and dogs bark. The noises surprise me. I would have thought that Barragán, known for his love of silence, would have built the walls of this house thick enough to hold the world at a sonic distance. I was wrong. There is a silence, though. I can feel it.”
- Jill Magid in The Proposal [film still]
Part I: Foundations
Magid’s career spans over two decades, her work often incorporating installation, performance art, writing and film projects. Her projects are grounded on an acutely critical axis; looking directly into the faces of power systems and social infrastructures, she seeks to deconstruct systems and break them down into parts, thus rendering convention strange.
With each venture, she is thoroughly enmeshed in her subjects, the paths of her tools ceaselessly crossing the borders of distinguishable disciplines. Wielding the fiercely ambitious spirit of an explorer, her approach inevitably transcends disciplines and requires a resourceful set of tools and assets. In her own words,
To enter a system, I locate the loophole.
If my subject is made of clay, I will work in clay.
If my subject is text, I may write.
If my subject is too big, I will grow.
All the media she works with is considered and chosen carefully. “Everything must be doing work,” she says. And for her film projects, sound design is particularly vital, guiding mood and emotion in a way that can transform the experience of visual material. “Music and sound can place you and create the world around you,” she says. And through her work with Todd Griffin - known professionally as T. Griffin - Magid’s films push into new spaces.
Griffin arrived in New York as an actor and a singer-songwriter in the late 1990s; he had never worked in music for film before, but the path to cinema was born from a few pivotal touchpoints. He met filmmaker Jem Cohen who became a primary creative influence and collaborator. Griffin then moved into sound design and film scoring, starting with short films and eventually on to features.
Back in 1999, he saw the post-rock chamber band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, legendary residents of the Constellation Records label, perform live. The group is an enigmatic subject of a worldwide cult following, known for their longplay orchestral soundscapes mixed over drone, hypnotic vocal recordings, and stark political commentary. “It was revelatory,” he recalls. “One of the top ten shows of my life.” It disrupted the idea of what musical composition and performance could be.
Griffin has now scored over 50 feature films and dozens of live performances, and has released five albums as a solo artist and with his band, The Quavers. Over his career, he has collaborated with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and their associated side projects, as well as with Patti Smith, The Kronos Quartet, Matana Roberts, Vic Chesnutt, and members of Fugazi, amongst others.
Then in 2017, Griffin found an affinity in Magid’s journey into the Barragán Archives. He came onto The Proposal about mid-way through the project, with working rough edits in development. Griffin had read about Magid’s work: “I knew it was an art film,” he says, “but when I watched the rough cuts I saw right away it was a thriller.”
Magid and Griffin in New York, 2021
“I knew [The Proposal] was an art film, but when I watched the rough cuts I saw right away it was a thriller.”
“When you have an aesthetic synchronicity, it’s incredibly pleasurable to do.”
- T. Griffin on the film scoring experience (image of Griffin in his studio, by Ebru Yildiz)
Part II: Collaborations
Griffin was introduced to the team through the film’s cinematographer and producer Jarred Alterman. The team applied a track Griffin had already composed - rejected for a previous unrelated project – to the scene documenting the exhumation of Barragán’s cremated remains in Mexico City.
The sequence was edited as an autonomous piece by Magid and Alterman, and then inserted into the film – and when they watched the edit with Griffin’s track, it was immediately clear he was the perfect artist for the soundtrack. “It was so right”, Magid recalls.
Dreamlike, the exhumation scene feels both sacred and menacing, beckoning the viewer into a kind of altered state. There is a suggestion of anxious anticipation – possibly edging into horror – and a certain descent into the science-fiction realm. It marks a crucial point in the film that divides the story from before to after: it’s clear there is no point of return with ‘the proposal’ at hand. It’s from this entrance point, Magid notes, that Griffin stepped in and expanded the world of the film. “When you have an aesthetic synchronicity, it’s incredibly pleasurable to do,” says Griffin of the scoring experience.
The forthcoming soundtrack, to be released on June 11 from Constellation Records, is itself an artefact built of that relationship - because if The Proposal is a shapeshifter, then Griffin’s score is the ghost in the machine.
Remixed, remastered, and standing in its native audio realm, the album is tightened up in some spaces and filled out in others. It ranges expansively in style from meditative ambience, drone, white noise, avant garde, analogue traditional music, orchestra, and touches of electronica that could sit comfortably in a classic Twilight Zone episode.
Not ones to ignore an open canvas, Griffin and Magid worked closely with Constellation Records’ co-founder and musician Ian Illavsky to create the vinyl edition as a work of art itself. Primarily directed by Magid, the comprehensive design of the physical album adds another medium to the immersive world of The Proposal: a tactile means through which to encounter the story - and in a way, a new (and final?) instalment of the Barragán Archives.
“If The Proposal is a shapeshifter, then Griffin’s score is the ghost in the machine.”
Cover artwork for the OST album
From Magid’s Barragán Archives exhibit (vinyl insert)
“The comprehensive design of the physical album adds another medium to the immersive world of The Proposal: a tactile means through which to encounter the story - and in a way, a new (and final?) instalment of the Barragán Archives.”
