Ira S. Murfin

Although the form, presentation, and structure of Mike Daisey’s monologue double-header, How Theater Failed America and The Last Cargo Cult resembles the talk performance of Spalding Gray and the other confessional first person performers who rose to popularity in the 1980s, the motivating force behind Daisey’s work is detectably different. Where Gray and his ilk are self-consciously self-involved, apparently fumbling for meaning in a pile of juxtaposed reminiscences, Daisey’s work is unabashedly outward looking and public. Daisey has an axe to grind, he selects and hones stories for their intended sharpness in dissecting his given topic, one for each monologue. His powerful vocal and facial performance provides dramatic emphasis, but his narrative structure deflects from his fallible human presence. Daisey’s work is essayistic more than it is anecdotal, opinionated, muckraking. It owes something to New Journalism, something to populist political speech, something to Michael Moore documentaries, as much as it does to Spalding Gray. The motivating energy behind his performances is nothing if not conceptually generous, he does not tell about his life unless he has to, instead he goes out and has experiences, conversations, thoughts, for the specific purpose of reporting them to his audience. It is only along the way of telling what he has set out to tell that he might occasionally explore his own personality or biography. And Daisey’s persona is one of indignant populism. We have been wronged, he seems to be saying, not by a system, but by individuals – complacent, fearful, shortsighted individuals — who have allowed the system to go off its rails. And he is angry about it. He shouts, he glares, he sweats, his operatic voice swells and fills the room. He feels strongly. Surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to be having much fun. Even as he is often very funny, his demeanor is one of fury, predicated on the dubious notion that if you really want to get people riled up about something, making a piece of theatre is the best way to do it.

Ironically, I see Daisey’s work to some extent as a result of grant dependent arts institutions and the idea that creative work must have a ‘use’ in order to have value. This is ironic because the message anchoring the first, and older, piece that Daisey brought to Chicago is that arts institutions, specifically regional theaters, have failed us. How Theater Failed America purports to be, and has been largely touted as, a radical and rebellious takedown of the regional theatre system. Actually, were we to tone down some of the shouting, what it most closely resembles is a discussion of regional theatre marketing and economic strategies. Although the elements of the monologue that would be particularly out of place in such a discussion are by far the most successful aspects of the monologue.

Early on, Daisey posits that what we are all looking for in the theatre is a “moment of truth,” when the hairs on our arms stand up to signal that what we have just witnessed is the articulation of a piercingly accurate shared understanding, but we hear little more about this transformative potential. How Theater Failed America wants to be about theatre, but it deals very little with theatre in the way Daisey initially means it, as a shared event. Theatre is not in fact a building or a system of institutions, but a particular mode of experiencing. At the monologue’s end Daisey touches on this, the allusive fact that such experience resists commodification even as it is treated as a commodity, but he is unable to integrate this into the monologue as a whole. Again and again his argument stops literally at the lip of the stage. That is, he critiques what goes on in the administrative offices of regional theaters and in their box offices and half-filled houses and even in their rehearsal rooms, but what happens on the stage itself turns out to be surprisingly off limits.

Daisey’s scapegoat is the expense of regional theater architecture and the administrative jobs (and salaries and insurance packages and retirement plans and attendant complacency) that go with the physical and financial scaling up of a cultural institution. It is the start of an interesting argument, he deftly identifies the way institutional administrators and boards of directors think. They are taking the long view for their institution, looking to the past and noticing the monumental architecture that cultural institutions have installed as their legacies in cities and they see, Daisey accurately points out, that the permanence of a building is a lot easier to rally a community behind than the salary of an actor, or the cost of a particular production. He goes on to further criticize the ‘safe’ choices theaters make as a result of these expenditures, mocking the ever receding horizon in the future when the artistic directors of newly built theaters feel they can ‘safely’ return to presenting ‘risky’ work, and at the same time mocking the small studio and workshop spaces built into these new structures (like the one at Victory Gardens he is performing in) as low-risk venues for ‘riskier’ work.

The economic argument he builds around the architectural craze is astute, but there are a few problems with his reasoning. Chief among them is that he doesn’t really define ‘safety’ and ‘risk’, in fact he essentially holds himself up as an example of both. He accuses regional theaters of programming him in because he is cheap, but also of refusing to program him because of his non-traditional format. Equally important, though, his argument does not really turn out to be about risk. It is not about programming or artistic content at all, in fact. It is about salaries. He would like to see actors paid full-time salaries with benefits, which he thinks would be a better place to direct funds than into new buildings. It is an entirely reasonable argument, and a conversation that should be happening in well-funded American theaters, where they exist. But it remains an industry conversation, relevant primarily to those whose livelihood it affects, Mike Daisey included. Since he steers clear of discussing content or audience reception, it is unclear what specific benefits he imagines America would receive as a result. It is noticeable that he rarely mentions particular theaters or artistic directors, or almost anyone by name, leaving open to anyone’s guess just who he is so savagely criticizing. A safe bet for a conversation about risk, from someone who stands to lose a lot in conducting it; anyone might safely believe he is talking about someone else.

Daisey’s monologue confuses a discussion of marketing strategies with a weighty conversation about what theatre is and what it is for, and he goes on to confuse an argument about the impact of resources with an argument about the nature of risk. He describes a single summer during college when he and four friends founded a small summer stock company at a down-at-the-heels Maine resort. After amusingly describing the familiar machinations he goes through to make zero budget theatre with an understaffed company, he calls it the best summer of his life. I imagine everyone in the room knew exactly what he was talking about — being young, having an infinite number of tries still ahead of you, and having nothing to lose. Yet even in this anything goes environment, the season they come up with is disappointingly similar to what such a season might look like in a well-funded institutional context, with offerings including The Glass Menagerie and Neil Simon’s California Suite. His message could just as well be that you don’t need a fancy space or a lot of money to produce safe, familiar, middlebrow theatre, in fact you’ll probably have more fun if you don’t have any resources but your own ingenuity. This seems to be the opposite of Daisey’s intended point, that financial security would make for better, or at least equally valuable, theatre.

Similarly, his salad days in Seattle’s no-budget warehouse theater scene are held up as near utopian. Though he acknowledges that there was plenty of awful work, he says he also saw some of the best theatre he has ever seen during those years. This actually starts to get at the real meaning of risk, allowing for the possibility of failure by doing something strange and unfamiliar. Yet Daisey hinges his reminiscence on a surprising personal turning point. Daisey is in a production of a truly risky play, Jean Genet’s The Balcony. It is exactly the sort of script that risk-hungry theatre artists are attracted to, and risk-averse regional theaters fear, for both its dense language and its radical treatment of sex and power dynamics. The director of the play, who he mocks as a drunk, wants the production to be “totally fucked up,” which seems a less articulate way of saying that he wants to take some actual risks, however smart or interesting they turn out to be. He asks Daisey to simulate masturbation onstage (confusingly, Daisey insists on claiming that he was asked to masturbate onstage, though from his storytelling it is clear that the act was simulated.) When a couple bafflingly chooses to bring their little children to the production, Daisey is traumatized to find himself at a loss for any other choice but to go ahead with the simulated masturbation as rehearsed in front of the kids. For Daisey, this moment does not suggest anything about the live and unpredictable nature of theatre, instead it prompts him to pledge to himself that he will forever remain autonomous as a performer. The following year he begins performing monologues, which suggests that the form is not a risky experiment for him, but actually a safer choice.

By this time, the risk argument has largely been put aside, and the argument becomes essentially one for and about choosing a career in theatre, which actually has the mark of a potentially more interesting monologue. Daisey recalls his megalomaniacal, overambitious, but ultimately inspiring college theatre professor. This is doubtless a familiar figure for many in the room, but Daisey does not take advantage of its unifying qualities, insisting on the anomaly of his individual experience. Likewise his summer stock experiences, first as an apprentice at an established theater, and then as artistic director of his own upstart company. He speaks of working harder than he had ever imagined he could, of doing the impossible. He astutely observes that it is not the plays he falls in love with, but the spaces between, the transition from one play to another. He wants to be in the trade of theatre, he wants to be a theatre worker, an artisan, a craftsperson, and to take part in the lore, the tradition, the community of theatre. Indeed, Daisey repeats several times that this show is a public airing of a conversation he has had many times over beers with actor and artistic director friends.  And it is telling that when, in the roundtable that followed the show the night I attended, Daisey became quite combative with Roche Schulfer, Executive Director of the Goodman Theater, Schulfer suggested that they “talk about it over a beer later” and, it was implied, not in this public forum. But the conversation remains one by and for a loyal member of the industry.

Theatre is a business, a trade, a skilled profession with a lingo and tradition of its own and what Daisey seems upset about is not the commercialization or professionalization of theatre, he is romantically nostalgic about that, but that it is a trade at which one can’t make a living these days. In this way, as Daisey himself suggests during the opening of the monologue, the title is not very apt. The monologue is not really about how theatre failed America, it is about how theatre failed professional working theatre artists. That theatre failed America, continues to fail America, is doubtless true, but it is in economic access, cultural relevance, and experiential uniqueness that this failure has occurred. And just as a safe professional class of arts administrators arguably makes for high priced, culturally remote, and repetitively familiar theatre, might not a safe professional working class of actors dependant on this same system be in real danger of doing the same?

This is what makes Daisey’s Seattle example so baffling. He cannot make sense of why his experience of making even bad theatre in Seattle was so deeply satisfying. He remembers that they had no money and he remembers that they were willing to try anything and he remembers that they enjoyed drinking warm cheap beer and congratulating each other after their shows, but he seems to believe they made satisfying work in spite of, not as a result of, their impoverished, no-stakes camaraderie. He believes that the utopian artistic successes he nostalgically remembers should be transferable to an institutionalized context. But for me this raises questions of economy that extend beyond a critique of buildings, though that is as good a place as any to start. The conversation, to really get at the heart of the issue, would have to extend into the sacred theatre space itself and interrogate what happens there, and it would have to extend out, beyond the theater, to question the role of theatre and its workers in the supply and demand chain of the whole free market system. Roche Schulfer, of the Goodman, made a cogent point during the post-show roundtable when he pointed out that non-profit theatre is built on a for-profit model, while other cultural institutions are not.

Ultimately, though, this amounts to a collective issue of self-esteem. The theatre is afraid, in the 21^st century, that it doesn’t matter, that it is useless. There is practically no such thing as a “popular” theatre, even amongst touring commercial productions, whose cost is on par with opera. And everyone likes to be popular. At particularly confessional and personal moments, Daisey cuts very close to what could have been a much more engaging portrait of theatre’s existential crisis by way of the dark night of one young theatre artist’s soul. In addition to the moments when he felt most alive and at home in the theatre, he spends a good deal of time quite beautifully describing a point at which he had failed out of college, returned to his parents house in northern Maine, and sunk into a deep depression. He is rescued only by the opportunity to direct a one-act play at a local high school, and by mentoring a particular student whose unrealistic dreams of theatrical success seem painfully familiar to Daisey. The portrait that emerges is of the self-doubt and shame that comes with the fear that doing what you love is ultimately meaningless, and still deciding to do it anyway. It is painful to listen to, personal and uncomfortable and sad, but it is important because it is not only Daisey’s story or his student’s story or any particular artists’ story, it is the story of theatre at a point of uncertainty about what it is or why it exists. This existential anxiety shadows Daisey’s broader argument, and he would have been wise to allow it to pollute his monologue from the start.

As Daisey wraps up, he addresses an irresolvable paradox, the difficulty of commodifying theatre and the difficulty in resisting commodification. Though he has made an adamant argument for theatre artists, it has remained a capitalist argument (he even mocks those who idealize socialist support for artists in other countries) and, like all capitalist arguments, the scapegoat is personal choice, not systemic or disciplinary corruption and decay. But, after the argument has already been made, he seems to suddenly get it: an object-worshipping, commodity-driven culture will never truly accept an ephemeral art form as anything more than a low-tech simulacrum, it will never understand the value of something that evaporates.

I was lucky enough to attend on one of two evenings when Daisey hosted a roundtable discussion with local theatre artists after his performance, something he does wherever he performs the piece. It is an odd proposition, and somewhat awkward. It is not a post-show discussion of his monologue, rather it is a conversation about his argument (which is why I am tending to deal with his performance primarily as an argument– that is how he deals with it.) After railing against the blindness and inefficiencies of the regional theatre powers that be, Daisey chooses to invite a number of major regional theatre players up to join him on a major regional theatre stage, and to try and have a civil conversation with them. The conversation suggested a central problem with Daisey’s hypothesis, that the need for individual comfort is trumping artistic risk in the regional theatre system. The game artistic directors and administrators he had with him appeared to be as passionate about theater and the well-being of actors as Daisey is, they just happen to be part of another area of the same structure he is part of, the conversation still never leaves the building. Daisey and the administrators sat there, uncomfortably trying to figure out how to negotiate the particular divide Daisey had set up, how to agree with him without agreeing themselves, and Daisey himself, out of existence.

It is worth noting that both monologues were informed by moments outside of the performance proper, which framed, or somehow altered the framing of, the evening. How Theater Failed America had the post-show roundtable, while The Last Cargo Cult involved each member of the audience being handed a piece of US currency valued between $1 and $100 on their way into the theatre. It was, we learned only after Daisey had taken his final curtain call, the entire fee for his performance that evening and it was entirely up to us as a group if he would be paid some, all, none, or more than the original amount. Like How Theater Failed America, The Last Cargo Cult is a targeted attack on a system Daisey considers criminally under-examined – in this case, money. Not necessarily the way we handle money or structure global markets, but the very concept of currency. In this way it is actually the far more radical of the two pieces, though by addressing something so incredibly large and impossible to alter, it feels safer than his pointed attacks on employment policy in mid to large not for profit American theaters. Essentially, though, the arguments address similar territories: what we value and why we value what we do.

Daisey reasonably proposes value as a kind of faith, a collectively held faith much larger than any religion, and he strikes out for a place beyond the borders of the money faith with which he has always lived. He believes he has found someplace “just beyond the reach of money” on the little island of Tana in the South Pacific where the last cargo cult, the John Frum Movement, is thriving. Interestingly, this outpost outside of capitalism’s hegemonic control is not an untouched enclave, but rather a former European colony, which has rejected political colonization and repositioned its relationship to American cultural colonization via a set of neo-archaic hybridized customs that prove endearingly appealing to Daisey’s Americans sensibility. Daisey’s history of how the John Frum movement came to be is a bit sketchy. It starts with the imposition, by squabbling French and English colonizers, of European customs, including the use of money, on the indigenous population. This ends with the native population in revolt, stripping off their clothes, burning all their money, and returning to the jungle. It is an exhilarating description and at the very least gives pause, “Could we all do that?” Daisey seems to wonder. But then the story skips ahead a good long time to World War Two, when American military outposts were set up throughout the South Pacific. Apparently when these military outposts disappeared, rather than leaving behind the mutant version of American capitalism associated with other American military adventures in the developing world, they left behind cargo cults, new religions that sprung up independently of each other on islands all over the South Pacific. The essence of these religions, a response to the presence and then rapid disappearance of Americans and their stuff, is not to worship American culture via mass media and the acquisition of consumer goods, but to worship the idea of America as a vast and unknowable abstraction, like a god, by reenacting the history of America, as it is quaintly understood. John Frum is an institutionalized malapropism derived from a word for broom – to sweep away the dominating culture. Appropriation as a form of resistance is apparently instinct as much as intellect, at least in the South Pacific.

According to Daisey the cargo cults have, by and large, died out, the exception being the last one, on Tana, which is, oddly and somewhat inexplicably, growing. It is to Tana just in time for the annual John Frum day pageant that Daisey heads on his amateur cultural anthropology expedition. But Daisey’s treatment of Tana does not really address the implications of his presence there, in fact he seems to consider the fact that he’s ended up on the main platform with the leaders of the movement to watch the pageant a lucky accident that does not relate to his particular status as and American or an outsider. Daisey so doggedly pursues a thesis, an interesting one, that little that actually happens appears to effect him or his opinions except insofar as it might serve to support that thesis – that money and its value constitute an unreasonable set of beliefs collectively held by a mass of individuals who have agreed upon a self-destructive delusion because they can imagine no other alternative. Nobly, he does not pretend to have an alternative, but merely to wish to describe, as in How Theater Failed America, our individual responsibility in this collective delusion.

Still, given the fact that making his argument nearly always seems to trump the imperative to relate his experiences, his very involved trip across the world to witness John Frum Days ends up smelling of an intellectual exercise. Which is too bad, since the small glimpses he offers are fascinating. Shifting material between the two monologues could have proven revelatory since the pageant proposes a potentially radically avant-garde version of a theatrical experience – an all day, highly symbolic acting out of the rumored and dimly remembered history of a distant land. Daisey points out that it is far longer than any performance in America would be allowed to be, making a point about cultural standards of patience and attention spans. Meanwhile, the two sequences he describes, one of naked men leaping through clouds of dust to illustrate westward expansion, another involving a figure in a Scream mask chasing a man meant to represent Barak Obama, suggest an inventive and challenging artistic experience. Tellingly, Daisey must constantly ask his “interpreter” – a woman with an advanced degree in macro-economics who lives part-time “in custom” as a leader of the movement – to explain the meaning of each moment to him, like an impatient audience member at an experimental dance or theatre performance.

It is too bad that Daisey never quite makes the connection between his ideas and the experience he sets out to acquire, since each on its own is tantalizing. Daisey proposes that money is both what separates us from each other and what binds us together, that in our culture money is who we are. Ultimately, he proposes money as a matrix-like veil over reality which prevents us from seeing things as they really are. His goal is simultaneously to remove the scales from our eyes, and to acknowledge the impossibility of doing so. He offers examples (the way the protection of insurance prompts his wife and himself to behave more generously than they otherwise would have after a rental car crash), corollaries (his relative indifference to a pig slaughter on Tana, despite the intimate relationship he’s developed with a different pig), and vivid metaphors (he literally chokes on the food he is fed.) Ultimately, though, he comes to a set of understandings about being American that many travelers reach: American culture feels thin, everyone worships money, and there is a richness and warmth to be found in more traditional cultures that most Americans don’t know is possible. But, at the same time, he concludes that being American is an identity nonetheless, as inescapable as any other, and it is hard for an American to imagine, or even fully understand, what it would mean to do without the privileges that being American provides. This is driven home in the final moment of the formal monologue, when he meets his friend the tribal leader/economist for coffee near her government job in the city and she suggests starting a cultural aid program in America because, as she says, “you have no custom.” Daisey, the reluctant American, seethes defensively while they eye each other over who will pay the check.

