I received
some interesting comments on my previous essay from fuffle (a Hubski contributor)
that deserve a serious and well-considered response. A link to my original essay is included below
(in case my blog’s scroll bar isn’t working or you got here some other
way). Below that are fuffle’s comment in
full (in blue).
I loved this, but to be fair to John Cage: some of his work
requires, as you say, no inherent chops from the performers. But-
A) alot of his composition and prep-work was very... very
impressive. In which case, isn't the work impressive for the underlying code,
which illuminates technical complexity on the part of the composer if not the
player?
B) 4 33 is just as much incidental music as anything else-
wherein environmental response dictates the melody rather than the person on
the stage. Schmancy? Yes, but I see very little difference between this and
your assertion about perceiving the beauty of the sycamore. When attention is
directed at the sounds in between sounds, people might just start to appreciate
with more enthusiasm things that they'd otherwise ignore as just everyday
drone.
C) Cage may have once been considered weird, but his work
has since influenced the output of mad composers, man. Electronic artists,
contemporary classical guys, guitar legends, score-writers... His work may not
be, uh, listenable, but his WORK has inspired plenty of people you've listened
to.
D) He's not that weird. Have you heard Stockhausen's
helicopter quartet? There is some gnarly, indigestible shit out there (see
note). Cage just has the most brand recognition. And if he has brand
recognition, his art can't be that inaccessible, can it?
Ultimately, though, E) It could reasonably be argued that
Cage is more performance art than music, and there is a lot more leeway granted
in performance art for eccentricity. Does any of this nullify your overall
argument? No. But to say that classical music died with the advent of Cage is
pretty unfair, especially since there have been perfectly decent classical
composers since Cage, and he was certainly not the first experimental composer
to sincerely fuck with the rules of the craft. Hildegarde Von Bingen. The
Artusis and the Monteverdis. Gesualdo. Obligatory Stravinsky shout-out,
Anyhow, I badged, but then felt a pang of regret about
readily accepting the cheap shot about Cage and music. Still a great read.
note: there's this one guy-
wish I could remember his name- who put out an "album" that was just
him stuffing a contact mic up his buttle and railing his girlfriend. That right
thar is the example you should have used.
(fuffle has recanted this note: "bfv corrected me last week in that the work I referred to (Nymphomatriarch by Venetian Snares and Hecete) isn't really just raw footage of them bumping nasties. They bumped nasties and then sampled those sounds for beats/tones. It's nowhere near as esoteric as believed/led you to believe."
- emc)
- emc)
Yes, I savaged John Cage mercilessly and for the worst of
motives – my own literary amusement. Admittedly,
he did not assassinate classical music single-handedly. I’ve watched interviews with Cage and found
him fascinating. I even find his Zen
perspective personally congenial. I am
acutely aware that there is a similarity between Cage’s perspective and mine –
however they are not identical. Cage
considered 4’33” a musical composition;
I do not consider my perception of a sycamore against a winter sky itself a work of art. I assert that our appreciation of art derives from our appreciation of other
things in the physical world. Cage
asserted, effectively, that there is no
distinction between art and the physical world as perceived. My assertion defines art within a broader
context; Cage’s assertion does the opposite – it renders the word “art” practically
meaningless. By Cage’s definition, dog
turds could be art. You wouldn’t even
have to put them under a spotlight at MoMA – you would just have to perceive them. Perhaps I snarled at Cage unfairly, but Cage
attacked my dearest friend – the English language.
I don’t doubt for a minute that John Cage was influential –
that is, in fact, the crux of my critique.
Had he been unknown he would have been completely harmless. Cage is not all that weird by what passes for
contemporary standards, but he helped to lay the groundwork those who followed
in his wake. One can argue that many
people before Cage were violating the rules of their time, but there is a
difference between violating an art form’s traditional norms and violating its
fundamental definition. I may think that
Pablo Picasso produced a large number of very bad paintings – but I have to
admit that they are paintings. On the other hand, if I say I-70 is my most
recent painting (and I wasn’t the guy who painted the dashes down the middle) I
am doing nothing more-or-less than obfuscating the word “painting”.
The history of culture rarely turns on single, pivotal
events in the way that military history does.
The Post-Impressionists did not defeat the Impressionists decisively in
the battle of Mont Sainte-Victoire. What
one sees instead are trends, influences, styles, and so forth. Things move gradually. Cage, if not decisive, was still significantly
influential. If what Cage delivered was
not exactly a deathblow, it was, at least, a milestone. I think what is important about Cage is that
once he attacked the very definition of music, mere trifling with odd keys and
rhythms seemed rather tame.
Consider the example cited above, of the musician making
recordings with the microphone shoved up his rectum. Things like this are what the avant garde
must do when someone who came before has upped the ante. In the 1930’s you could still be fashionably
radical by banging away at a piano like George Anteil – but how is that even
interesting after Cage? But if you can
no longer raise eyebrows by being merely discordant, you can at least still
raise them by being blatantly disgusting.
