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Our MFA show is less that three weeks away, and we’re in the midst of a part of the learning/teaching process that I’m discovering to be particularly fascinating. Our thesis committees are reviewing our work and the critique is beginning to get tough.
One professor made some suggestions that I found to be just plain irritating. I felt an immediate resistance to what was said, and further felt that incorporating the suggestion would be a kind of acquiescence, an unacceptable dilution of my intent. That was my initial reaction. My next thought was that we’re all adults here, my ideas and feelings on the matter are as valid as any other, and who’s the artist here anyway? Why it’s me of course. It’s my work and my vision and dammit, I’ll realize it as I see fit. Those were all the emotions and attendant thoughts that came in the moment. Naturally, I didn’t demonstrate these emotions. The professor has the best of intentions, and draws from a vast store of erudition and experience. The teachers on our committees are trying to help us become better artists by making sure we live up to the standards we set for ourselves. I’m not being an unthinking Pollyanna when I say this. I know many of the teachers involved in our program and who are on the thesis committees for my cohort, and they’re all pretty great. I see that they are trying to be genuinely helpful and have our best interests at heart. I understand all that and kept it in mind in the moment (I feel like that is a critical technique that is part of the practice of strong emotional intelligence; you’ve got to be able to observe yourself and check your reactions in the moment. Nevertheless, I had pretty strong disagreements with some of the critique that was offered.
That emotion is, I have come to understand, a valuable part of the learning process. My strong (though contained) reaction could be regarded as overly sensitive, or even petty, but it served to conjure within me a stronger sense of my own agency as an artist, at least in this context: it is my work and I’m in charge of it. Simultaneously, I was compelled to mull over the critique. Even if I disagreed with particular points, the fact that we were confronted regarding the work caused me to think more critically and deeply in general. I suppose I’ll see the professor’s point about some things, and might dismiss others, but the work is stronger merely as a result of the challenge.
Every now and again I hear original music in dreams clearly enough to reproduce it in waking life. Last night’s dream was not particularly wild: I was in a city I didn’t know, getting ready with eager anticipation to visit someone I also didn’t know - or don’t remember. The more interesting part was that the music coming out of the stereo in the room I was in (the home of a friend?) was a new song by Kate Bush that I found I liked quite a bit. I remember thinking that the drumming was very good; Bush isn’t real big on using traditional drum kit work, and that the lyrics were particularly amusing. I thought to my self, “At last, she’s gained a sense of irony.”
It was sufficiently vivid that, I could have written it down and used it myself, but alas, those who hesitate are lost. If I had recorded it, would that count as a collaboration?
It surely would have been Kate’s best single in years.
Peirce On Signs: Hoopes, James, Ed. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1991.
This is a collection of the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce pertaining to his contribution to Semiotics. The first observation I’d like to make about this reading is that Peirce, brilliant as he clearly was, was a terrible writer: difficult sentences (not just complex constructions, but awkward ones) frequent neologisms, etc. It requires a lot of rereading and interpretation. I take on this wrestling match with his writing with some enthusiasm, but I now see why his work has been cited to so many different - sometimes contradictory - purposes.
I am about to plunge in to a reread of On a New List of Categories. Wish me luck.
Article: Biography of the Sample: Notes on the Hidden Contexts of Acousmatic Arts
Author: Joe Milutis
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 18, pp. 71–75, 2008
Milutis directly addresses the tension between acousmatics and the “outwardly” signifying properties of sound. Acousmatic sound, simply put, is sound that is divorced from it’s original source, and delivered by means of mechanical or electronic means. It might be worth noting that sounds made through the use of machines aren’t necessarily acousmatic. The example I’m thinking of is a performance on an electric guitar. The guitar and the amplifier are both part of an instrument. The sound of the vibrating strings are temporally and causally connected to the strings themselves. A sample of an electric guitar sound played through a MIDI device or a computer is acousmatic. The sound is no longer connected to the physical circumstances of it’s original production. In other words, it’s a recording. Of course the thing about acousmatic sounds is that they are endlessly manipulable, to the point where they no longer any resemblance to their source. As we all know this has opened up a vast area of creative possibilities. Pierre Schaeffer is one of the great pioneers in developing this potential.
Acousmatics also begs questions of signification, the “purely musical” use of recorded sounds, and about whether sounds can ultimately be wrenched free of their sources. I particularly like Milutis’ suggestion that we think of acousmatics as a “politics that creates new connections and new narratives”. The relation of the world to its sounds is dialogical; one of relays and borrowings and constant - if constantly shifting - signification. His critique of the work of Francesco Lopez is held up as a demonstration of the dangers - and perhaps ultimate impossibility - of completely abstracting sound from referencing the context in which it was produced. I want to investigate this idea also from the other end of the music/sound spectrum. Spectrum is a poor choice of words; I don’t sense a range of experiences, but I do detect a border - with a liminal border space - between narrative and musical logic.