As in How Theater Failed America, though, the performance does not end there. After taking his bow, Daisey returns and explains the purpose of the currency that was handed out before the show. The audience is to choose whether or not Daisey is paid for the evening’s performance. He wants each audience member to notice his or her personal responsibility in the valuing of currency, and to make a very personal choice about his performance. One of the most interesting aspects of this is that he has given out different amounts of money; some received one-dollar bills, as I did, while others received bills as large as $100. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the moral dilemma for each audience member. Those with small bills might be reasoning either (or both) that $1 isn’t that much to give up, or else that choosing to keep the $1 might not actually make much of a difference. Meanwhile, those who received $100s, who in effect could stand to make a profit on their ticket purchase, might well be seriously considering not giving the money back at all.

Like a number of moments in this monologue, Daisey might have framed this choice quite differently if it had been presented at the end of How Theater Failed America. In that case, it would be about the value of theatre, the way funding structures work, and Daisey’s worth as a performer. Instead, he has again positioned his job as just a job, equal in labor or value to any other. The question is not the assigning of value, it is the act of paying. Another slyly clever aspect of varying the denominations is that it is not really possible to calculate, or even make an educated guess about, what his fee actually is, and therefore to decide for oneself if that is what his performance is worth. This is both the trouble and the brilliance in positioning the thorniest moments of his performances outside of the monologues proper. He brings the conversation into life, makes it real, immediate, while also de-theatricalizing it, specifically suggesting that this kind of complicated moment of moral or intellectual grappling is and individual one, it is not the collectivity that theatre is made of. Theatre is big, definitive, he tells us, it is about moments of shared truth. The everyday choices and complex conversations we have in life are to be worked out for ourselves, once the lights have come up. Thus there is no theatrical focus on what choice the audience makes about the money. Potentially, this might render individual actions more authentic, but it makes them also less visible, less collective, and therefore more personal. In this post-show moment, Daisey allows his own voice to recede and focuses his audience’s attention instead on the ongoing observation, analysis, argument, self-aggrandizement, reason and lack of reason each has going inside their head most of the time. He hands the stage over, at last, to the non-stop inner Mike Daisey monologuing in each of us.

I went to Ryan Dunn’s studio and home at Enemy Gallery on Milwaukee Ave. In Chicago earlier this week to have a chat about sound art. As some may know, Enemy is located next to the blue line tracks and as I conducted this interview with Dunn, noise musician, sound and performance artist, I couldn’t help but notice the ambient noise of the train, horns, cats and roommates that became part of this interview as well.

J: Where do you see sound art fitting into the contemporary landscape of art making?

R: Personally, I’m interested in sound because of its physical properties and its ability to exist in places spontaneously. Sound is important to me because it fundamentally exists in the case of an action. Something has to happen something has to change for sound to exist. Sound exists because of causation, the perpetuation of wave motion after two other bodies collide or some kind of motion. Whether it be a speaker or two objects colliding in mid-air and that causing a vibration. It’s also temporary.

(train)

J: There’s two things in there that I find interesting: the tactility of sound (horn) and sound as a trace. Is there anybody you’ve seen use the tactility of sound in art in an interesting way and how do you use it?

R: I think that, personally, it’s not so much tactility but the way it moves in space and how it is dependent on location and the range possible. So when I play music it has a lot to do with physical impact but it also has a lot to do with (horn-horn-horn) the reason I make sound with physical action is that I’m trying to make direct, visible correlations. The instrument I’ve been playing for the last year has been a reel-to-reel. Primarily, I’ve been playing that for the last year and a half. Touching the circuitry of the tape player. Basically short circuiting it without a tape in it. The fact that I can take this physical form and manipulate the circuits to do something else is interesting to me. It’s a sort of investigation, learning their specific possiblities. But as to the tactility of sound, I guess it’s about how we hear things and choose to hear things and another part of my work that gets incorporated in that work is overhearing; specifically overhearing people talking as a first form of communication.

J: As in you hear something before you see something.

R: Exactly. The other thing that’s interesting about sound as opposed to light is that sound is omni-directional. It doesn’t have a trajectory it follows. It’s about how it fills a space through bouncing off various properties of a room. It radiates. You can be faced away from something and still hear it.

J: So how do you think this corresponds to sound as a trace? A lot of people in visual studies are using the term trace to describe a physical artifact that has traversed space in a very specific way. The idea of sound radiating beyond it’s initial space kind of becomes an amorphous trace?

R: Well, sound is effected by the path it travels a lot more. I’m assuming in the visual field your talking about a trace as a mark on a page or a video that is a still of a phenomenon of light. The distinction with sound is that is affected by the path that it travels and the relationship with light is more one of ultimate voracity. Light travels best through air and can easily be stopped. Sound, on the other hand is characterized by the radiation that circumvents but also takes on the trace of the physical environment it travels through.

Instinct Control (Ryan Dunn) (link)

J: So sound then becomes a symptom of the space it travels through.

R: Right and I guess a lot of those physical properties is what keeps drawing me to sound. Before I got into art, a lot of my pursuits were science and physics oriented though I am definitely not an expert in that anymore. I’ve kind of left that investigation behind.

J: So sound as performance: do you think sound art can ever be disambiguated from the act of performance or are these two things tied together?

R: I think that’s what we’re dealing with in this century since the ability to record sound was invented. I think that’s actually what is defining what’s going on now in our recent history and will continue to do so for a while is the ability to record We have had many works consider exactly this, especially in photography. Again, probably because it’s easier for people to comprehend and contemplate the visual than sound. The way we deal with sound now and the way that overwhelmingly takes away the importance of sound in our environment is recording. It allows for constructed sound, music, to take the foreground.

J: Going off the paradigm of recording: do you think sound collage has a specific access point that might be more useful than visual collage?

R: Yes, absolutely, I think it has the ability to access direct association a lot more than the visual realm. Because you use sound as a locator, whether we realize it or not. We also use it to identify what is happening in our space. As a result, we use sound as a notification when we can’t use light; sirens, etc. Light, you have to pay attention to.

J: These are senses that are “always on,” so to speak. That’s something that has always interested me. If you speak of sound as having a direct association, a motive really, I think of going to the movies and picking out the track that runs through your average action/adventure movie, you notice these large scale crescendos and decrescendos that affect your emotional attitude to the images your being presented with.

R: Subconsciously, we use that to inform our attitude all the time. The fact that it’s subconscious not only means that it can be manipulative but also has a direct association that can be useful as well. In that sense, the world of sound poses a lot of ethical questions that the visual realm doesn’t pose.

J: Could you elaborate on that?

R: Because you can’t turn your ears off. You can’t turn away from a sound like you can an image. One of the reasons I find noise music attractive is because it does that. You can’t plug your ears, you’ll still hear it. Intensity is being considered as well as the intensity of the dynamism. You have a shrill high-pitch sound and you put that in a gallery space which is suppose to be a neutral space, (train goes by) you can have a sound playing in a gallery, you can go over it with the gallerist and it can be playing over and over again for two days and it could all of a sudden become that high, shrill note that no one was expecting, bothers everyone. That goes back to that ability for sound to manipulate. So I guess the ethical concern is that there’s no complicity between creating a sound and the audience. They’re there and they either have to accept what they hear or leave.

J: Aside from noise being developed as it’s own musical genre with its own aesthetics; does noise in the art realm have any other purpose than making the audience aware that sound is going on? You most always see noise used as a provocation.

R: Sure, I think that’s the natural reaction. It’s a build-out from the materials that are available (phone ringing) for producing sound (horn honking). As a pure (horn and whistle), just making noise because someone realized they can put their guitar petals together and make noise, they’re going to do that, right? I think that what is different about noise music is that it’s constructing abstract, maybe aggressive tonality, but to start considering them to be a viable range for sound production. It’s a lot like people using day-glo colors more and more. Whether  you like it or not, it expands the range. Noise music, the stuff I’m interested in at least, is trying to use that full range and isn’t just aggressive.

On July 22nd, the carcass of a lion’s mane jellyfish washed ashore a New Hampshire beach. The jellyfish’s detached tentacles still managed to sting swimmers, evacuating the beach and sending four to the emergency room. The dead thing stings.

Clement Greenberg died sixteen years ago, already a relic. But death does not deter Greenberg’s sting; his writings still seems to wound, irritate and burn.  Take, for evidence, Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ 2006 “biography” of Greenberg. Marquis seems perpetually irritated by Greenberg’s very existence, and wages petty war against his memory.  The denigration is vulgar and coarse: she sees Greenberg’s career, essentially, as a long con. Marquis’ Greenberg doesn’t care about art, but decided to go into it because the competition in literary criticism was too much – he did not have the talent to compete with Howe or with Rahv, and he knew it. Marquis cares little for the actualities of Greenberg’s criticism, preferring to note the size and cost of his apartments and regurgitating long-stale morsels of gossip.

Marquis’ denigration seems to have little in common with Robert Storr’s essay “No Joy at Mudville,” written in 1990, four years before Greenberg’s death. Although Storr’s essay also dabbles in biographical warfare, his intent here is fundamentally critical, even exorcistic. Storr feels that Greenberg’s ghost haunts art criticism and that his ghost must be shaken. Greenberg used the shell of critical Marxism to cover an “undisciplined albeit dogmatic idealism.” Greenberg’s insistence on the radical separation between art and world gave us a sterile, empty conception of modernism. Greenberg usurped the “American tradition of radical social criticism only to write it off as the preamble for a capricious and deterministic aestheticism willfully blind to its unsettled and impinging circumstanced” and therein “ deprived subsequent generations of their true intellectual heritage.” Greenberg must be destroyed.

Alice Goldfarb Marquis' Art Czar

The two works seem to share nothing more than fierce hostility towards their subject. But this Marquis biography – in its vulgar disgust, its concentrated hate towards its subject, its vibrations of rage – can help  situate and explain Storr’s essay.

“No Joy in Mudville” is a deeply ungenerous essay which assumes, at every point, the worst of Greenberg. He appears as a political poseur, a reactionary, an academic, a bully, an ‘aesthetic customs guard’ . His tastes are bad and self-contradictory: how, after decrying kitsch, can he appreciate Wyeth? One easy explanation would see this hostility as a healthy Oedipal impulse: kill the father to become a man. But such outward, bloodthirsty, relentless hostility is unusual in Storr’s work in particular and, more generally, in ‘postmodern’ art history. What, exactly, about Clement Greenberg drives Robert Storr to such lengths?

Marquis’ biography also gives us Greenberg as bully, but unlike Storr, she hones in on his personal habits rather than the work of his criticism. Marquis understands Greenberg’s use of ‘baffling verbiage’ as an attempt to intimidate the reader; his prose becomes a ’scholarly uppercut.’ There are simpler ways to understand Greenberg’s word choices: as an attempt to find the exactly right word for a context, as part of his own shared self-education. But Marquis’ accusation, however bizarre, indicates a broader logic. Instead of actually addressing herself to the problems that interested Greenberg, she flattens them out into a sort of con. Greenberg the critic, interested in actual questions,  disappears to be replaced by Greenberg the bully, Greenberg the cheat, Greenberg the bad lover, Greenberg the sham-artist, Greenberg the hypocrite, even Greenberg the spanker.

The same logic repeats in Storr’s essay. Nowhere does Storr acknowledge that Greenberg identified and attempted to work through real problems. Not only does Greenberg give the wrong answers, he asks the wrong questions. Greenberg, Storr suggested, attempted to find a position outside of the rough-and-tumble of modernism, the intricate circuit between society and culture and tradition. He wanted a pure world, in politics and in culture, and his desire erased the real complexity and implemented, instead, a conservative aesthetic program, unsuitable for the needs of the modern.

For Storr, Greenberg’s elitism is evidenced by his preference for color-field painting over Pop. Such misguided judgement, Storr insists, ignores the fact that the path of modernity is ‘issued not only onto the spectral rivulets, spray mists, and polymer mud of Olitski and other Color Field painters, but offered a more compelling view beyond to the patchwork, photo-mechanical, screened, and socially encoded matrixes of Rauschenberg, Johns, and their peers and artistic progeny.’ Against flatness, thick socially encoded matrixes: whatever they might be.

For Storr, Greenberg signifies something much larger than a particularly noxious art critic. Greenberg is the wrong way to approach modernity. He is the voice of the aloof academic, “Categorical, disembodied, and censorious.” He is the Greenberg that stole Modernity, the puritan, standing outside, judging, hoping for a perfect solution, and all perfect solutions must be abandoned, so that we may  ‘enter modernity in the fullness of its enduring ambiguity, magnificence, and corruption.’ Greenberg’s modernism is, allegedly, flat, one-dimensional: Manet – Pollock – Noland. Storr’s modernity is anarchic, multilinear, wild.   It can be assemblage, a print of a car-crash, a birds’ nest, a vitrine filled with floating Clement Greenberg bobby-heads, it could be the Cosby show. It contains multitudes.

To see modernity in this light involves a systemic avoidance of what was, for Greenberg, the real problem:: modernity seemed to be reneging its own promise. If the bourgeoisie opened the possibility of real culture, free from the shackles of tradition, then the bourgeoise were – in their fear, their conservativism, and their Tiffany lamps, shutting down that very possibility. Greenberg helps us see the modernist project as the continual attempt, sometimes conscious, mostly not, to preserve the promise of modernity against itself. To adopt an image from Greenberg, an alarm went off sometime around 1863, and modern painters began to recognize that contemporary culture seemed to be consuming itself, defecating a form of half-culture and drowning in its kitsch feces. The old ways would not work, the old ways were the problem. So, in order to keep the promise of culture alive, to keep things moving, the painters needed to re-examine their own work, and here begins modernism.

Greenberg’s own writings, from the earliest programatic statements until his last interview, must be understood as a series of attempts to keep our sensitivity to that alarm; to grasp the fragility of modernism and the constant threat of half-culture.  In this sense, Greenberg’s judgment in favor of the color-field artists over Rauschenberg can be understood. The color-fields kept the project of painting ‘moving’ in a way that Rauschenberg, for all his pleasing socially-encoded matrixes could not. Another way to make the same point:  quality, aesthetic quality, could be recognized in Noland and Olitski, and not Rauschenberg or Johns. But De gustibus non est disputandum – who is to argue about taste? Doesn’t this position require appeal to Puritan notions of aesthetic exclusion? Who is Greenberg to judge? But the question should be reversed: who isn’t Greenberg to judge?

Aesthetic judgement must be understood as a key achievement of modernity – a kind of relationship to the world that relies, wholly, on its own terms; a motion towards freedom. What the modernists were responding to was how modernity seemed to be shutting this form of freedom down, subsuming it under academicism. Greenberg’s criticism attempts – and the success of his attempt may be judged elsewhere – to keep this promise open.

At the heart of Storr’s objection to Greenberg, then, is Greenberg’s insistence on the necessity of aesthetic judgment. But Storr does not acknowledge this problem. In fact his whole essay is a neurotic refusal of acknowledging this problem in any way, continually throwing labels as a way of avoiding the problem. There is no problem. Instead of actually acknowledging or considering Greenberg’s reading of Kant, Storr snidely repeats William Barrett’s dismissal: “Clem is always putting on the dog – intellectually speaking… you know Clem doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he mentions Kant.”

Storr wants to be the pluralist radical, supporting the diversity of modernity against Greenberg’s obsessed, unproductive, conservative monism. For Storr, we can begin anew: “At long last disabused of our own purity of intent and suspicious of any project predicated on the near or far term perfection of society, we are left, as modernity began, with only the intoxicating improbabilities of our imagination and the vivid, often disquieting, actuality of our perceptions.” Once you’re reacquainted with the immediate actuality of the world, that is, you’ll find that it wasn’t so bad to begin with. Get used to things, they are staying the same.

Greenberg’s work, in its depth and focus, offers no such easy appeals to the ‘real world.’ It should be understood as constant restatements of a single problem. We have lost the particular dimensions and the specific vocabulary to come to understand his problem, but anyone who feels the vivid inadequacy of the current moment in art, even when that inadequacy masquerades as an intoxicating vitality, can find in Greenberg the glimmer of that problem, and the attempt, however imperfect, to restate the problem, again and again.

Mike Yong

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In 1982, after graduating from the GSD at Harvard, interning at Airbus, and taking a job at Polshek in New York, the architect Neil Denari began to initiate his own design projects under the name Cor-Tex. Cor-Tex had the following mission statement:

Through the reading of late sixties post-Marxist Jean Baudrillard, the 1960’s films of Michelangelo Antonioni, an acute understanding of the persuasive power of graphic design, and a thorough belief that architecture is geometry saturated with symbolic codes, Cor-Tex Architecture produces buildings which operate under a manifold of concepts. With a global program in mind, Cor-Tex moves toward the question of place with the same dynamic flow as a Boeing crossing the International Dateline headed for the arrival lounge at Narita Airport.

Pulled in divergent directions, from Jean Baudrillard to Michelangelo Antonioni, from graphic design to architecture as codex, Denari’s work is emblematic of what it meant to think about built work at the end of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s: distracted and searching, too busy to offer reflection while operating a buzzing switchboard of an infinite number of topics, unwilling (and at any rate, unable) to think through in anything more than a cursory way the relationship between an increasingly more opaque theoretical context and the built environment.

Denari’s drawing work largely eschews its contemporary situation, directed instead toward the arousal of emergent, not-yet-existent, futuristic desires. Denari fields these non-existent desires in an open-ended, indeterminate way, in order to avoid or ignore reflection on the continued tightening of a vise around architectural practice. This sort of deliberate escapism – who, after all, can speak coherently about emergent desire, desires which we do not have the capacity to comprehend or to know yet? – might be construed as a romantic way of hiding a building from critique.

Denari has been partially responsible as an architect as well as a theorist in prefiguring the contemporary popularity of ‘emergent’ or ‘projective’ architecture, which directs its imagination into the future to rouse the possibility of new (as yet unknown) kinds of desire and new (as yet unknown) kinds of collectivities, appropriate to what this strain of thought perceives of as a new kind of society – networked, faster than ever, constantly shifting, largely unknown and indeterminate, impossible to apprehend from any one standpoint, requiring oscillation between manifold perspectives.

