Kavolis (ii)

Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis
(1968)

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[165]

12
🙛 🙙
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
AND PURITANISM

Abstract expressionism, the imageless, energetic style of painting represented by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, is one of the few modern styles completely without analogues in any of the civilizations of the past. It has emerged in the only industrialized civilization in history. The partial correlation between abstract expressionism and an advanced stage of industrialization suggests that an economic determinant may have been important in the emergence of this style of painting. Our purpose will be to show that industrialism is inadequate, even on the level of sociological analysis, as an explanation of the abstract expressionist style.

Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (i)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

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[21] During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. ...

[22] Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed.

Rudi Supek—Freedom and Polydeterminism in Cultural Criticism

Rudi Supek
"Freedom and Polydeterminism
in Cultural Criticism" (1965)
in
Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium
ed. Erich Fromm
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965, pp. 280-298.

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Culture
is very likely

one of the most
sensitive
areas of

social criticism.

Nowhere else
can

the inadequacy or absurdity of theoretical presuppositions or methodological procedures
be
uncovered so rapidly,

nowhere else
can

human creative activity
overwhelm
erroneous premises and conclusions with such promptitude,

and

nowhere else
can

such harm be
inflicted
upon the creative potentialities of human beings

as when

a dogmatic theory
is
imposed on cultural policy

by means of
social compulsion.

Paul Goodman—What is a picture?

Paul Goodman
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
(1962)

"What is a picture?"
(pp. 182-190)

[185] A strong sculpture controls its surrounding space and draws us into it; therefore our space is made continuous with the art-work's, there is only special space. Consider a contrast. Imagine a frame around the Apollo Belvedere and it easily turns into a picture... But imagine a frame around the Moses and you at once get colossal Dada. Going further, imagine a frame around the Captives, not yet free of the rock, and the effect is abhorrent. ...

I take it that this was Jackson Pollock's idea, to control our space and make only one special space, when he said that the onlooker was supposed to be entangled in his big canvases, as in a woods. Not dissimilarly, Rothko's big colored stripes have been called backgrounds that make the people look good; the onlookers have entered a special space and actually are in the picture.

A colored wall limits our continuous space rather than itself being limited, so we do not see it as a picture; but when it is painted with figures, like a mural, it is often a matter of choice whether or not it is a picture. The more architectural, the less pictorial.

...

[187] The fresco fury of Michelangelo is even his outstanding painterly quality... In the past, however, this painting-action was mostly used to underscore such picture properties as appropriateness to the subject, atmosphere, composition, decoration. It has been the genius of our times to isolate painting-action as sometimes sufficient to itself. Such pure gesture sophisticatedly recalls the painting of children or aboriginal petroglyphs ,

Ugh.

in what fascinates us is not the painted product but the transmitted action, the sense of the painter painting.

Our man here finds said transmitted action to be recall ed by said pure gesture . Being initiated, we can propose no remedy. But if a non-initiate found, conversely, that the painting merely recall ed a painting and not an action, we would like to know what (if any) remedy he might propose thereby.

I do not think that such action organizes a special space in any of the ways we have been discussing.

HOORAY!

There is no illusory space and no composition of flat surface. Therefore there is nothing to frame.

WHOOT!

Further, putting a rectangular frame around the action creates wrong assumptions and confuses the direct meaning of the gesture.

Well, I think it depends on who's looking.

Consider, for instance, a real girl skipping down the street or a young chap making a neat double play at second base in a ball game. These are lovely gestures, but to frame them is to kill them: it turns them into cinematographs and destroys their continuity with our space and life.

But perhaps a painting-action might be compared to a dramatic action on a stage,

This is a drama-free zone.

in its specially lit special space framed by the proscenium arch. It seems to me this is a poor analogy.

Agreed.

The proscenium-framed space is much weaker in esthetic texture than the words, acting, and blocking of the drama;

Thank God.

it is easily unattended to; we look past the arch. In a painting, however, the negative rectangle surrounding the painting-action is of almost equal textural value with the painted

[188]

marks;

I find this assertion rather bizarre.

it is colored like them, and extended like them. Therefore it either must be attended to, making a conventional composition, a picture; or it is a dead weight on the action, like an obtrusive set in a play.