I’m in the midst of reading Susan Sontag’s introductory essay to Antonin Artaud’s Selected Writings. There are a couple of bits that resonated nicely. The first is on page xxvii of the 1976 edition.
Artaud’s work denies that there is any difference between art and thought, between poetry and truth…he takes art-making to be a trope for the functioning of all consciousness - of life itself.
Having read The Theater and Its Double some years ago, I know enough to see this in Artaud’s writing. It’s one of those ideas that I simultaneously embrace enthusiastically as a profound truth, even as I reserve a bit of skepticism (I’m happy to spend the majority of my time in the embrace). Sontag also observes that Artaud’s work involves a kind of conflation of theory or criticism with art-making: his essays were some of his best prose poems. That’s something to aspire to.
The place where she talks about his brief stint as a surrealist is also fun, as much for what Sontag says about Surrealism as about Artaud. She focuses on the positivity that lay at the foundation of the Surrealist project. Sontag rightly points to the fact that surrealism was first and foremost a mental and spiritual discipline, and secondarily an approach to art-making. She describes Surrealism as a “spiritual politics of joy.” Hear-hear.
In the midst of this party Artaud was a brilliant curmudgeon: a most curmudgeonly curmudgeon.
On Friday I attended a symposium entitled “The Art of Collaboration: Processes, Technologies, Authorship” here at UC Santa Cruz. It seemed relevant, since I am engaged in collaborative work at the moment, and have participated in varying degrees of collaboration in my musical activities over the years.
You can see the list of participants on the poster.The panelists were involved in collaboration that came in an assortment of flavors, and thus provided a good mix of perspectives. The bulk of the discussion concerned the nature of collaboration, particularly in the context of the current historical moment and its attendant technologies. This was clearly a fruitful basis for investigation. A few examples will illustrate the spectrum of concepts of collaboration the were represented. Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert are artists and a married couple who collaborate on performances works that often focus on their own lives and the psychology of their couple-hood. They talked some about the value of differences and disagreements in the collaborative process. John Jota Leaños talked about creating contexts for members of a community to interact in ways that might not have been possible otherwise. As he progressed with his presentation, Mr. Leaños began to speak in terms of audiences - the communities he addresses - as collaborators, which to my mind is a breath away from saying that to engage with an artwork as a viewer is to collaborate with the artist at some level. This is not a new idea, and happens to be one with which I agree in important ways. But is does take the notion of artistic collaboration to that philosophical boarderland where the line between artist and audience blurs and then vanishes. E. G. Chrichton presented her ongoing project involving a “matchmaking” between an artist and a deceased person through that person’s archive. The artist was to gather impressions by means of the archive and develop a creative response to that person’s life. Here the collaboration exists among participants on quite a few levels: the artist (E. G.) who flashed on the concept, contacts the participating artists and does the matchmaking, but otherwise stays out of the way, the artists who develop the individual pieces, and the dead person through his or her archive. It’s a rich structure. There were also artists who had developed large-scale projects involving participants worldwide who contributed video and audio documents to large archives that could be accessed and explored via the internet. Here is an area in which the status of authorship is drastically redefined. This type of project requires a collaboration among people who have never met, and are in many cases unlikely to ever meet. If the artwork is defined as the totality of the archive, the website, etc., there can be no single claim to authorship. These projects exist precisely because of current information technologies, and would not have been possible a few years ago.
Though the range of projects and perspectives was fascinating in itself, there were a couple of things that the entire event brought up - at least for me - by virtue of their being at least partly unspoken. First, if the purpose of the event was to explore the variety of collaborative approaches, it was quite a success, but I found myself waiting for some kind of direct acknowledgment that the fact of this variety meant that collaboration was a complex idea not easily reduced, I sensed a need in the air to somehow pin down the what collaboration meant, yet the panelists seemed unwilling to go there. At one point during the first panel on Friday morning, when the audience asked questions of the panelists, B. Ruby Rich, who was actually one of the organizers of the event, posited this idea succinctly, couched in a question to the panelists. Even then, no one just said “yes, clearly collaboration takes many forms, and all these practices are equally, though differently, collaborative” (or words to that effect). It was an interesting thing to observe.