A former director of SCI-Arc, Denari was largely an academic architect and theorist, and is beginning only now to make good on the conjectures and promises of the earlier part of his career through actual commissions. With new built work (like HL23, a residential building adjacent to the new High Line in New York) “The Artless Drawing” is a well-timed examination of the concerns present in these early drawings, and a demonstration of the way architectural concepts – such as dynamic flow, a central Denarian tenet – become transmuted over the course of a career.

Architectural drawings are a good place to begin thinking about the state of contemporary architectural practice because of their bizarre position: proposals which are not necessarily meant to be built, and not necessarily meant to prefigure buildings so much as new ways of life.  Drawings occupy a middle-space between the prefiguration of a putative coming reality and a merely formal language of representation, prone to the vagaries of the context from which they arise more so than any work with potential to come into physical existence.

* * *

“The Artless Drawing” comprises fifty-three drawings from Denari’s early career. The drawings are copious evidence of his future-directed approach to emergent desire: in his proposal for the Tokyo International Forum (1989), a bulbous, blimp-like object is suspended by a intricate network of trusses, There is no  evident reason for the particular position, shape, or relationship of these forms to each other. To Denari, it is clear that these arbitrary elements, strewn romantically with no seeming relationship to program, exist for the eventual purpose of the program, as desire itself would rise up to claim these objects as one of their own.

The drawing “Entscheidungsproblem: Law of Identity” (1990), contains two equations in the lower right hand corner:

m  n^th (U)
Tn(m) = p

Like the built forms in the proposed building for the Tokyo International Forum, these equations indicate relationships or functions. However, there is no actual indication of what variables are in question. Perhaps ‘m’ is mass. Perhaps it isn’t. For Denari, clearly, the issue is not what the equation means, but rather, its unknownness, the availability of the equation for desire’s ultimate, all-consuming takeover.

Another set of drawings is more ambitious about representing and showing the aesthetic and political possibilities of indeterminacy. “Solar Clock” (1986) is a set of drawings in which ascribed across the top are statements such as “1. ENERGY IS INDESTRUCTIBLE,” and “4. NONEQUILIBRIUM IS THE SOURCE OF ORDER.” “2. RADICAL UNCERTAINTY CREATES HOPE” is written across the top of one drawing, which looks like a military diagram, long and thin like a torpedo. On the bottom are written the words, “EVENTS MACHINE.” Different parts are numbered. To the left, there is a codex, in which the following is inscribed:

NOMENCLATURE

The nomenclature itself has less to do with architecture and more to do with spacecraft, featuring an outer defense wall, lasers, lubrication feeds, a hydraulic carriage, and the ‘intermediate stiffener.’ There is a system for ‘adjusting’ the curtain wall. Only a little more than half of these numbers are indicated on the diagram which accompanies this nomenclature. No. 22 is blank. The diagram itself appears like a shape drawn out of thin air, and the indicated parts seem to bear only an accidental relationship with the parts which are referred to in the nomenclature. This is presumably the radical uncertainty to which the headline refers. It is not clear how this radical uncertainty creates hope, unless one is prepared to believe that desire – in its manifold, flexible messianism – will save us all, by finding ergonomic ways to put these functions to use.

Prototype Architecture School No. 5, project, Los Angeles, California, Elevations

Of all of the drawings, “West Coast Gateway” (1988) is the most concerned with the political, utopian dimension of the architectural drawing and its ability to intercede into the present to prefigure a coming reality. It is also the thorniest of all of the drawings shown in “Artless,” and the closest to an attempt to intercede into a contemporary condition. The politics are identity politics. The complex proposed – the West Coast Gateway – is an immigrant center, to be built in the air rights above a freeway. Denari celebrates its location:

As the definitive example of the 20^th century automobile city, Los Angeles divides globally, east and west, residing as a kind of cultural centerline. This Americanness asks the immigrant to reside in western contemporaneity and at the same time in a city which is itself definitively pan-cultural. The site in the air rights above a freeway is the place where this distance, in American terms, is most clearly expressed: The gap between one place and another, and the time between the origin of a particular history and the hopeful beginning of other ones.

In his drawings for the proposed Gateway, Denari has overlaid data from the 1980 Census. Across the image of the proposed building are listed the Census racial categories as well as the attendant percentages, broken down by ethnicity: BLACK, HISPANIC, AMERICAN INDIAN ESKIMO & ALEUT, ASIAN & PACIFIC ISLANDER. White is indicated not as white, but as BALANCE (i.e., BALANCE: 90.9%).

This is Denari interceding into his contemporary situation, but he does so in a way that is clearly inadequate, unable to confront his present because the methodological preconceptions with which he approached the project had nothing to offer the immigrants, who are not always non-white, and who are probably not American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut. The rhetoric of cross-cutting and movement, the periphery and the liminal space, may work in dealing with as-yet-unanticipated desires, desires which we don’t know yet that we have. It fails him completely in his ability to confront real needs, which exist, now, and he has in this case shown his complete inability, given even the supposed dynamism of his theoretical parameters, to anticipate any actual program for the center besides being, vaguely, anti-white and pro-brown, anti-static and pro-movement.

* * *

The question is why, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, did this appear so certainly like the way forward? Why does it still look like the way forward? Why has this way of thinking come to engulf contemporary architectural practice? The field’s narrow theoretical parameters – constrained, not liberated by what appears to be its pluralism but in fact is something else entirely – have made this question virtually unanswerable by those ensconced within it.

Absent of a grasp of its moment, contemporary architecture  turns to an indeterminate, thrilling, dynamic future.

As Denari writes in the introduction to his own theoretical text, Gyroscopic Horizons, “Starting is always occupying the everpresent now. The departure lounge” – that is, the departure lounge from which we leave for Narita Airport – “is an architectural reference for a place that is not a destination but a moment (even if it is hours) within a continuous trajectory or process of movement.”

There is no confrontation with the present. There is only ‘dynamic flow.’ “The Artless Drawing” is evidence of how long this dire condition has lasted: a vital flow which moves around us, over and under, opportunistic and ergonomic, too fast and slippery for its practitioners to see death himself, with his bag of bones, hiding beneath it.

—————

At the Onset of the 21st Century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
-From the promotional information for The Singularity is Near, a film written, produced and directed by Ray Kurzweil that is making the rounds on the festival circuit this summer.

The idea of the Singularity in human evolution has caused both derision and jubilation. The promise of fully functioning AI, therapeutic robots the size of blood cells that would eradicate cancer and most disease, molecular computers and even quantum computers with computing power that surpasses the computational powers of our own brain are forecast to become reality within our own lifetime.  Yet what are the implications of this technological event horizon? What exactly is at stake in projecting a determined future and what kind of culture could exist in a non-human moment? [1]

Before addressing these questions, let me first briefly explain what has been termed “the singularity” and how the development of such a concept is bound within a modern metaphysical conception of being.[2]  The concept of the singularity at present was most likely coined by Mathematician Vernor Vinge in a 1993 paper he gave at the VISION – 21 conference sponsored by NASA. At VISION, he defined the singularity as such:

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence. Science may achieve this breakthrough by several means (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur).

However, the term or movement, as it has now become a full-blown phenomenon, maintaining devotees called Singularitarians, has come to be associated with futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil who in 2005 published the book The Singularity is Near.  With the release of the film and the corresponding media coverage, this phenomenon may well become a blanket term for the zeitgeist of this century, He took on the task of developing Vernor Vinge’s idea with what he termed the Law of Accelerating Returns.[3]   Kurzweil maintains that information technology is subject to exponential development and as the trends of the preceding century have shown, the rates of intelligent design, micro-engineering, price/performance quotients, etc. all will maintain an exponential vector and that this great explosion of innovation will most likely occur by 2035. Essentially, Kurzweil believes that humans view themselves to exist within a linear world, akin to how we conceive of historical development, one event after another, a compilation on a rather simple, constant vector. Yet, through review of developmental  trends, Kurzweil has noticed that human development, especially within the fields of information technology — though he has extrapolated it outward to evolutionary development as well considering genetic evolution as a sort of information technology — work within an exponential paradigm. Progress accumulates and evolves from previous accumulation – think Fibonacci sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc.). This additive evolution is what accounts for the exponential curve. In Kurzweil’s essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns, he states:

As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first half of the twenty-first century, it will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans. The progress will ultimately become so fast that it will rupture our ability to follow it. It will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand “on the plug,” will be dispelled.

So what are the implications of such a rupture? What would it mean for our culture (technology being an aspect of culture just as much as culture is an aspect of technology) to expand and develop at such a rate that we would become disconnected from it? Would this be an era of non-humanity? First, however, we must examine what it means, or meant, to be a Modern human with Modern conceptions of Time.

Modernity is not, as is commonly misconceived, an epoch or an era with a beginning or an end. Rather it is descriptive of the way in which we see ourselves and more specifically the way in which we conceive of our relation to time.

The present is reliant on the past, it is referential, and must always be new.  These are the edicts of what it means to be culturally modern. Modernity is an act of persistent becoming and is the simultaneous presence of the old and the new. By comparison, the pre-modern conditions of existence were reliant on ‘being’ and maintaining the cultural modes and mores of the time.[4]  It was an order whereby time was circular and maintenance of the normalized order was the fulfillment of one’s duty to their specific society. Modernity is bent on progressive (re)creation and time is seen in a linear mode. The modern is by no means new. The ancient Greeks, for one, underwent a foray into Modernity in which knowledge was gathered and used to ground the contemporary moment in a historical manner. This period of time is represented by what our culture refers to as Classical Greece or the time of the Polis and is ultimately what Western Modernity bases itself upon.

The conception of Modern time is easily visible in the form of knowledge we call history. Philosophers have recognized this from early on; Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Habermas, etc. all have weighed in on the role of history in modernity. For the sake of brevity, I’d like to just mention two here.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote an essay titled On the Use and Abuse of History for Life in 1873. It was a form of cultural critique, specifically critical of the quickening nationalization taking place in what would become modern Germany. In it, however, he provides a salient view of the role history plays in the creation of Modern cultural purpose:

That is, we need it [history] for life and for action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and from action or for merely glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living.

History is at the service of Modernity and is in fact a distinguishing characteristic of the modern conception of time.  Nietzsche does, however, mention an interesting cultural phenomenon that mirrors exponential growth. In a sort of gesture to an argument going on at the time concerning historical accumulation, he mentions that “the historical sense of our age” appears to be considered a “hypertrophic virtue.” Hypertrophy, in a cultural sense, is the excessive accumulation of knowledge and cultural artifact.  However today, it is more common as a biological term for the excessive increase of a cell until rupture through over-nourishment. Kurzweil, when making mention of “smart matter” suggests that as intelligence permeates the world around us, it will branch out into every part of the universe, remaking it in the image of what can only now be conceived of as a ‘Modern us’.[5]  One might say that in a post-singularity world, Man will create the universe in his own image – an edict, we will see, that should be all-too-familiar for the average modern person.

Walter Benjamin was a critic and philosopher of the early 20^th Century who became known for applying Marxist criticism to the emerging industrialization of culture. However, he was also in line with a tradition of Jewish mysticism typified by his life-long relationship with Jewish philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem. In one of his more enigmatic pieces, Theological-Political Fragment, he describes the tension of Modern Time. It begins:

Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal, but the end.

Now some of you may be wondering how this fits into a scientific discourse at all . Don’t fear the terminology Benjamin used here. In the West, Judeo-Christian philosophy and conceptions of time have played an integral role in the creation of the Modern moment. The Messiah for Benjamin as in the Jewish tradition represents a consummation of all that has been. It is not necessarily linked to a religion in this sense but to a shadowy assumption built into our conception of history. History is cumulative, it is the age of becoming and the only end possible to such a progression is to have become, an age which Benjamin terms Messianic. Kurzweil picks up on this imagery and imaginary through his representation of himself as a technological messiah in Transcendent Man. In other words, instead of time existing as a dialectical tension between the past and the present, the end of history is the termination of the present.

Let us synthesize what Nietzsche and Benjamin are suggesting. That history is necessary for life as we know it and that the end of history is the termination of life as we know it. Commonly conceived, this is the philosophical underpinning to an “end-of-days” scenario.  But let’s try to consider this in a different way since the end of history will most likely not take the shape of an Armageddon or a robot apocalypse but the moment when the historical ceases to have a purpose. Said in another way — history will end when we begin to conceive of being in time in a completely different fashion than we do know as Modern humans. Simply, non-human, post-singularity, truly post-modern, however we term it, time will be understood in a radically new fashion.

An implication of this that may help us to conceptualize such an epoch is to consider the  effects of exponential growth on a modern conception of being. As the speed of innovation increases exponentially and the size of intelligent devices decreases exponentially, how we relate to historical time, as a progressive accumulation of advances must change. No longer will we be able to place within a comfortable distribution the paradigmatic changes that will be occurring almost to the point of simultaneity. The trick of this, however is to not forget that by this time, Kurzweil predicts that we will also be increasing our intelligence and ability to learn. This approach will most likely maintain Modernist conceptions of being as progressive, cumulative and towards an implied goal. Vernor Vinge hints at this in his essay from 1993:

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow . . . and when it becomes great enough, and looks back . . . what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? The later being would be everything the original was, but vastly more. And so even for the individual, the … notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

So then, will the Singularity be the end of Modernity, or merely a period of super-modern expansion? A spread of Modernism akin to globalization but on a universal scale? A hypertrophic remodeling of the world based on paradigms already familiar to us and therefore NOT indicative of the rupture Kurzweil speaks of? Or will there be a break from all that has been known. If so, it will be quick (relative to the cognitive shifts we know according to Modern history) and traumatic. Hard take off and soft take off have been used to describe our options. Kurzweil and his cadres are all attempting to develop an environment which would be favorable to a soft-take off — slow, progressive, Modern and less traumatic.

A retort to this expansion that I’m terming super-modernism may well come from an aspect of the definition of singularity. The singularity would be created, not by ourselves, but by superior machines. But these machines themselves would be created, if not directly then via lineage, by us as Modern human beings. This would, theoretically provide enough of a lineage to the present moment for a disastrous rupture on the scale of ontological collapse to be avoided. I’m also comforted by one of Kurzweil’s main fall-back points as well. Human intelligence essentially consists of an extremely complex series of pattern recognitions and if we were to increase our intelligence as is suggested, then we would be able to keep up with any sort of information environment presented to us and thereby maintain a historical (patterned) understanding of time in that moment. History is, at a certain level, a set of information placed into patterns for the purposes of ontological cohesiveness.

Another key concept to understanding the implications of the birth of the singularity is control. As I’ve already quoted, “It will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand ‘on the plug,’ will be dispelled” suggests that the loss of control is what is truly frightening about the other side of this event horizon. I question if this is even a legitimate concern, however. Control is a matter of perceiving agency. Everyone has a different answer to the question “who is in control?” to the point of relative subjectivism. The technological re-creation of our universe through the Singularity from reactive matter into active, intelligent agents will in itself reformulate what power and control is but I doubt if most will see this. Rather, there is a good chance that whatever the environment of post-singularity, it will be read by the subject as inert and without agency just as our hyper-active environment of atomic vibration is read as stable, solid and only changing at a conceivable rate. But this, of course, will come down to where subjectivity is located after the event.

A little bit on what I’m terming “super-modern.” Marc Augé, a cultural anthropologist, is using it as a way to consider the overlapping conceptions of place and time in the contemporary moment. Meaning, the world is not synchronized as modern, but is incrementally altering its view of reality to come into accord with the Western conception of Modernity. Globalization is a super-modern occurrence, an automatic colonizing system branching outward indefinitely. It’s not hard to see why I am applying this term to the kind of intelligent colonization that Kurzweil is suggesting in a post-singularity universe. It will still be, however, an occurrence with that essential base of Modernity – self-reflexive, progressive continuity.

Let us assume, for a few minutes however, that there could be a rupture that would make any sort of Modern understanding of time impossible. What would change? Firstly, the way in which we produce meaning would be augmented. Better said, the significance of information would shift dramatically. Significance of a memory or a friend is to a great extent determined by its prospect of loss. If nothing is ever lost (think of hypertrophy here), then the prospect of meaning is expanded outward but the significance and actual meaning of individual objects will collapse. Something else that would necessarily change is our economic system. Imagine millions of units of cheap mechanical labor flooding a market place. This would drive wages so low as to make it impossible to earn a living wage based on our current economic system; setting forth the quirky little statement that we would be freed from labor to live our lives that right now consist of labor. Perhaps there would be an augmentation in what labor actually means as well. Perhaps it would even cease to exist. Mankind would be set free from obligation but for what purpose? How can an ontology (therefore meaningful existence) exist without a teleology?

Many of these changes could occur in part through a super-modern singularity, but I believe that the discourse which has developed surrounding the Singularity as “rupture,” “ultimate destiny,” etc. are little more than rhetorical devices to fit coming shifts of being into our Modern understanding of reality as one which will culminate in the end of the present, the end of modernity and the birth of the Singularity in a singular utopic burst.

However, in the end, the paradoxical construction of the Singularity, as a culmination and consummation of Modern, historical and Messianic conceptions of being is what is limiting our ability to see beyond the event horizon. It is not that we don’t have the ability to conceive beyond our own intelligence, but the all-too-common trap of not being able to conceive of ourselves as we are that should be our biggest concern.

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¹ Kurzweil’s concept of a singularity delineates the usurpation of humanity by its own technology. “Post-human” would no longer work to characterize this era since humanity would no longer be an element in the equation of teleological determination but rather the teleological travejectory would become one based on a technological intelligence which surpasses our own. One could then even argue that that entity would no longer be a technology either as it has ceased to be an extension of humanity and instead become a being unto itself.

² Modernity, in its characterization as a self-reflexive period of cultural production, contains a metaphysical presence through a spatial-temporal dialectic. I’ll return to this later in the essay.

³ The New York Times printed an article last month on the documentary about Kurzweil called Transcendent Man. From the title, I think you can infer the type of presentation he is casting for himself.

⁴ Therefore, pre-modern humanity wasn’t concerned with the expansion of what it meant to be human but rather the maintenance of what it is to be human (which was perceived to be the current state of being). If we can construct a dialectic of progress and regress, it was the latter that most concerned the pre-moderns. For the moderns, progress (due to socio-economic stability that prevented the philosophical implications of regression from affecting culture) became the overwhelming concern, the mandated obsession.

⁵ Smart matter is just a basic assumption when following the trend of contemporary computer technology: size decreases as computing power increases. Smart matter then is basically computers on an atomic level which have the intelligence akin to whatever non-human entity appears after the singularity.

