Emvergeoning

Andrew Waggoner sends a 3,000 word battle cry into the ether, begging us to beat back the “colonization of silence” before it’s too late. He juxtaposes complaints about the overabundance of music in modern life (music while we shop; music while we drive; music while we wait for the AT&T customer service rep to answer our calls) with praise for the powerful use of silence by composers such as Webern and Morton Feldman. I can’t help but wonder if the solution to this problem is as simple as replacing Muzak with, say, the Lovely Music catalog.

On the other hand, here’s a video of John Cage . He, too, waxes eloquent on the limitations of “what we call music” (does this include Feldman?), and the power of silence. And somehow, in this 4-minute video, Cage seems to say more than Wagonner can pack into 3,000 words. You get the feeling that Cage has absorbed silence, that he embodies silence, while Wagonner pines away for it.

PS. Here’s another discussion of silence in the context of poetry for those that missed it.

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Time to pull those summer fonts out of the closet.

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Alice Twemlow, kicking off a piece for Design Observer, points us to a Very Short List post giddily discussing an album which is a soundtrack without a film. Very Short List concludes the post reeling with the possibilities: “Dazzling book jackets without novels inside; awesome stage sets on which actors never set foot; kick-ass magazine covers with no accompanying articles . . . we love the myriad possibilities of this new cart-before-the-horse genre.”

Of course, something like this has been done many times before: Brian Eno’s “” (a 1978 album featuring soundtracks for imaginary films); Stanislaw Lem’s “” (reviews of imaginary books) and “” (introductions to imaginary books); and yes, even Harland Miller’s covers for imaginary books. The Design Observer article focuses on poster art, and the relationship between the poster and the (sometimes fictitious) event or product being promoted. It moves from minimal Japanese poster artist Ten do Ten whose designs only use huge black and red pixels, to Richard Niessen’s “Kong” poster: “A mosaic built up from pixellated K’s, O’s, N’s and G’s and fusing the game-scapes of Donkey Kong and Pong to create an architectural setting for King Kong.” Definitely worth a read.

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When I first saw Mike Gravel’s on YouTube, I figured he was just a 3rd tier Democrat trying to leverage Dadaism to get a little publicity. Crispin Sartwell has decided that these ads are no mere publicity stunt, but the genuine avant-garde of campaigning: “These are Dadaist campaign ads, as revolutionary in their context as Duchamp’s urinal, Warhol’s Marilyns, Washington crossing the Delaware, Bugs Bunny’s attack on Elmer Fudd.” You may never again see someone reference Baudrillard while critiquing a campaign ad, so enjoy it while you can, if you can:

Gravel’s works confront us with our own existences and our deaths, the brute thereness of truth, the skull beneath the $400 haircut, the cellulite under the pants suit. His is neo-existentialist, post-apocalyptic, post-post modern art, a silence that screams and cajoles.

(via The Plank)

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This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word [I-You] to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being.

The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such a confrontation demands this. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or man might, to seek relaxation in the It-world; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.

The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced world. Not as a thing among the “internal” things, not as a figment of the “imagination”, but as what is present. Tested for its objectivity, the form is not “there” at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.

Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize it, I uncover. I lead the form across — into the world of It. The created work is a thing among things and can be experienced and described as an aggregate of qualities. But the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again.

— Martin Buber (trans. Walter Kaufman),

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Via Andrew Sullivan, I ran across this interesting post at 3quarksdaily defending the films of Sophia Coppola and Wes Anderson as “New Mannerism“:

Coppola and Anderson make films that feel nothing like the great works of, say, Antonioni or even the New Wave directors or, for that matter, the films of Francis Ford Coppola. The New Mannerists are conveying a different kind of experience. They are interested in getting a certain feel or a mood right and they value achieving that sense of mood far above accomplishments in narrative or character development.

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A few months ago I wondered whether we’d lost the art of writing a good manifesto. Recently a friend sent me Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” which demonstrates that a good manifesto can still pop up now and again. It is interesting to think about in terms of Herzog’s own documentary work, which always seems to be an examination of the construction of reality, rather than an attempt to hold reality captive. Here is the text in full:

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema
“LESSONS OF DARKNESS”

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.”
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