Scanned letter from Jill Magid to Federica Zanco (vinyl insert)
Complete design work
Part III: Ruminations
“Barragán was a keen believer in the power of silence”, Magid says, “and how you don’t really feel silence until there’s an absence of sound.”
In the contemplative setting of her residency at Casa Luis Barragán, the music seems to materialise from the atmosphere itself, coming in on the wind or pulled up from the floorboards. The production team and Griffin had a tight collaborative relationship, tuning and recalibrating the score to the film like a radio dial; and they intentionally worked with the music to create absence and elevate silence.
They also used the score to create tempo and mood, and to guide the experience of the viewer. “We worked with Todd on when to introduce the different beats… to bring the viewer into a certain space and then to turn them away.”
In his work as a musician, Griffin plays with the focal points of arrangements, exploiting and withholding the spaces in sound to heighten engagement; he cites Brian Eno’s 1970s-era albums as “electrifying,” and a big source of inspiration. “I love in music when there’s just enough missing so you have to be more active with it,” he says. “There’s something energizing in the absence of a focal point… where you have to lean in and find it.”
Luis Barragán (credit: Ursula Bernath/ Barragán Foundation / fair use)
T. Griffin in his Brooklyn studio (image by Ebru Yildiz)
“The music offers the first clue to the power relations at hand and the battles to come. What’s the true nature of the story unfolding?”
Jill Magid in Casa Luis Barragán (The Proposal film still)
As tension builds throughout the film and the seeds of ideas are cultivated, the meditative tone gives way to frenetic string arrangements leaping from the ambience like schools of fish from a river: urgent and unordered. At points recalling the composer Mark Snow’s X-Files scores, the music offers the first clue to the power relations at hand and the battles to come. What’s the true nature of the story unfolding? And what will the string that Magid has pulled unravel?
For, really, both artists’ work responds vividly to themes of reality: reaching into the living world and its raw materials, and shaping it into new forms. Magid’s multidisciplinary work has focused on topics that would make many uncomfortable or uneasy, but which – by design - turn our focus back to these, to question and to perceive. Meanwhile, Griffin’s film soundtrack portfolio includes many non-fiction works and documentaries in particular, and he regularly composes for live performances in New York.
And perhaps this common language - this visceral dialogue with lived experience - could be useful in times of crisis: to make some kind of sense of it, even in unimaginable circumstances.
Part IV: The Body Was Always So Fragile
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic descended into New York City, and overnight civic life changed utterly.
Image: Niv Rozenberg
With just a few confirmed cases in early March, the virus rapidly brought the city to its knees; by the dark days of April, New York was an epicentre of the outbreak, and hundreds were dying every day. The health system buckled under the weight of an ailing public; thousands of businesses shuttered, and the streets of America’s most densely populated metropolis, and one of the cultural capitals of the world, were empty.
Griffin recalls the palpable fear at the onset of the pandemic. “It was horrifying,” he says. “I’ll never forget the feeling of the city emptying out, everyone afraid of touching everything, being afraid of their neighbours.”
Soon, his own personal displacement compounded an already-surreal experience. Having worked out of his Gowanus, Brooklyn, studio since 2000, Griffin was in the process of construction on the space right before the pandemic hit. And so, in the sweeping upheaval of the world at large, he now found himself without a studio and working out of a bedroom in his sublet. He and his family then relocated around the Northeast over the year; he took his work with him, scoring films and projects between relatives’ homes and then from a cabin in Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, Magid was increasingly requested to speak as an artist about what was going on, and how artists and art can respond to crisis. But in those early days, she was reluctant. She wondered, was her role as ‘artist’ the most important thing at that moment? Was that commentary needed?
“Reflecting on the era, she asked, What will be the lasting image of the pandemic? As a catastrophe, 9-11 was a highly visual tragedy – but what of this?
For her, the image of the pandemic frozen in time is a refrigerated truck. ”
“I did have to find what I thought was meaningful,” she says. “I would rather be silent than speak something that doesn’t need to be said.” And it brought into focus the other sites of her identity that carried an immediate weight and existential value: mother, family member, citizen.
As the global focus turned acutely to the management of the body, discourse around ‘protection’ – what and who was deserving of it – turned into a bitter debate between the preservation of either lives or economy. And ultimately, it seemed to Magid that politics around disposability and expendability of certain bodies was at the disturbing heart of it.
Reflecting on the era, she asked, What will be the lasting image of the pandemic? As a catastrophe, 9-11 was a highly visual tragedy – but what of this?
For her, the image of the pandemic frozen in time is a refrigerated truck.
At the height of the first COVID-19 surge in New York, with morgues overflowing and hospitals strained, refrigerated commercial trucks were drafted into use to transport the dead to their graves. “That made it real for me,” she says. Adjacently, she noted a stark visual and tactile link to armoured cash-in-transit trucks with their bulking bags of coins and cash like bodies stacked. And there, she found a symbolic link in the cynical debates between “protecting” either the economy or lives.