Bravado, nihilism, and emptiness mark the work of Robert Somol, an architectural theorist who has paradoxically made a career of undermining architectural theory’s hold on architecture. While Somol is styled as a theoretician, his work never rises above what can only be called the sloppy and superficial use of jargon. He once celebrated, for instance, Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois Center, on the grounds that it reverses Foucault’s panopticon to allow citizens to view the state. In his praise for WW’s IntraCenter, a community center in Kentucky, he turns an abstraction into reality, writing that the building’s molded plywood façade, with its bends and crimps, “emerges as a splint, a prosthetic for the limp collective of the contemporary.”[1]  Somol represents the bawdy and exaggerated side of contemporary architectural theory, the side that throws things against the wall to see what sticks, under the guise of the experimental.

“Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” by Somol and the architect Sarah Whiting of WW, is written in this vein and outlines an opportunistic framework for practice. Like much of Somol’s work, it defends its position in theoretical terms while simultaneously maintaining a hostility to the notion of theory in architecture. Somol and Whiting have tried to turn architectural theory on its head, using its terms to disprove itself in order to free architecture once and for all. This desire is symptomatic of how little they are able to understand or diagnose the real problems of the discipline.

For Somol and Whiting, architecture has been marred by the predominance of extra-architectural philosophical or conceptual concerns which intercede into architecture – which they call ‘critical.’ The ‘critical’ which they polemically refer to is the ‘critical architecture’ of Michael Hays and Peter Eisenman, but extends beyond them. Hays and Eisenman for them are merely a bad instantiation of the dominant mode of architectural production, expressed not only by Hays and Eisenman but by Clement Greenberg, Colin Rowe, Michael Fried, and Manfredo Tafuri:

Critical architecture… required the condition of being ‘between’ various discursive oppositions. Thus ‘culture and form’ can alternatively be figured as ‘kitsch and avant-garde’ (Clement Greenberg), ‘literal and phenomenal’ (Colin Rowe), ‘objecthood and art’ (Michael Fried), or ‘capitalist development and design’ (Manfredo Tafuri).[2]

The content does not matter, what matters is whether theory has tried to contain practice. To take its place, Somol and Whiting propose the “production and projection of new forms of collectivity.”[3] The desire to create and invent these new, ‘projective,’ ‘post-critical’ forms of collectivity have since become commonplace and widely accepted (the Architectural Association in London this year announced the creation of a new program, the M.Phil in ‘Projective Cities’). As a metaphor for the creation of new forms of collectivity, Somol and Whiting suggest “the Doppler”:

The Doppler focuses upon the effects and exchanges of architecture’s inherent multiplicities: material, program, writing, atmosphere, form, technologies, economics, etc… Rather than looking back or criticizing the status quo, the Doppler projects forward alternative (not necessarily oppositional) arrangements or scenarios.[4]

As the Doppler effect describes the change in the frequency of a sound wave when moving from one position to another, depending on the stance of an the observer, Somol and Whiting’s “Doppler” in architecture changes strategy depending on the arrangement, pursuing opportunistic tactics appropriate to each scenario.

Somol and Whiting may believe that theirs is a radical position, but they are in fact making wholesale compromise with architecture’s contemporary conditions. They are giving in entirely to the slow obsolescence of architecture as a practice. In 1936, the Los Angeles architect Gregory Ain designed a house commissioned by a postman in the Hollywood Hills, the Edwards House. The idea that a postman would today commission a house is preposterous. The vast majority of the American built landscape has no architect behind it. The Existenzminimum retreats further into the distance. The satisfaction which Somol and Whiting feel at the end of their article (when they compare themselves to Robert Mitchum and their critics to Robert de Niro) is merely the false satisfaction of a wretched situation temporarily blocked out.

* * *

Architecture cannot be blamed for the limited means of the postman, but it can be blamed for retreating into a jargon-strewn fantasy world. Somol and Whiting’s argument turns on the crude misuse of terms, which frankly, cease to rise to a theory and remain at the level of jargon. If the use of the terms ‘critical’ or ‘postcritical’ or ‘projective’ here seem to have lost all meaning, it is because they have. They are terms which have been photocopied and faxed over and over again, becoming more and more unclear, blurry, and losing their definition with the passage of time, until nearly unrecognizable.

‘Critical theory’ once referred to the Frankfurt School’s attempt to preserve the emancipatory charge of Marxian socialism. In the second, diluted and expanded sense, critical theory lumps the Frankfurt school in with the Heideggerian tradition, including Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze – a tradition hostile to the notion of emancipation. In this strain, the possibility of large-scale emancipation under modernism is a chimera. Local resistance – micropolitics – is all that is possible. Politically this strain found itself aligned with the burgeoning identity politics of the 1980s and later, with cultural studies, stressing the vital importance of resistance and eschewing the idea of freedom or emancipation altogether.

This emphasis on resistance – drawn from this second theoretical strain and having no truck with freedom – was central to architecture’s appropriation of ‘critical theory.’ Eisenman’s writing on Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino and Hays’ writing on Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, for instance, both argue that the buildings in question are caught between their being in the world and offering resistance to it. It is this faint, nearly imperceptible criticality that Somol and Whiting hope to evade. Their appeal to Deleuze is their hope to justify unbounded architectural opportunism, arbitrary multiplicities of arrangements and scenarios.

Somol believes that he has escaped ‘critical’ architecture’s clutches, but he has misidentified what those clutches are, and as a result he falls into the same traps.  Eisenman and Somol demonstrate the thinness of the poststructural moment in architecture, and its inability to adequately confront or digest the constituent problems of architectural practice. Contemporary architectural theory might be compared to a sealed room in which the inhabitants are slowly breathing up all of
the oxygen. Somol believes he has found an escape hatch. In fact he has only found a way to blunt his senses, so when the end comes, he will not be conscious of it.

——————-

1.   Robert Somol and WW, “IntraCenter: Seduction of the Similar,” Assemblage 40 (1999) 69.
2.   Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33 (2002), 75
3.   Somol and Whiting 75.
4.   Somol and Whiting 75.

Question: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think that is?

Answer: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and…I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., err, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our…

Though many of the 43,600,452 viewers (as of July 6, 2010) probably perceive her answer as a result of extreme natural stupidity (they certainly do if the Youtube comments section can be trusted as a barometer), perhaps Miss South Carolina was simply caught off guard.  Maybe her synapses misfired under the stress, causing the pre-baked answer in her brain to scatter at the critical moment.  As she scrambled to address world problems and socially relevant topics within her reply to a rather narrow question, one can imagine the information in her brain abruptly splitting into particles that no nano-sized cartographer could reassemble in time for her to answer coherently.  At once, months of coaching, memorization, and practice went down the drain.  In that sense, this admittedly delectable morsel of schadenfreude becomes all the more sympathetic and, perhaps, unfortunate.

I can’t say I care quite that much about her infamous moment, but I can empathize with her now that I’ve gone through Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.  To analyze and break down Miss South Carolina’s transcribed answer is to enter a world where signs point to other signs and the foundation erodes as quickly as you can put it under scrutiny.  We have no maps to guide us to any logical conclusion about what came from her brain at that moment, though every word is comprehensible.  The Codex tricks the mind in the same manner with its collection of Earthly objects rearranged and abstracted in an alien world.

The Codex is simply an encyclopedia of a world that does not exist, but is made up of elements of our own.  The book was originally published in two volumes, with the first volume dedicated to natural life and the second dedicated to the world’s human civilization (they may just resemble humans, but for the sake of simplicity, I will be calling them “humans.”)  Each chapter devotes itself to an aspect of that world, from its flora, fauna, physics, and microbiology, to human development.  The section on humans covers their history, culture, cuisine, architecture, and the writing system used on the planet.  Unfortunately for the reader, each section is described with words and charts written entirely in the world’s native language.  That language is an asemic writing system created by Serafini himself.  So, we are left to discover and learn about this world through the book’s thousands of drawings.

Let’s face it: we have no Carl Sagan to calmly and clearly describe this alien world to us in a way that makes complete sense.  The Codex instead reads as a series of confrontations to one’s logical comprehension.  Presenting it to others will most likely result in a wondrous silence not unlike your own, with intermittent giggles and exclamations at the absurdity of the creations contained in its pages.  Serafini himself has said that the book is meant to recreate the experience of a young child picking up an encyclopedia of Earth.  Unable to read, the child can only imagine how each picture is meant to relate to the planet based on his or her short time here.  The elephant resembles the garden hose; the hyena resembles the family dog.

The cover of the edition I read presents a vaguely Escher-esque drawing of a copulating couple slowly morphing into a single alligator, which, once the transformation is complete, crawls off the bed, and out of the frame completely.  The drawing itself is bizarre enough, but the paragraphs of text surrounding it are even more troubling–they suggest that this strange process is actually explained!  We don’t know if it’s logically explained.  We don’t know if the text simply says “here’s a cool drawing done by some guy on our planet, it doesn’t actually mean anything blah blah blah.”  All we know is that those words are our only hope of comprehending the drawing’s necessary inclusion in the Codex and that we’ll never understand what they’re trying to communicate.

For those wondering, yes, it is safe to judge this book by its cover.  Just to whet your appetite, other drawings include: artichoke-like plants that are topped off with sunny-side up eggs; bananas that have their midsections replaced with a clear cylinder containing gel capsules of medicine; trees that migrate by swimming across a body of water; a daisy-like flower that, once all its petals are removed, can be blown into through the stem to inflate the other end into a balloon capable of lifting a small child; bacteria-like creatures that live in hollowed out rainbows; a tiny snake that disguises itself as a shoe lace, only to bite the shin of the unsuspecting wearer; a bipedal species that wears suspenders filled out with some kind of egg sac, out of which a full grown tiger bursts with confetti when the time is right; elaborate alchemic devices that blend the contraption and substance used in it so well that it’s difficult to distinguish which is producing which; and, of course, the various depictions of human life are no less strange.  For starters, their mortality is thrown into question, as one series of drawings depicts animated skeletons being fitted with human skin.  They are shown to be fully functional humans afterwards.

All of these pictures are preceded and dotted with text descriptions, including graphs, charts, tables of contents, and captions.  Many pages, particularly the ones at the beginning of each chapter, are all text. Glancing through various articles online, it seems that people have attempted to crack Serafini’s text.  The numbering system was decoded, lending some credence to the theory that the rest of text might be decipherable as well.  The characters used in the writing system repeat themselves and stylistically, the system is cohesive.  Even if it isn’t decipherable, it gives off the illusion that it is.

It is tempting to indulge in fantasies about the book’s mysterious aura.  It practically begs to be fretted over and figured out.  It’s not hard to waste a few hours pouring over the text, looking for connections between pictures and Seraphinian words, and trying to find that one loose thread to yank on and unravel the entire thing.  When that begins to feel futile, perhaps one’s thoughts would become sharply pointed at Luigi Serafini’s head.  Maybe he has a fully translated copy of the Codex that he keeps under his mattress?  Or at least a Seraphinian-to-Earth language tablet of some sort.  It’s hard not to feel as though a translation is possible, even after Serafini went on record to say that it definitely does not exist.  The book’s obscurity and unavailability (all printings and reprints are sold at high prices on the second-hand market) only feeds its elusive and tempting character.

A document called the “Decodex,” a supplementary pamphlet containing reviews of and essays about the book written in Italian, is, perhaps, the closest thing we have to a key.  For those of us who don’t speak Italian, the only English translation of this document was pushed through Google’s translator and plopped onto an obscure blog.  The mechanical translation job is expectedly rough, but hopefully a proper translation will surface some day.  Early on in the lengthy document, it discounts itself:  “This leaflet is not intended as an introduction to flying, but a kind of packing slip” [sic].  This appears to mean that the Decodex is not an explanation of the Codex Seraphinianus, but a supplement to help people think about it. The essayist is kind enough to tell us why our packing slip will never introduce us to flying:  “I realized it would be a mistake to introduce explanations in a work encyclopaedic in nature, created to explain itself” [sic].  This insight lets us know that, once again, we are in an enclosed world of signs pointing to other signs.

From here, we go from Codex as a book to Seraphinianus, the world.  The world depicted is at once believable and beyond absurdity.  In sum, the drawings represent a collection of things from Earth rearranged to do the impossible, the nonsensical, or to be dysfunctional.  The previous paragraph of picture descriptions scrapes the surface of the many fantastic scenes presented by the book.  But for all its insanity, the drawings may as well have been made by a team of biologists and anthropologists sent to chronicle the Codex’s world.  Each animal, organism, or social event is presented in an objective manner–it’s not “hey, look, this person is getting a pen grafted to their arm!” Instead, it’s “here is the end result of the Seraphinian writing utensil transplant process.”  From this, we can extrapolate that Seraphinian writers are fairly serious about their art.  Though not every drawing is so easy to interpret, the more abstract drawings are simply representations of more abstract elements of the world, in the same way the process of nuclear fusion might be too abstract for many on Earth to understand. Of course, the text makes the drawings feel legitimate as well.  The book’s size, binding, and length complete the illusion that it is an actual encyclopedia.  As a work that is meant to “explain itself,” it succeeds because it cultivates so much credibility, even though the reader may never understand it.

Serafini accomplished his goal of inducing childhood nostalgia with this balance between believable presentation and ineffable content.  The book induces a communication breakdown between itself and the reader.  It was not meant for our eyes.  It was meant to be self-explanatory to those who could understand it as a whole.  Our grasp of what goes on in its world is ephemeral, as one drawing may make sense, the next even more sense, the next even less sense, and finally, all three may barely relate to each other, except under a broad heading such as “Chemistry” or “Culture.”  As much as it discourages Earthbound readers from finding a solution to its writing system or even many of its drawings, it still wants us to look and look some more.  Indeed, so as long as the reader is willing to suspend disbelief, it’s a book that can be picked up and explored periodically throughout a lifetime and never let its reader down.

Jessica Labatte • Circularity

A cursory flip through the many websites featuring new media online often shows a widespread use of the gradient.  Taking many forms – from multimedia collage, to Adobe Illustrator-style drawing, to plexiglass sculpture, photographic tableau, and many more – the gradient is a common material choice in a vast sum of new work.  At first glance the ubiquitous inclusion of gradients can be dismissed because it seems trendy and obvious.  But art is always trendy in that it presents new forms.  It is a moot criticism.  The ‘obvious’ charge is a more interesting one, because it seems to want to call it banal when in fact it is anything but.  If a viewer gets beyond initial reactions, they realize that the gradient is an absolutely new phenomena and that it is to be found in few historical instances.  While it has precedents in the formal techniques of shading, only within the past few years has the gradient been isolated out and dealt with as a form in its own right.

What the viewer sees on myriad websites, as well as many photographic works like Jessica labatte’s, and sculpture like Ben Schumacher’s Blue Demon is a new technical use of gradient freed by new technological and production means.  In other words, the gradient in its current exploration is reliant on new technology.  But to be more specific than the vague charge of ‘technology’, production seems to fit better.  Though many artists utilize software programs like Photoshop and Illustrator to achieve the gradient effect, the gradient is a much more adaptive and mobile form.  Schumacher’s Blue Demon and Focus uses not computer effects to construct the gradient, but rather appropriates a found material: gradient mirrored window tint for car windows.  This is already an abstraction from the initial gradient construction process, as the manufacturers likely use software to make the tinted sheeting.  Schumacher’s gradient then is twice removed, which already suggests that the gradient is pervasive enough to be passed between mediums and complicated by repeat usage.  Widespread usage reflects widespread need.  The gradient is a latent device which is utilized in seemingly disparate products.  That artists collectively explore the gradient today suggests that there is a project to collapse the difference between these products by allowing its background device to emerge to the surface.

Ben Schumacher • Blue Demon

Backgrounds on countless websites and most browsers rely on gradients for scrolling and viewing ease, and this often unregistered ‘background’ effect shows exactly how pervasive and unconsciously perceived the gradient is.  Gradients are seemingly used to decorate everything from cars, to websites, to various product designs.  But ‘decorate’ is the wrong verb, even when it appears to be accurate.  Gradients articulate objects and define the contours of new industrial forms which are not immediately graspable.  The gradient on the Firefox browser is the most minimal element necessary to delineate the illusion of different tabs, for example.  As such, it constructs false auras which mimic three dimensional space where there are merely two.  New photographic work like Jessica Labatte’s and Carson Fisk-Vittori’s frame objects similarly in ways that take them out of their typical functions and rely on the gradient in differing ways to exploit latent perceptions of (historically speaking) newly created objects.  As Carson Fisk-Vittori has explained, the background gradient frees the object from perspective.  Fisk-Vittori adds to the background gradient mundane consumer objects with their labels removed to further frame the objects and abstract them from daily use.  The final effect is a free-floating abstraction of recognizable objects.  In Desktop cd’s, paperclips, and receipts are itemized in a minimally delineated viewing space.  This is brought about exclusively by the manipulative device of the gradient to liberate perceptions of reference from banal everyday utility.  Abstracting objects such as these suggest an inability to accept them as they exist, as well as an ingrained curiosity at whether or not they suggest something more than their current incarnation.  However, the refusal to use them as they are and itemize them in carefully considered, meticulous configurations reminiscent of shrines, reflects and pedestalizes the weird consciousness of reification and all the confused wonder at objects ingrained within it.

Carson Fisk-Vittori • Desktop

At the moment, the dominant theoretical framework to view work like this is to default to inherited notions that it subverts advertising norms.  This viewpoint is indebted to a history which experimented with appropriated imagery and texts from advertising (the pictures generation), and which was built around a theoretical targeting of the supposed domination of media catalyzed by Chomskyian paranoia and the extraordinarily one-dimensional hypotheses of Jean Baudrillard, as two examples.  Rather than subversion as the qualifying legitimizer, which inherently suggests that it is solving the supposed problems of advertising, we should view these works as being the highest, most perfected forms of media.  Add to the art the reified consciousness of Chomsky, McLuhan, Naomi Klein, Baudrillard et al which erringly mis-targets consumer culture as the supposed ethical evils of modern life.  In other words, the sheer existence and persistence of media theory which has tangible proof in many young artists in this vein is problematic in itself, as it materializes reified ideology (fantasizing a static overlord who controls the media instead of recognizing media as a sum of social relations that can and does change).  Reorienting our viewpoint would mean to frame the artwork as symptom, instead of antidote.  The gradient is used in advertising regularly – a flip through a Uline product catalog will feature gradients in the same way that many artists do.  So, by artists using gradients they are actually trying to isolate the form, perfect the form, and further canonize it.  However much the gradient grows out of advertising culture, it nevertheless reaches an esteemed status where reflection can encounter it in more dynamic ways.  Desktop is not an antidote to advertising, it is the smartest incarnation of it, and therefore is unavoidably entangled in the same ideology.