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I just saw a headline on the Glasstire RSS feed that reads: “Current event protest art is finally making a comeback.” I have to confess I have an instinctive revulsion to most political art, which I generally find manipulative and cynical. My favorite example from recent years is this Richard Serra print of the famous photograph of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner standing on a box. As a political issue, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the following revelations about torture were appalling to me, but I find this print to be a banal and unproductive form of political activity. Richard Serra may be a minor deity in the art world, but does he really think he can shift public opinion by reproducing an image that has been printed in magazines and newspapers all over the world? This Economist cover, for instance, was much more powerful for me, because it was backed up by actual political analysis. What we need in our politics is thoughtful critical discourse, not shrill activism. What we need in our art is depth of feeling, not emotional manipulation. Arthur Danto took up this issue in more depth with his essay Beauty and Morality. I feel about this Richard Serra print roughly the same as Danto felt about a Chris Burden piece called The Other Vietnam Memorial, which listed the names of the Vietnamese victims of the war: “It does not help the dead and it does not move the living, and in the end it seems merely a clever idea, almost a gimmick, a kind of moralizing toy. Everything about it as art is wrong, given its subject and its intentions. And because it fails as art, it fails morally, extenuated only by the presumed good intentions of the artist.” Danto may have changed his mind about the conclusion of this essay (”the time of day appropriate to action and change may not be appropriate either for philosophy or for art”), but my feeling is still that protest art is much more likely to cheapen the artistic process than to improve political or social conditions.

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Following up on the Kraftwerk video I posted last week, I thought y’all might like a little background on what these guys were trying to accomplish. I find it interesting that critical writing about music most often emphasizes the formal and emotional aspects of the work, and generally disregards the philosophical implications. Visual art criticism, on the other hand, often focuses on the conceptual aspects of the work to the point that the discussion revolves around ideas that are tangential to the actual pieces. In any case, here’s an excerpt from a Lester Bangs interview with Kraftwerk from 1975 which gets to the heart of the Kraftwerk philosophy (read the whole thing on the Creem site):

They referred to their studio as their “laboratory,” and I wondered aloud if they didn’t encounter certain dangers in their experiments. What’s to stop the machines, I asked, from eventually taking over, or at least putting them out of work? “It’s like a car,” explained Florian. “You have the control, but it’s your decision how much you want to control it. If you let the wheel go, the car will drive somewhere, maybe off the road. We have done electronic accidents. And it is also possible to damage your mind. But this is the risk one takes. We have power. It just depends on what you do with it.”

I wondered if they could see some ramifications for what they could do with it. “Yes,” said Ralf, “it’s our music, we are manipulating the audience. That’s what it’s all about. When you play electronic music, you have the control of the imagination of the people in the room, and it can get to an extent where it’s almost physical.”

I mentioned the theories of William Burroughs, who says that you can start a riot with two tape recorders, and asked them if they could create a sound which would cause a riot, wreck the hall, would they like to do it? “I agree with Burroughs,” said Ralf. “We would not like to do that, but we are aware of it.”

“It would be very dangerous,” cautioned Florian. “It could be like a boomerang.”

“It would be great publicity,” I nudged.

“It could be the end,” said Florian, calm, unblinking. “A person doing experimental music must be responsible for the results of the experiments. They could be very dangerous emotionally.”

I told them that I considered their music rather anti-emotional, and Florian quietly and patiently explained that “‘emotion’ is a strange word. There is a cold emotion and other emotion, both equally valid. It’s not body emotion, it’s mental emotion. We like to ignore the audience while we play, and take all our concentration into the music. We are very much interested in origin of music, the source of music. The pure sound is something we would very much like to achieve.”

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Jed Perl is on a tear. His latest fulmination (subscription required) in The New Republic lashes out at John Currin (”what Currin doesn’t know about figure painting could fill volumes”), Kiki Smith (”whose dumb-beyond-belief Whitney show was full of the sort of neo-hippie baubles I wouldn’t buy at Target for $14.95″), Fernando Botero (whose recent paintings “have as much sense of form and structure as mushy brown gravy poured over marzipan”), and a host of others. What he’s so worked up about is what he calls “laissez-faire aesthetics” which he claims “violates the very principle of art.” And he has a point.

I don’t follow the art world closely enough to address his specific attacks on their merits, but I think the larger themes of the essay are worth grappling with. The crux of his argument is that high art is by its very nature exclusive and esoteric. The mingling of high art with pop culture is therefore an unholy union which threatens to turn museums into expensive shopping malls. But his take on this situation is more nuanced than the tired lamentations about pop art we’ve been hearing for decades. His point rests on the idea that what was once a dialectic between high art and pop culture has devolved into a raw pursuit of money through the time-tested marketing strategies of the taskmasters of pop. That is, while Andy Warhol may have been the “evil prophet of the profit motive” he was at least taking a risk, standing up for an idea, and engaging in a real conversation. Now, apparently, artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage are presenting works without meaning, without statements, that challenge nothing.

Should the art world try to maintain (or regain) its tendency towards the “daringly, rightfully, triumphantly intolerant”? Personally, I’m not sure yet — but I do think this is an important discussion to be having at a time when the art market is exploding and YouTube is helping to create and propagate some of the most inane pop culture this side of pet rocks.

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Just thought I’d link y’all up to probably the most sublime review of a rock album ever written; in fact, one of the best pieces of art criticism I have ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, is among the most celebrated American rock critics, and although he has written some crap, this review shows why he deserves that reputation.

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

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Have we lost the art of writing a good manifesto??

Money quote:

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, “Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert …. Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!”

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