Again, this is not a matter of taste or of degree. It is a watershed distinction – a difference
of kind. I’d be willing to bet that a chimpanzee
watching someone shove a microphone up his own ass would be disgusted, but it
would be a toss-up whether the same chimpanzee would prefer Richard Wagner to
George Anteil.
Here, really, I need to take a step back and talk about what
separates the last century and a half or so from the entire previous history of
the arts. I think it is fair to say that
the great majority of artists who worked prior to the late 19th
century were trying to achieve some standard of excellence. From that point
forward excellence has gradually
waned in favor of the pursuit of originality.
Ancient Egyptian relief carvings, rigidly stylistic as they
are, are beautiful. They are beautiful
because the artists who produced them had an idea of excellence. Egyptian sculpture
does not require the context of museum for us to recognize it as art. One may or may not have a taste for ancient
sculpture, but one knows that it is art regardless. Drop a Roman statue into a landfill, and the
garbage man would know that it does not belong there. Toss half the contents of MoMA into a
landfill and the garbage man would never notice. You’d need an army of academics in rubber hip
waders to sort it from the rest of the trash, and even then they’d probably be
wrong at least one time in three. By
contrast, if you could have taken an average Vermeer to ancient Egypt I have
little doubt that nearly everyone, high and low, would have marveled at
it. They may or may not have tried to
copy its style. They may or may not have
found it somehow blasphemous. They would
have known it was art. I have listened
to some cutting-edge contemporary music and, frankly, if I heard it coming
through the wall of my apartment I would not assume my neighbor had sophisticated
tastes, but rather that he had a serious plumbing problem. I only know it’s art if it is packaged as
art. And then, if you’ll forgive me, I still
have doubts.
I don’t wish to insult anybody’s sensibilities here. Well… actually I do – but I’m willing to
throw myself onto the trash pile along with them. I did go to art school, after all. Put me in a museum and I will stare with rapturous
solemnity at a nice Mark Rothko color field painting, knowing full well I could
achieve a very similar mental state by going outside and staring at a random
patch of sky. I know when I stare at the
Rothko that I am engaging in an art act,
and that other people passing through the gallery will see me as an aesthete
admiring something beyond the comprehension of the common herd. Academia has created a group of people large
enough to support nonsense. If I stare
at a random patch of sky, on the other hand, the same people will only think
I’m off my meds. Do I like the Rothko really?
I don’t know. How could I
know? It depends on whether one believes
my conditioned response to something is definitively me or not. Did Pavlov’s dogs
really like to salivate at the sound
of the bell? So it is with
everyone. We all have our own unique
conditioning histories, dependent on where and when we were born, how we were
educated, etc. It is quite hard to
overcome the impression that our particular place in the universe is absolutely normal. It’s only relatively
normal – really.
To get back to the distinction I raised earlier though, excellence and originality are very different kinds of goals. The arts did
change under the regime of excellence,
but they did so in a gradual, organic way.
You could have swapped the romantic period in classical music for the
baroque without the whole world exploding.
When the emphasis began to tip in favor of originality, however, art acquired a definite and self-destructive
direction. In the pursuit of excellence, one tries to express one’s
concept of art to the of best one’s ability.
In pursuit of originality, one
tries to destroy whatever concept of art happens to prevail. The Impressionists made blurry paintings and
that was fine – enough to irk the traditionalists of their day. And then we got Matisse, who annihilated the
third dimension and all the lovely refinements the Renaissance had
achieved. After that, Mondrian, et al,
gave up on paint things
altogether. De Kooning and Pollock
extirpated any meaningful requirement for skill. Et cetera.
The worst thing you could say to an artist when I was in school was not
that his or her work was crude, but
that it was derivative.
Sooner or later, the quest for originality makes someone shoving a microphone up his ass
inevitable. People simply run out of
other things to do. Technology may delay
the act for awhile by opening up other avenues of exploration, but sooner or
later the microphone will find its way into the hands of some ass that has
tried everything else. It has been more
than four decades since Chris Burden took a potshot at an airliner with a
pistol. He later had a friend shoot him
in the arm. Both incidents were widely
accepted as art by the academics and critics who get the final say. One wonders how the arts community would have
reacted if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had eschewed any religious or political motives
for the Boston Marathon Bombing, and declared instead that his motives were
entirely artistic. Wouldn’t the curators
at MoMA have had to take him at his word, and sought out photos and artifacts
of the event to fill a gallery? How
could they do otherwise? By what
standard would they deem such a bold piece of self expression not art?
Personally, I dislike being called an artist. I do not dislike art – that is, I do not dislike what I define as art in the inner
recesses of my brain. What I do dislike is being called something
that, in current usage, has no coherent meaning. Throwing me into a category that contains both
Rembrant van Rijn and Chris Burden is little more meaningful than calling me
non-broccoli. You might as well just
bark. An artist is a person whose name
is on the little plaque beside the random object under the spotlight at MoMA.
Great blog you have herre
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