The precious itemizing and photographic shrine for objects is a way of constructing an individual aura around mass produced objects.  As mentioned, the same technical device is commonly used by product catalogs, so the gradient is utilized even in mass culture to construct a free-floating false aura around reproducible objects.  In Jessica Labatte’s photography the aura itself is manipulated by way of using the gradient paper itself as photographed object along with other objects typically used for the construction of photographic construction (e.g. tape).  Ribbons with digitally created gradients on them meander through the picture and articulate different contours.  But just as the Uline catalog keeps salable objects in a state of a priori, perfectly rhetorical reflection, Labatte does the same with the device itself.  In other words, she keeps the conditions of viewing likewise in this infant state of disambiguation.  As such, it is a placeholder for viewing, or an exercise in the viewing experience.  Identifying the device and working it materially takes vital steps towards a consciousness of it, but doesn’t inherently cross beyond it.

Jessica Labatte • Untitled (Gradient Ribbon)

Tauba Auerbach has also been exploring the gradient in technically more manual ways, with glass and paint.  Gradients are created manually with acrylic in yet again a novel exploration of contours.  A simple black and white gradient is applied to what is presumably each shard of a broken glass, articulating the difference between each one, in Gradient 3.  It is a simple and methodical exploration of a common occurrence which utilizes the device of the gradient specifically.  The glass serves as canvas to view micro-gradients and again what is commonly an unregistered background is brought into the conscious foreground.  As a result its devisive character is brought to the surface and emerges as an isolated phenomena to be assessed critically.  The perfection of the canned gradient in Adobe Illustrator templates is mimicked by manual applications through serialized labor in the studio.  An obvious question is, Why wouldn’t Auerbach use available software gradients?  One answer is that she can’t print the gradient onto the complicated surfaces she works with.  By applying the gradient manually to materials which deter its easy application is the mastery over material which is featured prominently via an objective gradient.  It is another attempt to freely distribute the gradient, the placeholder of viewing, and get to a ground zero.

Tauba Auerbach • Shatter 1

What all of these instances show are varying attempts at mastering a natural form.  After all, a most common natural occurrence of the gradient is the sky, in different manifestations of sunlight.  The emergence of the gradient is a way of formalizing a natural phenomenon and using it for human ends, not nature’s.  Perhaps the most striking thing about the gradient is that, like the square or circle, it has a platonic form – meaning that we know a priori what it looks like, and the mental image of the idea of gradient almost always surpasses the particular material manifestations.  This is why it makes it so interesting to view how the various interpretations of a singular identity measure up.  In many ways, forms like these are laboratories for viewing how artistic technique is utilized by current artists, in that it eradicates the anthropological-cultural-study urge which devalues objective viewing scenarios and fetishizes difference.  That many artists pursue the same form and attempt to perfect it makes it a social phenomena that in its evasion of exploitative instrumentalization allows us to see social procedures and real difference in their own light, uninfected by vulgarly iconic political posturings.  While it may seem non-political, or not ‘about anything’, the collective pursual of the gradient is a more revealing and experimental project than many of the current depraved themes immediately available.

Moire Rota

Carsten Nicolai is at least equally renowned for his sound work as he is for visual work.  Making minimalist digital music under the moniker Alva Noto, Nicolai has been a central figure in electronic music’s shift from dance music towards glitchy computer-based sound art.  In the mid 90’s he started the Raster-Noton label with fellow German minimalists Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider, and which features cool, European, technologically-obsessed music that is often rhythmic in nature.  Advances in personal computers as music-making instrument have been ideologically pushed by the label regularly.  Nicolai’s music specifically has that sine-wave-based clinicality to it, compounded by his meticulous structures of pointilist rhythms.

Since Nicolai himself once ruminated on the art world’s inveterate failure to familiarize itself with experimental music I was curious to see how he would pair with Pace, a seminal gallery in Chelsea.  Would he use this opportunity to acquaint the artworld with niche sound art?  Why did Pace choose him, after all, for a solo exhibition?  But the exhibition was silent.  The installation was purely visual in nature, with not a click to be heard.  The works on view, ranging from tensed string, to video, to Olafur Eliason-like visual effects, all came off as irritatingly restrained and ascetically quiet to the viewer who knows Nicolai can accomplish much more with broader media interplay.

To further this restraint, the works on view were uniformly and conveniently themed around moire patterns, an effect created by lines intersecting to create perceptual illusions.  Seemingly taken directly from an elementary science textbook, all works were simple (if not incredibly ambitious in scale) variations on a somewhat obvious theme.  The viewer feels like a wanderer at a children’s science museum turned puritanical.  This type of visual-scientific subject matter is typical for Nicolai, who has investigated snowflake formations, Chladni patterns, and jellyfish.  In short, anything with a clearly identifiable structure to be exploited and investigated.

Nevertheless there are some art historical reference points.  The most prominent sculpture is a freestanding one in the middle of the large space, about human height, and comprised of glass panes splayed equally around a central pivot in hexagon form.  Moire Glass is covered in a greyscale checkered pattern which gradates from light on top to black on bottom.  Moire Glass looks both affectively and unintentionally like a Dan Graham sculpture.  But whereas Graham’s glass installations are explicitly sited in institutional critique, and more generally a critique of bureaucratic life (his lectures are rife with poignant comparisons between his work and business park architecture), Nicolai’s glass comes off as yet another convenient material to convey a fetishistic obsession with basic op-art effects.  Additionally, the use of basic lines to delineate form are reminiscent of Russian Constructivism and Minimalism, but the scientific (nearly pseudo-scientific) add strong reference points which were absent from minimalism and intentionally sidestepped by Constructivist impulses to explore new forms.  But the ‘science museum’ quality of all works on view obscure, rather than clarify formal experiments, and this gives the work a somewhat conservative tone.  Instead of methodically investigating, and thereby transforming, the construction of scientistic viewing, Nicolai perpetuates a  contentious sense of mesmerization.  His op-art is less critical of norms than affirmative of them.

Moire Glass

One wonders here if the science museum is being raised to the level of aesthetic reflection or if aesthetic reflection is being lowered to the level of kitsch scientism culture.  I am inclined to believe both are in effect, for better and for worse.  Moire Rota, for example, specifically functions on the level of science museum viewing.  Two posts with leds attached to wire ends swing rapidly enough to create the illusion of fluctuating lines of light.  The posts are concealed in a black room behind a half wall which keeps the viewer from entering the room and potentially hurting their hands by reaching out to touch the lights that are actually wires.  Curatorial safety keeps the work from being experienced, and limits the body’s interaction to two dimensional viewing through extremely limited perspective.  When I was there, one post was not functioning, echoing the type of disarray that one often finds in hi-tech science spectacles.  As a point of historical comparison, Richard Serra’s Prop sculptures offer something antithetical; if once sculpture was dangerous in a desperate attempt to imbricate the viewer and also take material to its extreme limits, all generative material-body interplay is being kept to a safe minimum in Carsten Nicolai’s Moire.

But the silence of the exhibition still resonates in the viewers confounded imagination.  Was the decision to leave sound out Pace’s, or Nicolai’s?  If the former, it represents a timid approach to the multimedia installation, which consequently is not raised to its highest form.  The fearful exclusion of advanced sound art verges on a common approximation of abstract sound-music as mere noise.  Sound art is left out of yet another platform of experimentation.  As of now, artists who use sound have increasingly been excluded from gallery exhibitions, museums (the absence of Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing leaves the entire exhibition void of noise and purged of an entire experimental method of contemporary art.  The remaining exhibition space is not ‘infected’ with the impurity of sound, and becomes an ascetic space of precious reflection.  ‘Sound’ is cordoned off into segregated exhibitions which conveniently separate them off in false ways and create the idioms that keep the medium from moving on.  However, we don’t know that the decision in this instance was Pace’s.  It could very well have been Nicolai’s, which points to a much larger problem of easily assimilable self-editing.

‘Formal’ has transfigured into a pejorative term when used to describe an art work today.  Amidst the proliferation of social art,  post-conceptual research projects, identity politic art, and general obsessions with trying to communicate meaning to the viewer, a purely ‘formal’ art work is often perceived as a relic interest of the past.  Traditionally speaking, formal art is work which adheres exclusively to the qualities of line, shape, color, and other fundamental aesthetic principles.  But the term has come to be used today colloquially and liberally, often as a catchall that envelopes any object that isn’t subsumed under the determination of intellectual discourse.  Since the object persists, so does reflection, which inherently articulates form as well as categorical distinctions.  A general tendency to use catchall terms like ‘formal’ to describe an art object becomes meaningless since it is so obvious – of course an art object is formal, and of course reflection upon an object formalizes it.  The ubiquity of the term when paired with its cryptic significance and truncated development suggests that we are operating on autopilot, in an unconscious dream-state of art production.  My position is that the emergence of this condescending ‘formal‘ fingerwagging is symptomatic of an artworld that suffers from a post-conceptual aporia.  The formal system’s camp of conceptual art was supposed to overcome material shortcomings and clarify material processes by getting closer to a positive determination of mind.  In short, by making the physical world more consciously controlled.  If the formal overcoming ‘failed’, its  residue persists in a vulgar determination of collective mind which has made the given art material subservient to its own predictable support for questionable social worldviews.  The result is a field of art that, instead of creating open formal systems, starts with a top-down model of making – an idea is executed as literally as possible, or “deduced”, as Clement Greenberg (perhaps incorrectly) described minimalist art.  Moreover, the ‘formal’ insult indicates an expectation for art viewing to constitute an intellectually meaningful experience, and with understated reason; intellectual reflection apparently exists nowhere else and the expectation for meaning exclusively within art belies a broader desperation that leaves its mark on the compromised art object.  Desperate swipes at pre-determining ‘meaning’ inherently rely on the given set of vulgar worldviews and standardized social commentaries available.  Much art today is an arbitrary artifact to confirm preset ideals and forge pitiable statements.  This pervasive formula appears more similar to representational work than experimental open systems.  And representation is always formal.

So what is formal, when the term is nearly meaningless and absolutely vague today?  I am taking the position that line, shape, and color are limited and somewhat pastiche definers of formalism in an art world that necessarily grapples with an ever-expanding field of industrial material and transfigured psychologies as a result.  In this sense, line, shape, color, etc., may need to become more ‘mobile’ and adaptable to new material.  Historically, reductional experiments in line, shape, and color were considered aesthetically progressive because they clarified and more consciously directed standardized notions of bourgeois art into a more modern and socialist world by constructing ideal material forms from the ground up (e.g. Russian Constructivism).  Formal meant staying true to the historically given rules of art and explicating them.  However, the industrialized world presented a plethora of new, alien forms.  Theodor Adorno explains his philosophy of how best to deal with new and old material in one sentence, “The recognition of frontiers implies the possibility of crossing them”[1].  The exhaustion of a dominant social order transforming into a new one has historically called for such reconstructions, which are often largely defined by aesthetics.  But when all notions of emancipatory politics evaporate, highly formal art does the same.  This dilemma is where Adorno found himself in postwar music. He set himself the task of devising a new musical language more in step with the time by incorporating new material without abandoning all previous compositional developments.  Like constructivism, Adorno thought it would be repressively nostalgic if composers and experimental musicians could not utilize new materials.  ‘Material’ in this sense means new electronics for example, but also the conceptual, process-based ‘material’ of Fluxus experimentations.   Not surprisingly, Adorno’s attempts at formalizing post-war artistic material, in order to make sense of the new world were never seriously heeded.  What Adorno saw as a vice in the formal “loss of tension”, composers like LaMonte Young and John Cage perceived as a freedom in the attempt at an Orientalized music of tranquil Eastern Mysticism.

Today, however, conceptual art’s “deskilling” has become yet another material in the toolbox with line, color, shape, and more.  Vain attempts at liquidating art into the everyday has only expanded the formal tools available to artists.  Add to the insufficient tools of line, color, & shape things like intervention, appropriation, and cultural research and the toolbox bloats with potential.  ’Formal’ can extend to cover all of these tools (and many more unnamed) and raise each to a more materially generative level.  If line, shape, and color are somewhat parodies of formal art, then things like interventions, appropriation, and research are generally postulated in similarly pastiche terms as anti-formal.  Paradoxically, even though the artist has a diverse bag of tools at his/her disposal, the utilization of them is more repressed than ever.  Artistic originality today often consists of picking a tool (again, material or conceptual) and preserving its one-dimensional function instead of wielding it.  This gives art a sober functionality.  A defense of this may be that artists picking a tool and exploiting it are understanding why it was needed in the first place.  This seems accurate, but also boring, scholarly, and often ineffective.   The artist-as-researcher has turned into a laconic excuse to romanticize history, while also providing a considerable amount of didactic and compromised social commentary.   When art meets intellectual research or theory the result is often a predictable closed system, in that it relies on established or canonized norms of social, political, and historical projections.   Both ‘chance’ experimentations and research methods, which are supposed to glean artifacts from a collective, historical unconscious, often exploit their unique empiricism for predetermined social commentary and lamentable attempts at meaning.  End results merely support canned tropes, ranging from environmentalism to modernist ‘critique’ to consumerist culture and far too many other cliches of pseudo-political thought.  In this sense, artistic exploration isn’t entirely to blame, but rather the naturalization of a portfolio of ideas which have run artists into the ground.

There is a great deal of art that makes futile attempts to break free from this pitiable discourse, like the ‘unmonumental’ vein, which at best is a mere exploration of material through formalized experimentation that portrays something entirely new and alien out of the everyday.  However, there is always the critic who situates the work theoretically as a predictable critique of consumer culture, while the artist deceptively feels that they are transcending the limits of material.  Realistic limits of surrounding discourse have not been recognized.  Limits are unconsciously perceived, rather than identified.  But even the most dubious sense of limitations and boundaries already implies that there is a hidden form to what appears to be, and is kept within, an infantile state of artistic disintegration.   An ‘unmonumental’-style artist, for example, will never overcome their repetition of formulaic and stylized material implementations because its surrounding ‘theory’ has kept it tethered to the ground in order to affirm a crude reality.   Both are defeatist in nature.  In this case it is the ‘critique’ of consumer culture and bricolage-style philosophy that keeps the artist exclusively utilizing kitschy materials, even when the proliferation of industrial material (including service industry and other abstract material) points beyond its own limitations.  Theory and criticism in this implementation is a manner of catalyzing materialist taboos.

Nevertheless, research-based discourse and unmonumental-style work is not to be dispensed with, as it represents an unfulfilled project of ultimate transparency.  The artist-as-researcher’s emergence over the past half a century is index of a need to make sense of the new culture industry.  This need is the need for conscious understanding of material culture as a way of not mindlessly perpetuating itself.  A responsible, if failing project in that it often reverts to affirming particulars of cultural development in their appearances, which of course is exactly one function of the culture industry.  But they fail only insofar as critical reception (including widespread passive viewing) looks to art in general as a haven or ‘antidote’ instead of identifying the artworks as social problems presented in their most aggressively clarified form.  When Adorno says “all art is always also ideology” he means it literally.  Artists don’t eradicate ideology but perpetuate it in purer, conscious form.

Limitations may be recognized in the assessment of transformed or untransformed ‘needs‘ through the centuries.  A major problem today is the slippage from identifying how earnest artistic experiments (no matter how ‘ironic’ they appear) are acute indexes of unconscious social needs, into a rubric of thought that packages those experiments according to preset and automated ideologies and pseudo-theories.  Unmonumental-style work, for example, could be read in numerous ways, not the least of which is a preordained futile struggle to regain or articulate a lost autonomy amidst a social situation that perpetually alienates.  But any whiff of ‘autonomy’ is immediately extinguished.  That a broad variety of differing practices emerges simultaneously signals a widespread but tacit social desperation with innumerable needs that are not being met or even identified.  Artistic discourse, as a domain that raises unconscious impulses to the level of transparent comprehension, can break down taboo-barriers, if only in its immediate mediums and segregated sphere.  After all, art cannot do everything, nor should it.  A broad spectrum of artistic practices – as acute analog of divisions of labor –  can be pitted against one another only in the domain of art, thereby breaking the spell of instrumentalized work, or at least clarifying its reasons for comportment. In short, art can generate contradictions that are not permitted in elsewhere.  Perhaps now, where immaterial coexists with material, deskilling coexists with skill, sloppyness coexists with austerity, and so on and so on, the time is finally ripe to articulate latent tensions by accepting the broader palette instead of repressing it.  Acceptance would mean raising each to their highest level of tension and therein overturn cliche meaning.

photo by Mary Ann Caws

CM: Can you start off by defining the manifesto? What are their fundamental principles and underlying structures? When did they come into use and to serve what ends?

MC: It stems from the word “manus“, which means “hand” in Latin, and also means “bearing witness”. The tone is usually very loud and very anti-everything that was there before, and everything around it. The perfect manifesto, to me, would be like a momentary flash, or sound bite—not spread out in prose. I write a lot about how the aphoristic style is itself  a manifesto. It’s like a proverb but an inner statement that is tense and small, getting across its message immediately. The aphorism is consumable in one quick moment.

Some manifestos can be stretched-out in prose, and long too. But they work with one idea and still manage to create that kind of momentary flash. So the manifesto is really shouting for what it believes in. I think the point of the manifesto is to bear witness to something believed.  It’s like a credo. It says, “I want to bear witness to what I believe, and screw what you believe!”  It opposes everything that is irrelevant to  what “I” believe. You can’t make or perform a manifesto if it seems that no one is against you. There is no manifesto in the desert. Yet, on the other hand, the “I” quality of the manifesto gets to be a “we” through those who believe it. After all, the “I” does always want to be a “we,” even if secretly. The exception is the spoof on manifestos that Frank O’Hara created in his “Personism,” a made-up movement, based on the single personality.

CM: So would you say that manifestos are trying to forge their own enemies?

MC: Very often. If we think back to James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Ten O’clock“, it worked that way. And then he wrote The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. He makes it more interesting then setting up straw men: he makes the Other into someone opposing him. I think it is very funny and he does it brilliantly.