The same reasoning holds against those painters who claim that the rectangular canvas is the playground for their action, like the football field for the game. It is again a poor analogy. The spectators of the game do not importantly notice that the grass at the fifty-yard line is worn thin and that the corners want cutting, but the spectators of a painting notice the texture, color, and painted or unpainted quality of the background.

The distinctiveness of certain hallowed stadiums and grounds is actually a huge part of the appeal of sports, whereas certain dimensions, rules, and (occasionally) customs are held constant. For the "true fan" this diversity-within-unity is absolutely a conscious part of the experience. You know when you are looking at Fenway Park, Lambeau Field, or Pebble Beach.

Also, the spectators of the football game know that, by the rules, the game may at any moment spring into any unoccupied territory, so that the whole field is necessary for the game and is potentially alive; whereas a painting gesture is already achieved and much of the rectangle has become dead past.

Is he serious?

When we say that a girl is "pretty as a picture," we mean

We'd really like to get with her but could do without the high-maintenance shenanigans?

that she makes the place of her presence and of her movements divinely special. ...

We speak of the space of the object in the picture, but of the place of the gesture in the world.

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[239] The young people have latched on to the movement in art that is strongest in our generation, the so-called Action Painting or New York School. ... I have tried to show that this disposition to go back to the material elements and the real situation, is intrinsic and spontaneous in the art action and poetry action of some of the young groups. This means that they are not off the main track. It can be said that this Action art lacks content, it does not carry enough humanity. I think this is true. But it is just its eschewing of a stereotyped or corrupt content while nevertheless affirming the incorruptible content of the artist's own action, that is its starved and brave humanity—a step beyond the nihilism of Dada—a beginning.

Martin Green—New York 1913

Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant
(1990)

[4] ...I derive some terms from Susan Sontag's essay on "The Aesthetics of Silence." She there discusses modernist art primarily, but she uses a vocabulary alien to ordinary
[5]
aesthetics. Her terms belong more to religion than to anything else. She says that, "Every era has to reinvent the project of 'spirituality' for itself." She defines spirituality in various ways which converge on the idea of ultimate value, or a religious transcendence of "the world," and continues, "In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is 'art.' The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move) have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness . . .":

Well, I loves me some Susan but based on this retelling I'm quite confused as to just how a religious transcendence of "the world" follows quite so directly from any staging of those pesky formal dramas which are always besetting consciousness and sowing general mischief about the psyche.

these are, I take it, the dramas or crises of protest which express our need to transcend the ordinary conditions of life, the limited expectations and temperate temperatures with which we ordinarily pursue even artistic and intellectual concerns.

It would be simpler to say that we create what we need, but then there would be no transcendence and no spirituality to bandy about; and there would be formal dramas prominently involved only where we have either too much or not enough of them.

Lasch—Theatrical Possibilites

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[336]
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
[337]
pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.

While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.

European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
[338]
spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution."

The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater. Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.

John Berger—The Success and Failure of Picasso

John Berger
The Success and Failure of Picasso
(1965)

My note says:
p. 6—"the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade"
p. 9—"For Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does."
p. 13—"Picasso's historical ambiguity...his fame rests upon his modernity... And yet in his attitude to art...there is a bias which is not in the least modern..."
It could not have been obvious in 1965 just how post-modern this outlook is, though in drawing a connection between the "what he is" outlook and Picasso's great fame JB clearly grasps the underlying mechanism. It is but a short step from the focus on self and the hostility to learning and reason and experimentation to the phenomenon of Famous for being Famous. The Picasso herein described would have made a near ideal instagram user...and instagram (the company and the user community) would have loved having him. The nineteenth- and twenty-first-century provenance of this ethos suggests a cyclical rather than linear history.