The arts organisation Creative Time commissioned Magid to reimagine a public artwork in response to the pandemic; Tender was the result. Launched in September 2020, Magid released 120,000 2020-issued pennies into circulation with the appropriated phrase “The body was already so fragile” engraved on their minute edges. Subverting the notion of a static monument, the pennies thus spread amongst people and society – a ‘communicable’ intervention in the economy.
Trailer for Tender (Jill Magid/Creative Time, 2020)
The exhibit Tender : Balance ran at the Renaissance Society in Chicago from 10 April through 23 May 2021. For the 28-minute film installation in the gallery, Magid and Griffin once again came together to collaborate on the soundscape. Specifically, they discussed, “What is the sound of the cash trucks? How does that weave into the sounds of the refrigerated morgue trucks?”
The film follows the journey of pennies from factory production and out to delivery and distribution into all five boroughs of New York City. Bathed in Griffin’s atmospheric composition, its abstract style is reminiscent of the Koyaanisqatsi (1982) or Baraka (1992) non-narrative documentary lineage.
“The score mixes an enmeshed, disorienting hum of indistinguishable organic and synthetic elements: unearthly voices like a church song, or a war drone; naked string arrangements; delicate melodies that stop and start.”
The score mixes an enmeshed, disorienting hum of indistinguishable organic and synthetic elements: unearthly voices like a church song, or a war drone; naked string arrangements; delicate melodies that stop and start. And in the shots absent of music, the stark industrial ambience of labour and mechanical process is suddenly made strange – a frequent mark of Magid’s conceptual methods.
Exploring the uncanny valley of our current situation, Tender / Tender : Balance, is an immersive project born from the fresh memories of collective trauma. It is an attempt to make sense of existential threat to the body, public space, and livelihoods; of the invisible virus that brought the world – and Magid and Griffin’s New York - to the edge of the abyss.
Part V: Returning to Barragán
“I’ve read Luis loved the smell of wet clay. Every morning, the maids would dip the vessels into the reflecting pool so that the smell of wet clay would waft into Luis’ studio.”
Quote: The Proposal (2018) / Video: ‘The Smell of Wet Clay’ (2020)
Jill Magid is back in a white-walled corner of Casa Luis Barragán’s outdoor courtyard. With meditative, ritual-like focus, she methodically pours water with a porcelain pitcher from a reflecting pool over large red clay pots – heavy, earthen, hand-made vessels.
Derived from an early performance piece concept, footage for the 11-minute video The Smell of Wet Clay (2020) was shot during the making of The Proposal; brief shots appear in the early scenes of the film. But the sequence ultimately didn’t work in the broader framework and tempo of the story, and it remained an idea without a home.
“Delving back into the auditory voice of the feature film, it weaves a rich composition from sparse drums, bass, saxophone, synthesizers, banjo and in-situ field recordings.”
Then, in 2020, a new collaboration opportunity came up through Constellation Records’ Corona Borealis series, an initiative launched in Winter 2020-2021 that commissioned longplay tracks and component videos to support select label-affiliated artists during the pandemic. Through Corona Borealis, Griffin and Magid returned to Casa Luis Barragán once more with The Smell of Wet Clay as a standalone music video track that is both an appendage to and independent of the feature film.
Working from the longer edit of the scene, Griffin scored the track in August 2020 from a secluded cabin in Massachusetts, still displaced from his Brooklyn studio. In a quintessentially pandemic-adapted format, he worked alone and collaborated with other musicians remotely. Delving back into the auditory voice of the feature film, it weaves a rich composition from sparse drums, bass, saxophone, synthesizers, banjo and in-situ field recordings.
Beyond the wetting of the clay, the lens turns a meticulous eye to the surrounding minutiae: water trickling from the crevices of sculpted details; fading flowers on the quivering surface of the pool; terra cotta walls nestled under cascading trees branches. The suggestion of things beyond our view - stories, secrets, the calls and answers across oceans and nations – murmurs in an unsettled concerto.
For Magid and Griffin, returning to Casa Luis Barragán for The Smell of Wet Clay was simply like opening a door and stepping back into a familiar place, back into The Proposal. “Working in all different media with a visual vocabulary and - through Griffin - a sonic vocabulary, a world is created,” says Magid. “And that world doesn’t go away.”
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The Proposal official soundtrack by T. Griffin will be released from Constellation Records on 11 June 2021. See here for more info and to order.
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Follow T. Griffin on Instagram / Facebook / Official Website
Follow Jill Magid on Instagram / Twitter / Official Website
Follow Constellation Records on Instagram / Twitter / Official Website
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Acknowledgements: thank you to Jill Magid and T. Griffin for their generous time and responses; to Greg Purcell for the insights and feedback; and to Joni Sadler for making it all happen. Learn more about Joni’s life and work here.
About the writer: Clara Dudley is the editor and curator of SITUATED. She is an art director and designer based in Dublin, Ireland. Learn more here.
Article updated 11 June 2021