CM: One other thing that I noticed from manifestos is that the “Other” they create is, in part, a facet of themselves. The manifesto is trying to supersede from its prior moment, like from Futurism to Dadaism, or to Surrealism for example. A lot of the people who were writing these new manifestos were actually part of the earlier movements that they write against.

MC: Yes, they have the attitude that says, “I know this book or movement because I’ve been there, so lets do something else.” Its the sensibility of saying “down with the pastness.” The 1909 Futurist Manifesto says “Down with Venice!” “Down with pastness!” “Down with everything that’s slow!” and Tzara’s Dada shout: “Let’s scream and let’s be like a volcano and rush down the slopes, as opposed to the chocolate in the veins of all men!”

Jean Tinguely

CM: But do you think that these manifestos are trying to speak to a greater whole, an international phenomenon?

MC: They would like to. There are some problems and contradictions, however. For example, the Surrealist manifesto says both things. It says, “Let’s not distribute this forbidden bread, let’s not distribute this thing that we are doing, to the sparrows.” But its also saying lets’ all take part in our ambitions. It becomes both elitist and selective. But I think this is also the joy of manifestos. This is opposed to a political program, where you do not want a lot of contradiction.

CM: So you would say that there is a self-conscious act of creating contradictory statements or calls?

MC: Absolutely. The manifesto is a performance. And it performs verbally or visually, or both. It creates the stage for its performance, whether there is anybody out there or not. All manifestos, to me, are meta-manifestos: they are manifesting the performance of their manifestos. A manifesto could also be a non-performance, a manifesto that doesn’t happen. For example, Arakawa and Madeline Gins manifested something called Reversible Destiny: they decided that they were not going to die. All their work for the last ten years has been about that. Well, Arakawa just died. So we all went to the Guggenheim to celebrate Arakawa while he was in the hospital and he died right after that. But the occasion was celebrating the belief–which of course has no relation to truth–of being able to avoid death.

CM: So are manifestos essentially always rhetorical, speaking something that does not or will not always be true?

MC: Rhetoric sounds so negative, it sounds like it is something not real. So a kind of rhetorical statement that would not be real is seen in Reversible Destiny. It becomes a possible impossibility, in a kind of philosophically Wittgensteinian way. It is taking rhetoric not as a negative term, but something that does and undoes and performs itself, even if it is never a “real” performance.

CM: In your book you say, “the manifesto makes an art of excess.” In the interview you contrast the word “excess” to “conservative forms” of artistic creations. What do you mean by the word “excess” here?

MC: I think that everything about excess is good. Everything about manifestos is loud, they consume lots of energy and are energizing in their “too-muchness.” The non-excess is very bourgeois in its ideology of moderation—it has become a platitude. The Surrealists and manifestos in general want to be too much to handle. I declare that I am bigger and better than you! It becomes very macho. This is why the feminist manifesto is interesting in this respect. But one I don’t include in my anthology of Manifestos is Valery Solanas’ The Scum Manifesto—the woman who shot Warhol—because it seems to be on the side of politics and not on the side of manifesting literary devices.

CM: In the an interview you had with Curtis Fox, you also talked about how manifestos are easily incorporated into advertising slogans. It seems to me that the word excess immediately draws an association to the notion of surplus value. Could it be that manifestos are easily subsumed into the logic of creating surplus value because of their emphasis on excess?

MC: They are very much like an ad. They basically yell “BUY this!,” or “BUY what we believe in!”. It is a credo done large, everything is very big about manifestos. A question I often try to address is “could you have a whispering manifesto?” It doesn’t seem to make lots of sense. But I do understand that if you want to have an art of silence, an art of non-excess, a sort of humility manifesto, what would that be? We are more modest than you? A whispering manifesto would be inaudible; nobody would hear it.

CM: But perhaps with the whole history of the loudness in manifestos, the “silence” of the whispering manifesto could be “deafening,” as the phrase goes. I wonder if it would be possible to reach the same kind of effects through a whispering manifesto.

MC: John Cage’s Bang Fist, and the book on Silence are in fact manifestos on silence. But not everyone could have such an immense impact through such style as Cage’s approach.

CM: Thinking about how a whisper manifesto could be considered a non-manifesto, I noticed some of the stuff you picked in the book might not be traditionally understood as manifestos. For instance, you included the Introduction to Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Grey. Do you think Wilde himself would have considered that piece a manifesto, or do you consider this your own interpretation?

MC: It’s my interpretation. But I think he would have liked it read as a manifesto. He liked what was loud and vivid, like the manifesto style. The one I liked was Whistler’s “Ten O’clock.” It is also deeply anti-political. It basically says, “I don’t want anything to do with the ‘real’ world.” Whistler himself lied about everything. For example, he was an American but said he was born in Russia.  He would say, “If I say it, then it is the truth. This work completely fulfills my idea of a manifesto.

Andre Breton

CM:  It seems to follow then that Whistler emphatically stated that his literary manifesto is not tantamount to a political manifesto. Could you please elucidate on the differences of the two—i.e., their differences in technique, form and content, means and ends, etc.? Also, in what ways are they related?

MC: I do not think they are related—literary manifestos are about the aesthetic. The manifesto wants to be about the current moment, but not the worldly moment. Political manifestos seem to me much more simplistic, much less interesting. They are obvious, whereas the literary manifesto is not as obvious—it draws you in by being so damn intelligent.  Political manifestos are not as complex because they are usually making a point, trying to construct a program. I do not think a manifesto is a program; the manifesto is a statement. On the aesthetic side, though, I think the architectural manifestos are about building real things from the mind into the world. So they do both, the aesthetic thing and the program thing.

CM: So would you say that all manifestos are in some sense dissenting against the status quo, or trying to move beyond it?

MC: Yes, all are. They say, “Look, this is new! I’m going to shout it out, and join me if you believe it!” The manifesto is in general fast and loud.  It is not trying to repeat what we have always believed—the manifesto is always new.

CM: By doing this, though, it seems that manifestos are trying to build upon an already existing narrative in order to transform it, thus creating something “new.” But they are not always moving on a linear track.

MC: No, not linear. They were very often written simultaneously and disconnectedly from the manifestos that preceded them. You cannot divorce what you know from what you are reading or what you are seeing.  So manifestos are about style, their own style of reading and seeing and being.

CM: Is there a strong relationship to the avant-garde and manifestos; are manifestos their trademark or product, so to speak?

MC: The manifesto always thinks itself as avant-garde. There can also be an arrière-garde [a manifesto that seems to be treading backwards]. Whistler’s “Ten O’clock” is pretty arrière-garde, since everybody was doing something seemingly more adventurous than what he was doing by refusing the “real” world. He was saying, “lets let life be there and I am doing what I am doing over here.” That’s already in a sense arrière-garde, and certainly not avant-garde, so I think the relationship is whatever it chooses itself to be.

The Death of the Grave Digger

CM: I find the notion of the arrière-garde very interesting. Despite the fact that manifestos have a kind of “prophetic” vision, you claim in your book that they are “haunted by nostalgia, [and] they have the feeling of longing rather than constructing, like a post-manifesto moment in a too-lateness.” What is the cause of such conflicting sentiments? Could it be that manifestos are a desperate attempt to make up for the failed workers’ revolutions of 1848 and 1917, for example, by trying to “keep culture moving,” as Clement Greenberg put it?

MC: I cannot imagine how literary manifestos compensate for anything in the political world. I don’t think they do, I don’t think they want to, that’s not the way it works. But keeping culture moving seems to me using the same tradition: you re-use it, you alter it, and that longing, every time you do feel that longing its prompted by looking at the future and thinking about the past and the future together. But the manifesto in general seems to me to be about the present, even though looking forward means you are looking back too. I think that the question is always “what can we change?,” so that nostalgia for the time we used to be able to change things is what you feel longing for. It’s very much not about politics.

CM: It seems that there was a kind of recognition that artistic and literary movements were bound up with the political temper of the times, so I do not think that literary manifestos were necessarily trying to create a “political program”, as you call it, but creating a kind of aesthetic intervention that may have indirect political implications. I was struck by the sense of longing or too-lateness in manifestos because many of the direct revolutionary political events that could have seized the movement of history failed, effecting the mindsets of the revolutionary manifesto writers such as the Surrealists. From their vantage point of experiencing the aftermath of WWI, the source of their longing could have been in the belief that the 20th century was in decline, experiencing a regressive period. In what ways can our literary manifestos push culture and society or encapsulate some kind of utopian vision?

MC: We can live here, but we cannot live there, in Utopia. The thing Breton always said that Surrealism changed both life and human nature. It would change life and human nature and the way things are. Literary manifestos are always about changing the way things are and the way we read them. Thus it goes past the political into, as you say, the utopian: another place we can live and dwell, be and think.

CM: So the point is to create some contemplative or imaginary state of some utopian future through recognition of the present? It seems that if the literary manifestos are not political in any way, they are at least trying to fish out where the utopian potentials of the present reside.

MC: Yes, it is sort of the possibility of the impossible through aesthetic means. This is what could be. That’s the same as political programs, but it doesn’t talk about health care and all that, it talks about humans looking around them beyond the present.

CM: I actually want to talk more about the possibility of the impossible. I think this could also be linked to the utopian aspirations of some manifestos. As you know, the definition of utopia is that it is not here; it is in the imagination, always on the horizon line. Utopia becomes something than that is unreachable, not able to be grasped by the present, proving it as an “impossible” world. Leszek Kolakowski even called utopian visions a “pathology” of a sort. But at the same time, we can imagine it, which is real in its own right. Marx kind of speaks to this when he wrote, “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve.” By trying to draw out new ways of seeing, it would in turn create new ways of acting and new forms of social relationships and social productions, that to some extent, is political in nature.

MC: That’s why Aragon left the Surrealist movement for the Communist Party. Originally, after it was La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution), their journal became Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. (“Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution”) But there was a split between the Marxist view of the world and the Trotsky view, and Breton was definitely on the side of Trotsky, even writing a manifesto with him. A crucial circumstance was Aragon’s poem called “Le Front rouge,” about violence against the bourgeois consumers sitting outside the cafes sipping drinks with their straws. The French government condemned him and his poem. Then Breton protested that it was “a poem,’ and not a statement in the real world.  But Aragon responded, that it was a real statement, a political one, and not just concerned with the world of poetry.  The entire argument clarifies the difference between political and aesthetic manifestos.

Breton himself tried to join the party, and he was assigned to a cell of gas workers but it did not work out. There was absolutely no communication between him and his way of thinking and the gas workers in the cell. And, when he returned to France having spent the war years in the United States, he seemed to be more on the way to the mystical than the political.

Chris Burden

CM: You mentioned earlier the total transformation that manifestos could bring about like ways of seeing, ways of creating, ways of being, and so on. In some sense, the Communist Manifesto was itself calling for a total revolution in mankind, a revolution that you would imagine would open up all different kinds of pathways for ways of seeing and creating, etc. Is this akin to the kind of transformations literary manifestos were looking for?

MC: Breton did not think the manifesto of communism went far enough; he did not think it would not change human nature. This is what motivated him to go back to poetry.

CM: Upon reflecting on this rich history of Surrealism, it got me thinking of manifestos in our day in age. What would you consider to be some manifestos produced today, whether written, performed, or both?

MC: Tino Sehgal’s work called This Progress at the Guggenheim that happened this year is a good example.

CM: You actually participated as a performer in that, right?

MC: Yes, I did. It was an interesting experience. It was certainly like a contemporary manifesto; it was a manifesto as a performance.  For example, I went to Chicago for an art historians meeting (the College Art Association’s annual conference), and there were three talks about Tino Sehgal. There were not many talks about anyone else really. So I ask, “why is it that in a certain moment, everyone wants to talk about one thing that is going on now?” –The issue of this work all of a sudden spontaneously rose up like a flash. What was fascinating about it is that we talked to people, but there could be no trace: there could be no notes, no recording, no camera. It was like a manifesto of something invisible and its import was just that.

CM: Would you consider this as another example of a whisper manifesto?

MC: Yes, for sure. And to participate in it was very different from being a visitor. I of course played at being a visitor too, we all did. The fact was that  the experience of walking up the seven levels of the Guggenheim’s ramps, with no art on the walls to look at, just conversation, changed every time. It  was never the same experience twice. The control of the whole situation was fascinating too, and the amount of freedom we had as participants in the situation: it was situation art, but with a difference.

CM: I hear it was very controlled for the performers.

MC: At the top of the Guggenheim, where I participated, it was both controlled and uncontrolled. There were a lot of things we had to do and be trained in. If you were a Surrealist participating in a Surrealist manifesto, you would have to obey the certain strictures that Breton as the leader set-up. So it was very much like that, controlled by Tino. But conversely, at the top we had the liberty to talk about anything we wanted to, so that was not controlled. It was the form of the performance that was controlled. So when people agreed to enter into the circuit of the performance, it seemed a very energizing process. It pulled people in, and got them to talk and get into conversations that are normally non-existent.  When in ordinary life will you be talking to strangers in this form? Bringing together such a collective endeavor in this manner felt very much like a manifesto to me.
CM: Thinking of what Sehgal is doing, what do you think are some of the other most imperative issues for cultural actors to tackle?

MC: I think to see exactly where one stands, as well as where “we” stand in the world today. And they should be very clear about what they believe about it. So I would stand with Charles Bernstein and the others who performed during the Manifesto Celebration at MOMA, manifesting about the manifesto. We believe that different people around the world should read works around the world.  Now that’s a manifesto.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Gradute Center of the City University of New York, recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty, and Rockefeller fellowships, past president of the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism, the Academy of Literary Studies, and has served on many editorial boards and national committees. She is the author of numerous volumes on art and literature, including The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter; Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar; Robert Motherwell with Pen and Brush; Virgina Woolf; Marcel Proust; To the Boathouse: A Memoir; Pablo Picasso; Henry James; Surprised in Translation; Salvidor Dali; and Provencal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France. She is the editor of Surrealist Painters and Poets; Surrealist Love Poems; Surrealism; the Harper Collins World Reader; and the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She lives in New York with her Husband, Dr. Boyce Bennett. <www.maryanncaws.com>

For some reason it is common among films portraying genius to aestheticize their intellectual process by showing the protagonist writing on glass, mirror, or other reflective surfaces.  In Good Will Hunting the film opens with the solitary genius writing abstract mathematical formulae on mirror, with few other objects in sight.  A man and his mind, alone in a room.  Oh wait, but also an obscure writing utensil that one would need to go far out of their way to procure.  A Beautiful Mind has a similar scene, where the main character, a sociopathic math genius, writes his ideas on transparent glass.  A plethora of pi glyphs and some mundane squares, punctuated by some other recognizable shapes like triangles and greater-than or less-than symbols writ in white mar the view of his dormitory window.  Apparently geniuses are too pure for paper.

from A Beautiful Mind

Why this silly trope?  Is it a little-known fact that geniuses need to write on reflective surfaces in order to function properly?  Or do geniuses just like looking at themselves while they work?  Of course, there is little to prove that any sort of ‘genius‘, mathematical or not, undergoes this humorous process of writing on glass or mirror.  Genius is boiled down to its currently exclusive value and only understandable trait: eccentricity.   Silly, in fact, could be substituted with ‘vain’.  One thing that Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind accomplish is a fashionizing, or perhaps fetishizing, of intellectualism.   Of course, uncritically succumbing to an aesthetic trend in order to represent a predetermined ideal puts the aestheticization of intellectualism in an anti-intellectual category that becomes pure fashion.

The impracticality of writing in this fashion positions the idea of ‘genius’ as something which is beyond pure pragmatism.  ’Alone, with a reflective surface to write on’ seems almost funny, like a humorous take on ‘self reflection’.  Self reflection is portrayed as silly pastiche because the very notion of ‘reflection‘ has lost all meaning and activity.  But the stakes are not set to such capriciousness.  Rather, these films pose a dire earnestness.  Romanticizing intellectual reflection and liquidating it into the culture industry is a last ditch attempt at saving it from receding into history, while also obscuring it from true understanding and hoarding it away from active implementation.  Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the TV series Breaking Bad, where the art direction repeatedly calls for shots underneath glass surfaces.  Although the Nobel Prize-winning-chemist-turned-meth-making-prodigy never explicitly writes on a reflective surface, all objects are turned to glass, so that when Walter White does something brilliantly ‘scientific’ we see his face through the object.  No activity, no process is left opaque.  Everything is rendered transparent.

Transparency is the defining characteristic.  It is also a crucially modern one.  The modern obsession with capturing all conscious and unconscious action through camera, and subjecting it to aesthetic reflection is an extension of Enlightenment progress, which aims to leave no stone unturned, even abstract psychological stones.  Certainly, this new method for interrogating the hidden, surreal mundane is what Benjamin appreciated about film.  Similarly, Walter Benjamin dialectically critiqued the use of glass in modern architecture as a symptom of a society wherein everything could be viewed more clearly.  On the one hand, there is a complete obliteration of privacy, while on the other, this attempt at making society transparent was a highly fraught step towards socialism.  The common recurrence of writing on glass plays its part in this transparency of thought, in the most obscure way possible.  For example, we the viewers do not understand the mathematics behind the aesthetic, and the whole image turns ‘scientistic‘ from out of the scientific.  Visages like the ones in A Beautiful Mind, for example, become distorted ghosts of enlightenment motion towards global socialism.  Enlightenment attempts at transparency of thought processes are treated through a vulgar parody of the idea, presented as matter-of-factly and as (humorously) seriously as possible.  More importantly, the collective, nearly global movement of science, architecture, and philosophy, which all seemed to engage in a collaborative empiricism is reduced to a single individual, a shaman-type character who the viewer  assumes to be a ‘genius’ but is never given any sort of reasonable information to support the assumption.  Scientific, reasonable genius is twisted into a cult of personality.

But transparency is still the paradigm.  Breaking Bad makes considerable efforts to explain to the viewer the chemistry behind the criminal shenanigans.  It even goes so far as to incorporate Periodic Table of Element symbols, which fly by faster than the mind can perceive them in the opening credits like a scientistic spectacle.  Breaking Bad is equal parts scientific pedagogy and ideological entertainment.  Both elements are unified in an artificial synthesis in order to make a statement: science and entertainment are now one.  Rumors of Futurama’s new season culminating in a real mathematical proof cement this notion.   That Walter White embodies the apotheosis of traditional science only heightens the social statement that is squarely aimed at saying that Capitalism has no room for empirical science unless it can be instrumentalized.  And this is not merely fiction, which should be evident to anyone who has watched a Ted Talk.  Breaking Bad is symptom of this vulgar tendency in its empirical enforcement of cultural values, while also making this tendency more transparent since it is sited in the sphere of artistic drama.