Elizabeth Cowling—Picasso

Elizabeth Cowling
Picasso: Style and Meaning
(2002)

[56] Like Matisse—but unlike many other innovative twentieth-century artists—Picasso never forgot, or wanted to forget, the achievements of the 'great masters' and he habitually made reference to them. ...his general approach perfectly fits Michael Baxendall's definition of the active, not passive, relationship which exists between a truly creative artist and the works of art which are his inspiration:

'Influence' is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient ... If one

[57]

says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.

...

[95] Picasso's concentration on the sufferings of the dispossessed [ca. 1902] testifies to his identification with the workers' desperate struggle. But he was in no sense a political activist, and like most painters of his and his father's generation he was not prepared to put his art at the service of a political agenda, believing that painting should aspire to timelessness and that the appropriate forum for commenting on ephemeral socio-political events or expressing ideological convictions was the illustration, the cartoon and suchlike. Even artists like Picasso who were genuinely engagé made this fundamental distinction between painting and the graphic media. Assessing the relative importance of socio-political realities to the content of the Blue period work remains problematic because, having rejected naturalism, Picasso used an abstracted style as a way of universalizing or masking the strictly local and specific issues which may have provided his initial motivation.

...

[228]
The Lessons of the Artisan
In using popular codes of representation and imitating the typography of newspapers, posters, sheet music, and so on, Braque and Picasso signalled their intention to identify with nameless artisans rather than 'fine' artists. Throughout the Cubist years they lived in what were then cheap and unfashionable districts of Paris...where bohemian artists rubbed shoulders with the working classes. ... They took up boxing and affected the working man's uniform of overalls and canvas jacket. ...[as Kahnweiler once "reminisced":] They arrived, imitating labourers, turning their caps up in their hands: 'Boss, we've come for our pay!'

My note says:
Hipsters! Though it seems that ever fewer of today's hipsters are specifically "affecting" proletarianism. ...

Now:
Well, it might just be that I moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. The agro or lumbersexual of the Twin Cities was/is definitionally proletarian; not actually a lumberjack but certainly descended from one. And I suspect that more of the agros actually work for a living, in all kinds of jobs, whereas I find this ever harder to believe about most of the LA cohort with each passing year.

[336] For the three composers, for Cocteau, Massine, and Diaghilev himself, the discrepancies of style in Picasso's designs for Parade, and his virtuouso shifts between naturalism and Cubism in his easel paintings, were not anomalous: they were the norm, and
[337]
awakened in them no mistrust or incomprehension. All shared an essentially dramatic concept of the role of style, and all found the theater congenial because it required them to exercise their gift for composing in different voices and provided a focus for their commitment to the principle of change. In such company the question 'Which is the true Picasso?' did not arise. The contrast with the art world, where consistency was expected and inconsistency mistrusted and feared, could hardly have been greater.

an essentially dramatic concept of the role of style

After the heartwarming remark about stylistic inconsistency awakening no mistrust or incomprehension, this seemingly matter-of-fact observation is really not so flattering. What does essentially dramatic even mean? How can commitment to the principle of change be inherently a good (or bad) thing? It ought to depend on the change in question. And it certainly ought not depend on any old change merely to create dramatic-ness as an end in itself.

The later contemporary/millennial sense of drama seems apt as a corollary here. Perhaps millennial drama is actually a fair conjecture in Picasso's case (see J. Berger's book); but it's equally clear that he was simply a new kind of artist, and that even if he stands as exceptional in stature, the purported drama of his stylistic transitions would eventually become commonplace even among the mediocre, this owing not to anyone's mediocrity or greatness but to changes in the wider world. (Freed thus to reason transhistorically, Ligeti then becomes a much more logical comparison than Stravinsky, whose diversity of style either at any given time or viewed after the fact really was nowhere close either to Picasso's or to Ligeti's.)

[638] The fact that he had remained in Paris throughout the Occupation enhanced his reputation for defiance. But he was in his sixties and by the end of the decade it began to look as if he had been left standing by the rising avant-garde of abstract painters and sculptors. He remained stubbornly hostile to pure abstraction, which he sweepingly dismissed as undemanding, undramatic and, as he told Françoise Gilot, 'never subversive': 'It's always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of. You can't impose your thought on people if there's no relation between your painting and their visual habits.'