Another subtext that caught my interest was the invocation of the “myth” of the artist as a lone producer. Even though an almost total war has been waged against this concept by intellectuals of many stripes for nearly a century, the mythology of the artist as the solitary genius remains potent enough that folks feel the need to address it. What’s even funnier is that it’s invoked partly as if the war has been won. Mention of the solitary artist is placed in imaginary quotes and put forth as an anachronism, but continues to be addressed all the same. The speakers on Friday seemed quite self-conscious about bringing it up, yet felt that they must. Of course many artists do work in solitude in their studios, and we all understand the importance of “alone time” - long stretches of it on occasion - to allow ourselves space to think. That’s quite a different thing from the above-mentioned myth. Yet the myth persists. It’s romantic, and romance is something we do crave on occasion (We also still listen to Beethoven, who seems to me to be an artist who’s biography exemplifies this myth more completely that almost any other). It does seem to be true that many institutional and industrial infrastructures buy into it as well, particularly universities, where the holy grail of tenure is doled out depending on how much intellectual heavy lifting the candidate can do, and one of the criteria is, apparently, can the candidate write her own book, or otherwise publish of produce on her own? After discussing a number of cool internet archive projects she had helped create over the past couple of years, Marsha Kinder told us that collegues still ask her, “When are you going to return to your own work?” The institutional pressure is against collaborative work. The unspoken consensus at the symposium was that this needs to change (I agree), but I didn’t hear much in the way of ideas to correct the situation. Then again, I had to miss the last panel. Perhaps they focused on that very thing.
The event was valuable as much for what was not covered as for what was discussed. In my book it’s a mark of success that as many questions were raised as were answered. It means that the topic is complex and important enough to merit further exploration.
The popular (in the sense of “shared by the majority”, not necessarily “current”) notion still seems to be that the world is getting smaller - metaphorically speaking. I have to say that I’m experiencing the opposite phenomenon with respect to my own little world. It’s expanding by leaps and bounds. Part of this has to do with being exposed to conceptual arenas that are in some way validating of unarticulated ideas, or open my thinking up in an unexpected direction. In the last year I’ve become acquainted with a few concepts and practices that have set me thinking about my own practice in fresh ways. These little jolts feel like doors opening, allowing me to develop ideas that were vague and simmering until I learned about the new notions. There’s a sense of gratitude at the discovery, and a “why didn’t I think of that?” feeling at the same time, because the concepts feel so natural and so like a reasonable progression.
Sound Art: This makes so much sense to me that it’s almost silly. Throughout the 20th century music practices grew more inclusive with respect to what kinds of sounds could be considered potentially musical. By mid-century it was pretty well established that any and all sounds were fair game. Yet this abundance of sonic phenomena was still subsumed under the notion of music which implies, among other things, the abstraction of sounds from their original contexts and potential meanings, and their placement in the service of musical logics and procedures, as well as the conventions and expectations surrounding musical performance. Sound art, on the other hand, allows for creative practices focusing on sound that do not rely on notions of music as such, though it is certainly inclusive of them. Sounds may retain their original signifying qualities - or have them manipulated by virtue of the context in which they are placed. This can be in the service of conjuring a sonic environment, conveying a narrative of some sort, etc., without being overtly musical. Looked at in this way (and this is the idea that really excites me), Sound Art is really the larger category, with music being a subcategory, albeit a very important one. This doesn’t seem to be the way it’s used in the reading I’ve done so far, however. Sound art is something that’s practiced by visual artists, or installation artists; “non-musicians”, while musicians make music, irrespective it seems, of what the end product sounds like. At any rate, I’m enjoying thinking of myself as a sound artist these days as I slap together collages of footsteps, bird song, woodwinds, and the sounds emanating from my guts as they digest my lunch.
Performance Studies: The thing I love about this new (in the last 30 years or so) discipline - if it can be said to be a such - is it’s ambiguity. It’s possible to make a convincing case that every activity of sentient creatures includes a performative aspect. This goes way beyond theater studies. It’s looks to me like a cultural-theory approach to phenomenology; the way that much cultural theory is a kind of applied philosophy.
Acoustic Ecology: I was introduced to this term just a couple of weeks ago in the course of conversations with friends who are involved in social documentation to varying degrees (in one case as a profession, in another as part of her artistic practice). We were talking about soundscapes (another great word), paying attention to sound environments and making use of this kind of attention to various creative ends. I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed the act of listening, not only to music, but to all the sounds at all times. There are times when I would rather listen to wind in tall grass, or the clothes rolling in the dryer, or the crunch of gravel underfoot than any music. It’s an important meditative practice. There’s a spiritual dimension to sound and listening that it is critically important. Knowing that there are communities of practitioners and listeners who’ve considered these ideas has considerably broadened my ideas of what I might to do with sounds, and how to deepen and try to communicate my understanding as it develops.
On Tuesday I had the privilege of joining Nada Miljkovic on her weekly radio program Artists on Art. You can find a recording of the show in her archive here.
A piece that was part of a screen-based class assignment that also involved imagery taken from July 1910 editions of the Washington Herald.[audio http://www.chrismolla.net/cmmp3/Birds_Brass_Guts.mp3]
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