Gregory House by his special differential diagnosis board in his office

Along the same lines as Breaking Bad is House, M.D.  Another television genius with master plans that ultimately show how plan-less our social situation really is.  The lack of master-plans in society at large is sublimated to the level of inexplicable genius with plans that cannot be understood upon watching, and that are occasionally nearly heightened to the level of political leadership.  The authoritative leadership of Gregory House is a compensation for a general lack of leadership and direction.  The aesthetic abstraction in these dramas are artifacts of the inability to foster a more consciously directed reality.  Viewers watch, subconsciously mezmerized by futile attempts to explain the reasoning behind decisions and the science behind actions.  Most importantly here, House works in a glass office!  The symbolism of transparency has yet again been put in place.  Everyone can view his process of writing on a vertically positioned reflective surface (plastic, with marker), though it curiously does little good, as the true genius is kept concealed; the rational answers to real problems are still represented as an unconscious magic that spontaneously arises. House’s ruse of practicality fits the mise-en-scene quite well.  All of his friends, patients, and acquaintances are subjected to scientific analysis.  Intellectual analysis is shown in its true form through a distorted entertainment prism as the obliteration of surface appearances through the uncovering of unconscious behavior.  Intellectualism is also portrayed as anti-humanist at times, which is positive in its inveterate implications that  we can move beyond standard cliches of humanity, and negative in its refusal to generatively socialize.  It is not surprising that these antiquated notions are perhaps exclusively embodied in a misanthropic loner.  The decay of reason has been observed and celebrated for decades now, and its emergence in recent television is perhaps more critical than in the Hollywood films of A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting, for example.

Bret Schneider

THE AESTHETIC experience of drone music is not just aesthetically defined, but socially and historically located. The significance of this location is especially intriguing when concealed in a music legacy that aims exclusively at the purely metaphysical presentation of sound – a music intent upon expelling all that is foreign to the aesthetic experience while underscoring a formal, perceptual physicality. As such, it is difficult to review an instance of drone music in isolation from either the widespread classification of the genre that increasingly defines the music listening experience or drone music’s historically accumulated predilection for spatial sound masses over temporal themes. The difficulty is further compounded by the lack of a definitive denotation of the term “drone” itself, which has come to be used as a catch-all for everything that loosely resembles any of drone’s preceding musical forms. Moreover, the motivations behind recent standardizations of drone music contrast sharply with the original impetus of its project, which in the 1960s aimed for the limits of listening.

LaMonte Young @ The Dream House

The artificial grafting of a music aesthetic contextually relevant in the 1960s onto the current social situation results in a lapsed music production based on a nostalgia which can, at best, only accidentally evoke its original impulses and aspirations. Recent drone music does not stand alone in barely nudging along forms of music that are already standardized. It is a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon of repeating established norms because society has not grasped its history (even as it obsesses over it). Drone music intends to take seriously its own history, but fails in its intent by fixating on preservation, as though it could provide a museum-like envelope of the past. Through its dream of solidarity and identification with the original ideals of the form, recent drone music preserves the aesthetics of its forebearers while also exposing ideologies behind the aesthetic forms more starkly. Early minimalist drone music utilized accepted music aesthetics by exploring tonal possibilities latent in preceding historical forms, but only in order to expand the possibilities of what could be considered music. What concerns drone music artists and their audiences are chiefly aesthetic considerations, and most of what we perceive to be new in recent drone music is actually latent in earlier forms. The question is why those possibilities are manifesting now.

Drone music is expressly inspired by one branch of minimalist music from the 1960s, epitomized by La Monte Young’s ensemble, The Theater of Eternal Music, which included, among others, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, a considerable source of mainstream influence. The Theater of Eternal Music were the first to implement the exclusive use of long sustained tones that is so prevalent in much of today’s music. But what is particularly fascinating about La Monte Young’s music, listening to it forty years later, is not some sort of “ontological” or “eternal” condition of sound, nor its idealized timbral qualities, but rather its fleeting attempts at trying to capture those ideals materially, with the technology and techniques then available. Though it may not have been his intent at the time, Young was most successful not in preserving sound itself, but in capturing the Sisyphean task of trying to preserve sound. The now archaic sine waves in Young’s Dream House display their artifice in ways they may not have done forty years ago. Recent drone music artists are in some ways repeating Young’s attempt to capture eternal dimensions of sound without regard for the fleeting nature of the physical and technical means they employ to do so. The result is that by certain techniques they gloss over the very means on which they depend, abandoning the attempt to alter the means themselves, and only exercising them. Baudelaire’s formula of the modernist aesthetic—that it captures the still and eternal through the fleeting nature of industrialism—is evident in Dream House: Sine wave generators, now comically dated, jeopardize any romance of an eternal aesthetic, and instead point towards the tension between the hope for eternal sound and the material means by which those hopes might be realized.

LaMonte Young clip

Today, drone artists attempt to display the transient qualities emanating from delay, reverb, distortion, and other sonic effects, but this is not the primary issue at hand, critically speaking. The problem is that a lack of clarity as to the intent of such attempts translates, in effect, into a reanimation of drone music’s initial romanticism, but in a more opaque and problematic form. The intentions of contemporary drone music remain unclear in ways La Monte Young’s music was not, and most drone music criticism today does little to problematize the aesthetic impasse. An ideological fixation on the physical, formal characteristics of sound has overridden critical attention to the question of what can constitute music material—a question taken up by, for instance, the work of La Monte Young, John Cage, and the Fluxus artists. Ironically, this trend in criticism traces its origin to these very artists who explored the limits of the materiality of music.

When Frances Morgan, in Frieze magazine’s May 2009 review of critically acclaimed Sunn O)))’s doom-drone album Monoliths & Dimensions, proclaims that Sunn O))) should focus on the timbral properties of the sound, as opposed to the self-referential social position of Sunn O))) within art history, the original intentions of minimalism are as misunderstood as they are preserved.[1] Morgan’s advice seeks to replace one common theme, a historical situating, with another, the tonal dogma of minimal music. This misunderstands how both were necessary for La Monte Young, as his extremely original project would never have arisen were it not for an awareness of his own position within music history. In Young, the aesthetic and the historical character are intertwined completely. The timbral characteristics of Eternal Music’s compositions are not the only dimensions of their art. The timbral, tonal, physical characteristics were only relevant insofar as they could actually combine to stretch the possibility for what music could be, in light of what it had been. Focusing solely on the timbral properties is an attempt to deflect attention away from the social conditions to which Young’s aesthetic reacted. Sunn O))) is actually quite successful in heightening the discrepancies between material and romantic fantasy, but the reception in Frieze is more interested in the romance of the manifestation as such, not a reflection on why or how it manifests.

Sunn0)))) – Black One – It Took The Night To Believe (clip)

Music criticism in general has also failed to adequately grasp the resurgent character of contemporary drone minimalism, arguing instead that it has always existed, uninterrupted. This overlooks the question of what sets 1960s-style drone minimalism apart from its recent implementations. First, there is the obvious digression of music into an area motivated by technological and product-based advancement. An artist today who would perform a music composition like Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, in which the pianist offers the piano a bale of hay to eat and a bucket of water to drink, is likely to be ignored in favor of a technologically advanced multi-channel set from artists like Ryoji Ikeda or Robert Henke, for example, or the romantically charged guitar compositions of Sunn O)))—a group, after all, that takes its name from a power amp. It is nearly impossible for musical experimentation to escape the net of new music templates and technologies and, judging from recent drone implementations, there is little desire to even try it. A renewed interest in drone music now, at precisely the point where music gear commodities swallow the maker, is curious, specifically because drone music does not need to rely on advanced technology—witness Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, for example, or his Island Song, in which he drives around an island on a motorcycle harmonizing his voice with its engine, an economy of aesthetics as elegant as it is complex. But most drone artists rely heavily on templated music production tools, be they guitars, effects, Ableton Live software, or hacked electronics. This dependency on generic means of production is one major distinction between early minimal music and its recent implementations, and keeps recent drone music in an aesthetic realm quarantined from an understanding of what drove the creation of minimalist music in the first place.

Oren Ambarchi (live)

To what extent are drone artists today doing something new, as opposed to merely perpetuating the past? As Barnett Newman would ask, are drone artists today actually creating, or are they simply making? Of course, at one level there is something different in recent drone music, but to what extent this is significant, or even recognized, remains unclear. A principal reason for this is that drone artists and their audiences are interested in romantic and, generally speaking, countercultural ideologies—an interest often expressed in the form of an interest in their own musical tradition that overlaps with performance. But uncritical nostalgia for the historically countercultural roots of drone music can hinder actual innovation by drone artists today.

Drone music in the 1960s was masterful in its use of the material artifacts of sound. This emanated from a conceptual attempt to extend the socially accepted physical conditions of making art. Resurfaced drone music today, even if it has very different and fragmented concerns, points in an altogether different direction through its genrification, its aesthetics bordering on ambient home listening, its mimicries of previous drone forms. The arrows no longer align against the membrane of what is acceptable, nor does the music strive to involve outside support and social institutions. What drone artists today have in common is their misalignment and tacit recycling of previous efforts. Even though the kernel of a music history is retained aesthetically, it is often too unconscious in its motivation to sell itself as an ideology. When drone-influenced music can neatly fit into expected formats, whether performed live or recorded for labels that cater to a certain aesthetic, the new becomes naturalized, so that a great distance now separates current motivations and concerns from those of the music that supposedly inspires it. Recent drone artists look to the past, but only to mechanically rearticulate its styles and forms. This evasion of the task of interrogating the inherent implications of past forms and the stultifying weight of their history threatens to make drone music into a mere craft. A good drone artist today would not create drone music at all.

Recent drone music often creates new work through mass-production techniques, and this possibly reveals how these products are bound up with far-flung ideals. This was always the case to an extent. La Monte Young was dependent upon sine wave generators that were quite advanced for the 1960s, but the generators were merely the tools used to advance the boundaries of the acceptable based on implications in the previous generation’s music. In its simplicity, it exaggerated the gap between the ideal of an eternal music and the alienating realm of the material. Young correctly identified the tonal tendency of western music and ran with it. In this way, his work negatively parallels the rebellion against tonality one sees in John Cage’s percussive experiments. For Young, previous musical forms and traditions were the foundation of innovation, rather than an obstacle to it.

Charlemagne Palestine

Like most drone music created now, the work of _i is characterized by a technologically based, individually expressive aesthetics, albeit one that is quite distinctive in its style. Its rearticulation of past drone and ambient music is centered upon tone field build-up with guitars looping, reverberating, stretching, ultimately reaching a crescendo, together with the predominant e-bow sound so favored in much drone music today, mainly because of its scintillating and uniquely melancholy affect—an affectation that was intentionally absent in the more extreme forms of minimalist music in the past. In performance, _i has sound waves fill the room and reverberate, performing a wistful melancholy through distended melody. These repeat in undulations until swallowed by a field recording of what sounds like branches being stepped on, a surprisingly common motif in experimental music that can be heard, for instance, in the work of Mountains, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Michael Vallera, among others.

Similar to _i’s work, a lot of the drone waves created by recent artists are affectively wistful. Adam Menzies, the man behind _i, says he likes sad music. Likewise with Michael Vallera. This is a new development in drone music and its cousin genres; not so long ago, Menzies cultivated rave music filled with euphoric dancing, which he took to be overtly “progressive” music, expressing an optimism that worked towards something full of social hope, promise, and complexity. This paradigm, which Menzies actively encouraged, proved fleeting; rave culture and the social hope vested therein have slipped away. As rave ran its course, Menzies changed with the times, allowing “emotional” music to gradually vaporize the previous form. Only the skeletal structure of rave music remains—minimal “clicks ’n’ cuts,” glitch music, and so on—all effects that would later be seen as progressive and cutting-edge in their own right as expressions of a “post-minimal” attitude.

But the emotive melancholy of Menzies’s most recent music marks not only a departure for him, but also a change that minimalist drone music has undergone in general. The rave culture of the 1990s was dynamic. It attracted artists globally, and found ways to stitch them all into a single fabric. From a production point of view, at least, it succeeded in fostering a massive consumption of recordings, as well as an efflorescence of music production hardware and software, a steadily growing economy still imbricated with cultural obsessions. This once-popular rave music was textural and complex, constantly unfolding and revealing different layers of sonic change within a larger machination. By contrast, the new drone music is slow, painstakingly so. Rather than in a dance and drug-induced fervor, people share the drone music experience in a dark daze, in isolation or private company. Sounds are arranged to suggest that electronic music hit a wall and exploded in slow motion. The beats blur into tonal confusion, creating a dense cloud of debris, a dystopic fog of sound.

Possibly the only catalyst for stylistic musical change is the attempted overcoming of previous failures. Today it is difficult to locate in music stores many CDs that were once the pinnacle of previous music genres. The music currently produced by drone artists, who were once passionately supportive of and involved with different music movements, are in many respects undergoing complete stylistic reversal. It is as if the emancipatory impulses of rave culture, ultimately unsatisfied and frustrated, drove the music scene to the diametrical opposite of rave: the plodding and apocalyptic ambience that characterizes much of experimental music today.

The music of _i, as one representative of cutting-edge experimental music, is not just void of all defining characteristics of rave culture and its subgenres that were so prominent in the 1990s, but represents its polar opposite. The densely layered mechanized beats, overt raw sounds of technology, happy drugs, laser light shows, monumental voids of space, and large collections of people acting out (or seeking to act out) some richly imagined drama of freedom—these have all vanished. Instead, recent drone artists cull from a different tool box: petit acoustic instrumentation; electronics taken to the point where they are scarcely recognizable; slowly evolving, glacial soundscapes; sad, wistful tones; mopey sub-bass drones; and small, local, and intimate social arenas where listeners retreat.

The melancholy affectation of much recent drone music stands in contrast not only to the 1990s, but also to similar music genres of previous decades. Originally, the impetus for drone was a non-deterministic experiment that explored what could happen if the inherent, inescapable tonal elements of sound were exaggerated beyond the expected scope of listening. Drone music, with its immense breadths of time and an unprecedented spatial density presented as simply and objectively as possible, completely distended the rules of what was possible at the time, and considerable outside economic and social institutions were necessary to bring that about; Dream House, like Walter De Maria’s long-term installation The Broken Kilometer, was made possible only by generous donations from art sponsors.

The current retreat into idealized sites of music presentation that so dominates contemporary music understands itself as a romantic throwback to 1960s projects like La Monte Young’s Dream House, itself a throwback to Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth. The return to minimalism, albeit in a different stylistic vein expressed in “clicks and cuts,” had already started in the late 1990s. A return to it in the form of La Monte Young-influenced psychedelic drone at this moment represents, at worst, a collective disappointment embraced through nostalgia and, at best, a profound but obscure disappointment preserved in its sublimation. Either way, the new “static” drone music is confounding—a thick, expressive, ambiguous fog in which, at the moment, one enjoys wallowing. But a question remains: To what extent can this rediscovered interest in drone music locate the ideological shadow that lurks behind the nostalgia? Can drone music identify the original artistic impetus beyond the aesthetic? Recent drone music seems to reach toward this goal—but, if achieved, perhaps drone music would no longer need to exist.

Although aesthetically pleasing, what is most fascinating about drone is not the music itself. Producers of this music are unavoidably ideological, even and especially in the face of the preceding history of minimal music. The aspiration is always to expel everything that is not pure and objective sound, especially ideology. But the aspiration to expel ideology is itself ideological. That music being made today is overtly influenced by the history of minimal music takes on added significance in light of the various interpretations of that history, as these serve to fragment and complicate the form. In light of art history, bound up as it is now with the increasingly unoriginal idea that there is nothing original to say, artists seem resigned to an imitation of the past, either ironically or in earnest. While this is very much an explicit and already noted phenomenon in the visual arts, recent experimental music takes a less ironic and more earnest approach to respecting its history and, indeed, to the act of artistic creation in general. However, the small world of experimental music perhaps works against itself insofar as it yields to a complacent acceptance of the past, devoid of critical interest in its legacy, even as aesthetic forms that link us to the past are embraced and endlessly celebrated. Irony often characterizes how we relate to each other socially. To this, music stands as a poignant counterpoint, a singular area where ideology nearly runs wild. Although it is commendable that the many fascinating aspects of minimalism are more fully explored in recent experimental music (as in the work of Greg Davis, Bernhard Günter, and Carsten Nicolai, to name a few), the social significance it once had has now become obscure. Minimalism allows itself to be driven into more fragmented situations cut off from a sense of possibility. It meanders along, creating monuments to earlier cultural territories without ever really understanding its historical place or its destination.

Bret Schneider

The double-disc Persian Electronic Music; Yesterday and Today 1966-2006 is yet another unearthing from the prolific archives of electronic music from the latter half of the 20th century.  As such, these excavations often interrogate the developments of avant-garde music as it developed within a particular nation.  This time around we are exposed to the unexpected experimental music of Iran which comes exclusively from the early tape experiments of Alireza Mashayekhi (1940-) on the ‘yesterday’  disc, and recent experiments from Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote on the latter ‘today’ disc.  In addition to long, intricately composed pieces, we are given a plethora of theoretical and historical writing, particularly from Mashayekhi in detailed descriptions of the works, and even an ambitious text titled ‘The Philosophy of Music’.

Hooman Asadi, from the University of Tehran, classifies Mashayekhi’s compositions as being in two styles: works that are not directly influenced by Persian music, and works that are directly influenced by Persian music.  That Mashayekhi had a choice to not make exclusively nationalist music already suggests that a certain modernization had reached Iran by the 60’s, if not earlier.  That Mashayekhi had a choice to deny global electronic music trends in favor of more traditional Iranian music implies that modernization was perhaps not fulfilling its role properly.  But all eight of Mashayekhi’s pieces on the first disc seem to deny easy categorization, as the dynamics of sound cover both demarcations, and he transforms the choice into aesthetic tension.  Similar to the Obscure Tape Music of Japan series, wherein the many composers create interweaving textures of traditional instrumentation and modernized technological advances in tape music, effects, etc., Mashayekhi’s works are all characterized by the abstraction of sounds – intentionally or not – usually associated with national and cultural identity.  Perhaps no other ‘medium’ than music or sound is capable of such crude Nationalism, and the forms music takes are always unavoidably political in nature, since Music is so convoluted with notions of progress and the intensive search for the new.  Once one musician has made the leap into politicized music, all others are forced, through popular expectation, to answer the call in some way, even if by not answering.  An imperative then forces itself upon all musicians and composers who don’t make nationalist music: Why are you not making Nationalist music?  The question is not without ramifications in the resulting forms.  Mashayekhi’s works acutely represent this unfortunate tension in a suitably abstracted and formalized way.

Like Toshi Ichiyanagi or Joji Juasa in Japan, Mashayekhi seems to pass an entire nation’s sonic identity through globally developed electronic filters, with the result sounding like traditional Iranian music has been passed through a prism.  Perhaps nowhere is this most clear than in Mithra, Op. 90, from 1982, where stringed instruments and other metallic sounding microtonal experiments are distended into a meandering drone, with the parabolic crescendo’s and decrescendo’s which characterized much of avant-garde electronic music in the 60’s and 70’s.  Mithra is also contemporaneous with Iannis Xenakis’s visit to Iran, when the Shah had invited him to compose a piece specifically for the occasion, resulting in his Nuits. However, it is unknown whether or not Mashayekhi had intersected Xenakis during his visit.

Alireza Mashayekhi

Abstracting auditory cultural barriers is not what Alireza Mashayekhi seems to be directly concerned with.  If he uses ‘traditional’ Iranian instrumentation, it is not because he intends to deconstruct it in some didactic manner, but rather because it is simply the available material.  Electronics, just as they were for the French musique-concrete composers and the Japanese, to name two other nations working at this edge, were a way of overcoming convention.   Mashayekhi is at times concerned with following in the directions of methodical, pseudo-serialist abstraction.  In East-West, Op. 45, from 1973, the dynamic is similar to Stockhausen’s tonal clusters, with long sweeping crescendo’s leading up to little percussive explosions and distorted bell sounds.  Distortion features prominently in East-West, where Iranian scales are barely distinguishable in the detritus of fuzz, ambiguous drone, harsh rises in pitch, sinusoid microsound clusters, radio warbles, and quick doppler-effect motion of both tonality and impulses not quite heightened to the level of percussion.  Dynamic motion and change is clearly the impetus in pieces like this and Panoptikum 70, Op. 27, wherein there are severe shifts from minimally quiescent drone to intense bursts of noise clusters.

Alireza Mashayekhi – Shur, Op. 15 (clip)

Mashayekhi is thoroughly modernist in his methodical approach and ideologies of autonomous music.  For instance, in his ambitious text ‘The Philosophy of Music’, he echoes Theodor Adorno without knowing it; “neither Adorno’s aversion of the masses’ ignorance nor the artistic commitment defined by Socialist realism are the answers to the advanced cultural crisis of capitalism.  The solution to this problem is to focus on the ‘commitment’ of artists towards society instead of trying to create works of art which are supposed to have social messages”.  Clearly, Mashayekhi is making an argument for the autonomy of formal art in order to overcome the depraved reality of the era which is often defined by sullied attempts at ‘meaning’.  Or later on, “I believe we can find truth through multilogical structures of artistic thought, this being the only way we can encompass the contradictions that ‘truth’ carries in itself”.  An inflated sense of optimism regarding a thorough break with the past and overcoming the limitations of constructed “language”, for example, or “realism”, became a programmatic aesthetic in itself, and later on chided by postmodernists for being too serious, and too naive in the pursuit of ‘truth’.  Mashayekhi though is composing during that era of modernist dismantling, which makes it odd that he clings to rigorous formalism – like a ghost from the past that we are still in.

Alireza mashayekhi

Even more contemporary than Mashayekhi is Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote (1972-), and the second disc is devoted to showcasing his prolific output as a counterpoint.  Persian Electronic Music implicitly asks what the differences and similarities are between old Iranian electronic music and new Iranian electronic music.  But such differences and similarities are predetermined.  Electronic music was perhaps supposed to assuage such questions that are tethered to standard notions of identity.  Differences arise out of the newer generation needing to outdo the earlier, while similarities emerge from the very standardized idea of ‘Iranian electronic music’.  By the time Sote comes along the legacy of Mashayekhi is domineering (similar to Cage or laMonte Young), as he seems to be the sole figure working in this vein.  Curious that he deals with the ambitious legacy of Masheykhi by crawling back into more traditional instrumentation.  The second disc sounds like a series of distorted solos on Iranian instruments.  The most notable difference is how flat Sote’s disc sounds in comparison to Mashayekhi’s.  Compared to the dynamic ranges in pitch, volume, and tonal clusters on many of Mashayekhi’s pieces, Sote’s pieces are uniform in all said aspects.  This isn’t to say that Sote’s pieces are somehow lesser than Mashayekhi’s.  Rather, Sote’s disc acutely represents much experimental music today in its flatness.   It bears the mark of minimalism and other dominant movements without following the methods or ideologies which gave the aesthetic form.  Music today is made in the large shadows of past revolutionary ambitions.  Sote is no exception.  Pieces like Nashid and Roboy Radif sound childishly playful, as if a traditional stringed instrument solo were processed by someone who inherited a computer with software and a few plugin effects.  This isn’t to say that that is in fact the method; its just that it sounds that way.  But this aesthetic produces some fascinating listening, like old, severely warped albums sped up.  The often singular instrumental source has a glistening, but decaying sound, and Sote does well at provoking that tension.  The Sote listen is only disappointing because it represents a broader phenomenon of loss.  It is appropriately disappointing.

Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote – Lovaz (clip)

A broader issue that Persian Electronic Music brings up within its two modest discs is one of global and generational importance: has contemporary experimental electronic avant-gardist music lived up to its past, or does it reproduce it in pastiche form?   Mashayekhi was an Iranian composer who, like many mid-century electronic composers, saw tradition (and national tradition) as restrictive on artistic endeavors.  Mashayekhi went out to the Netherlands to get beyond national and regional aesthetic forms and overcome them while not necessarily dominating or ignoring tradition.  The type of ‘Global spirit’ of mid-century avant-garde music has buckled under the postmodernist rubric of locality.  It is no wonder why Ata Ebtekar has crawled back in to traditional Iranian aesthetics.  In some senses the chronology that Persian Electronic Music presents appears entirely regressive in the near-orthodoxy of Sote.  Moreover, the package in general comes off almost as World Music, with its cliches of cultural identity, especially when considered as part of a whole music distribution system which has recently been obsessed with unearthing archaic music documents from particular regions (e.g. the Obscure Tape Music From Japan series).  What is interesting is that Persian Electronic Music represents a dominant consciousness in experimental music today; that the past can somehow unlock the key to the present.  Such an attitude only shows how lost, unoriginal, and confused experimental musicians are today.  On the other hand, in its unbounded analyses of the past as a way of dealing with present stasis, experimental musicians seem to care deeply about notions of musical progress.  It is unfortunate that such hopes for musical progress unnecessarily need to be diluted with half-baked notions of anti-modernist deconstruction.

The reconstitution of the avant-garde in the postwar era was fraught with confusion over purpose, and guilt with picking up avant-gardism after the Holocaust.  When Theodor Adorno suggested that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, he was speaking for an entire generation of artists, writers, and composers who felt the same paralysis, especially in America where the distance created an abstracted sense of guilt, admixed with a confusion over why they were continuing earlier modernist languages when World War seemed like it should have ground all social progress to a halt.  Countering Serge Guilbault’s ‘How New York Stole The Idea of Modern Art’, TJ Clark proposed via his essay ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’ that the reconstitution of avant-gardism in New York’s abstract expressionism was necessary, because the conditions of Capital were not only still in tact, but had rigidified and gained mass momentum after the war.  Confusion of avant-garde purpose, admixed with a post-war positivism of technological progress created intensively competing sets of ideologies — e.g. Cageian chance methods versus Iannis Xenakis’s formalized, scientific music.  Perhaps nowhere was this more acute than in the frantic activity of mid-century music and the emergence of electronic avant-garde music as a method of dealing with this confusion over the reinvigoration of the new.

Concret PH

Above is a clip of Iannis Xenakis’s Concret PH, a short piece he composed to be played inside the Philips Pavilion which he designed with Le Corbusier for the 1958 worlds fair in Brussels.  The sounds of Concret PH were taken exclusively from burning embers, with each crackle separated singularly, processed, and recomposed on approximately 400 loudspeakers.  This intricate process only became imaginable because of the advances in musique concrete – the first sample-based-music-turned-compositional method devised by Pierre Schafer and Pierre Henry to take advantage of the new ubiquitous possibilities of radio and recorded music in the 1940’s.  Samples taken from radio transmissions would be cut and spliced with reel-to-reel tape machines, in order to create a dynamic sound collage.  One manner in which Xenakis hoped to raise the bar for new music was by liquidating this new sound composition into architecture, science and visual arts, hoping to create a gesamtkunstwerk, or a ‘total art work’, while also continuing a modernist project of ‘empirical sensation’, as TJ Clark called it in reference to Impressionism.  The gesamtkustwerk specifically had been long idealized by romantics like Richard Wagner as claiming some sort of autonomy for art by utilizing all available means to devise a purely sensory and physical experience.  The dissolving of the autonomous gesamtkunstwerk into mass culture – the worlds fair -  marks an interesting nexus for the role of the avant-garde, as avant-garde music was for one short moment manifest in collaboration with a pioneering electronics company which would determine the landscape of everyday contemporary life: Philips.  Xenakis, perhaps the prototypical avant-garde composer of the 20th century, curiously had not developed an anti-aesthetic (as was inherent in the avant-garde of Dada) but was pleased to use any and all technological advancement.  More similar to Constructivist El Lissitzky’s sincerity, Xenakis transferred vague hopes in progress into an era which had failed to attain the socialist progress that Lissitzky attempted, but felt that it had won with the rigidification of Capitalism. How his formal aesthetic ideologies played into this is still vague in that it continues a constructivist formal language of shape, color, line and space into a seemingly changed postwar future.  Also what Xenakis at the Worlds Fair represents is how the avant-garde became entangled and unified with bureaucracy in post-war globalism, ie the culture industry.  One prominent aspect of this reality today is that artists are critically aware of this situation, yet paralyzed by the inability to move beyond the ideology of technological futurism, even when they rail against it.  In some ways, avant-garde music today is haunted by a history which came to full fruition over half a century ago.

The Philips pavilion was supposed to be nothing short of a spectacle which proved that the netherlands-based corporation Philips exclusively was at the cutting edge of electronics engineering and design.  Its not surprising that Philips had asked Le Corbusier to design their pavilion, as Le Corbusier had coined the popular phrase, “machines for living” in reference to what modern architecture should accomplish.  The 1958 Worlds Fair was said to be the first major fair after WW2, and everything was in place to show off the technological prowess of Capitalism’s post-war future which was already being projected far into the distance.  Philips products promised, and continue to promise, an aesthetic mode of living; the promise that everyone in the modern world can have an aesthetic, avant-garde experience in their own living room.  It is also either serendipitous, or shows how insular and prevalent these ideas were, that Xenakis was scoring the sound and designing the architecture for Philips, as Philips was the electronics company that invented many of the electronics which the music-concrete composers were likely using.  Xenakis was perhaps already using the materials which Philips had designed, so to create an aesthetic experience specifically for them seemed a natural extension, and one which positioned the avant-garde as an entity which molded and sculpted the conditions of post-war ‘progress’, instead of resisting it, but was also manipulated by mass solidarity towards a technological future.

Iannis Xenakis - Score for Metastaesis, and prototype for Philips Pavilion design

But Iannis Xenakis in 1958 was not the pioneer of experimental electronic music and sound art as we understand him today.  After graduating as an engineer, Xenakis meant to move to America, but made a permanent stop in Paris when Le Corbusier hired him.  In Paris he was initially denied access to the musique concrete group, but met and studied lightly with Olivier Messiaen, a composer who was using similar musique concrete methods, but also bent on unifying sound and vision via his own synaesthesia.  Messiaen told Xenakis that he should take advantage of his interests in both mathematical engineering and music composition, prefiguring a new type of composer who could expand music out of its own formal history.

Around this time Xenakis also published an important article which would demarcate his own aesthetic ideologies from the previous generation’s.  Titled ‘The Crisis of Serial Music’, it was an outright attack on any and all methods of serial composition, which Xenakis thought had exhausted all its possibilities and lapsed into determinism – specifically the 12-tone system devised by Schoenberg.  Although Karlheinz Stockhausen was to extents a serial composer, Xenakis was perhaps the first to live up to a certain hope of Stockhausen’s – that the Western music slate should be wiped clean and started over by building musical society from the ground up with electronic sounds.  Xenakis opens up his book Formalized Music with the statement, “the formalization that I attempted in trying to reconstruct part of the musical edifice ex nihilo has not used, for want of time or capacity, the most advanced aspects of philosophical and scientific thought”.  Electronics were a way out of what was materially given from history through the standardization of instruments.  Electronic synthesis could build tonality from scratch with the basic sine wave , and percussion with the click, or ‘impulse’, as it was called back then.  Xenakis was perhaps the first to methodically create a system from such hopes for new music which could overcome compositional shortcomings of the past and the propensity to lapse into convention.  To counter the ‘determinacy’ of serial composition, Xenakis utilized algebraic formula, statistics, set theory, physics, probability theory and stochastic algorithms to more dynamically compose sounds in time – everything is supposed to be in flux.  But ‘compose’ is not the right word, as composition in its fixed, static image was a problem that Xenakis hoped to overcome through “a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions”.  In this manner Xenakis oddly prefigured conceptual art, which would arise a decade later.

But this breakthrough from musical convention came about because it rested on other given conventions of scientific technology and nearly lapsed into a sort of technological positivism which the Philips Pavilion seemed an ornament of, and which continued a precious “bourgeois notion of progress”, to reference Walter Benjamin when speaking about Paris in the 19th century.  More specifically, this exacerbated the idea of bringing the heavenly city down to earth in the Parisian World’s Fair, which Susan Buck-Morss says had the most elaborate of its kind, terminating in the Eiffel Tower, which Trotsky observed to be a mass exercise with no real purpose.  Likewise, the Philips Pavilion seems in retrospect an exercise of avant-gardism.

Iannis Xenakis - study for Terretektorh

Not only had Xenakis criticized the serial music which had by the late 50’s had become part of the artistic firmament, but in embracing the blank slate of electronic music and theorizing his own work, he was implicitly severing from the theoretical framework of modern music as well.  Theodor Adorno, in his essay For An Informal Music, was already skeptical of the trends in new electronic music, because it abandoned method for sake of playing with, and being mesmerized by, new sounds.  Adorno squarely identified a problem with the sonorous obsessions of electronic musicians, and thought that the meandering explorations of sound color bordered on a fashion which left the material unchanged.  Xenakis was above all concerned with the production of new sounds, but the twist was that he was methodically obsessed.  He later made a full break even with musique concrete because it was reliant upon existing sounds.  Furthermore Xenakis thought that Cageian methods of chance and experimentation became likewise deterministic and fell back on habitual behavior when performed, not living up to the pathological expectations for ‘newness’.  Regarding the sound quality and fortuitous composition of Cage, Xenakis quipped, “we all have fortuitous sounds in our daily lives. They are completely banal and boring. I’m not interested in reproducing banalities.” Xenakis was clearly disinterested in the synthesis of art and life.

But this disinterest was perhaps because ‘life’ in his time seemed so deplorable.  The more interesting side to Xenakis’s attempt at overcoming artistic stasis was not brought about purely by technological means, but rather the most chaotic and disorganized aspects of a society at war, culled from his own experience as part of the Greek resistance to Fascist Germany.  Also from Formalized Music:

Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context… are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.

The most advanced technological art only arose from the most depraved social situation.  On the one hand, there is advanced technological sophistication taking from recent research in physics for example, that had become so sedimented in postwar notions of ‘progress’.  On the other hand there is a tumultuous unrest in the mass that was barbaric and animalistic.  As opposed to viewing these two poles as unified in the music, there is another way to look at this co-development; technological positivism as a method of eradicating past failures and distancing from traumatic events.  Xenakis’s music, like a lot of other electronic composers in America (Morton Subotnik), Europe (Bernard Parmegiani), Japan (Toshi Ichiyanagi), and even Iran (Alireza Mashayekhi) to name only a few was only  possible in this setting of global unrest.  As a contributor to the online publication Perfect Sound Forever writes,

“The war had accustomed them to a sound world which had never seemed possible before and each one had to adjust to it in his own way. This assimilation took many forms, it explains why, for instance, musique concréte was so quickly accepted by this generation as a perfectly natural extension of the sound continuum they had perceived, and secondly, the violence, anger and horror of the war could be transformed into a music which was openly aggressive, brutal and violent.”
By imitating crowds Xenakis was proposing an art based in mimicry.  Transferring civil unrest and social confusion into pure form was a way of dealing with the inadequacy of the situation.  Through pure abstraction, Xenakis aestheticized the political upheaval of the moment.  In this sense, what is commonly perceived to be the most esoteric, abstract avant-garde music, was in fact purely practical and grounded in the physical conditions of the moment.  The standardized but obscured paradigm of ‘physicality’ in recent sound art and experimental music floats free from this history and as a result repeats its failures instead of fulfilling its promise.  The ruse of ‘physicality’ in much recent sound art ‘theory’ becomes pastiche and pure lipservice, especially when many of the tools which could actually manifest those latent potentials are repressed by the dominant countercultural DIY hegemony.

But this abstraction also implies that reality in its complicated form was indigestible, and also that Xenakis had no intent on digesting it as it existed empirically.  There are two things happening in this abstraction:  first,  the calculated abstraction of social relations into mathematical data and pure pattern echoes the objectification of reification.  To further support this theory one need look no further than Xenakis’s mimicry of insects and natural phenomena as well.  In other words, Xenakis lumps human social culture in with animal nature, proposing there isn’t much of a difference.  But secondly, and conversely, by formalizing social inadequacies through an ‘open system’ as it would later be called in the 1960’s in reference to conceptual and minimal art, the artist is incapable of accepting the conditions of reality at face value.  Instead the artist sought to re-constitute reality by exorcising the latent potentials of its form and by overcoming life through formalizing it artistically (or at least attempting to do so), instead of synthesizing art + life, as is commonly understood to be a defining characteristic of the avant-garde and much art today.