Quite revealing, perfectly accurate, and meeting no objection whatsoever from these quarters. We're quite comfortable abdicating the imperative to impose, all the same in art as in life.

Mumford—Art and Technics (xvi)

[Prefatory note: I struggled mightily with this final installment of the series, so much so that what should have been a centerpiece became an afterthought. It remains both incomplete and overlong. It is at least completed somewhat by recent posts, at the cost of adding verbiage rather than paring it. Such is the content-rich, editor-poor world we live in. Enjoy, if you can.]

Lewis Mumford
Art and Technics (1952)

The general effect of this multiplication of graphic symbols has been to lessen the impact of art itself. ... In order to survive in this image-glutted world, it is necessary for us to devaluate the symbol and to reject every aspect of it but the purely sensational one. For note, the very repetition of the stimulus would make it necessary for us in self-defense to empty it of meaning if the process of repetition did not, quite automatically, produce this result. Then, by a reciprocal twist, the emptier a symbol is of meaning, the more must its user depend upon mere repetition and mere sensationalism to achieve his purpose. This is a vicious circle, if there ever was one. ...people must, to retain any degree of autonomy and self-direction, achieve a certain opacity, a certain insensitiveness, a certain protective thickening of the hide, in order not to be overwhelmed and confused by the multitude of demands that are made upon their attention.
(p. 98)

...we only half-see, half-understand what is going on; for we should be neurotic wrecks if we tried to give all the extraneous mechanical stimuli that impinge upon us anything like our full attention. That habit perhaps protects us from an early nevous breakdown; but it also protects us from the powerful impact of genuine works of art, for such works demand our fullest attention, our fullest participation, our most individualized and re-creative response. What we settle for, since we must close our minds, are the bare sensations; and that is perhaps one of the reasons that the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say. In order to make sensations seem more important than meanings, he is compelled to use processes of magnification and distortion, similar to the stunts used by the big advertiser to attract attention. So the doctine of quantification, Faster and Faster, leads to the sensationalism of Louder and Louder; and that in turn, as it affects the meaning of the symbols used by the artist, means Emptier and Emptier. This is a heavy price to pay for mass production and the artist's need to compete with mass production.
(pp. 98-99)

Lasch—A Refusal To Find Patterns

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

In the visual arts at least, the celebration of selfhood, as exemplified by abstract expressionism in the late forties and early fifties—the assertion of the artist as a heroic rebel and witness to contemporary despair—had already come under critical attack by the time Roth published his diagnosis of the literary malaise in 1961.
(p. 132)

Artists, Agitators, Introspectors

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

Socialism, as [Oscar] Wilde understood it, was simply another name...for the elimination of drudgery by machines. Wilde had no patience with those who proclaimed the dignity of labor. ... The collectivization of production would liberate the poor from want, but it would also liberate the rich from the burden of managing and defending their property. ... No less than manual labor, the administration of property distracted people from the real business of life.
(p. 231)



Socialism, in Wilde's conception, would not come about through the action of the masses. The masses were too stupefied by drudgery to be capable of emancipating themselves. ... Agitators were the political equivalent of artists: disturbers of the peace, enemies of conformity, rebels against custom. They shared with artists a hatred of authority, a contempt for tradition, and a refusal to court popular favor. Agitators and artists were the supreme embodiment of individualism, wishing only to please themselves.
(p. 232)

This kind of message [Christ as "artist"]...appealed to intellectuals in search of a substitute for religious faiths by then widely regarded as offensive to the modern mind. ... It confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd. It sanctioned their revolt against convention... By equating social justice with artistic freedom, the religion of art made socialism palatable to intellectuals who might otherwise have been repelled by its materialism. In the heyday of the socialist movement its attraction for intellectuals cannot be adequately explained without considering the way it overlapped with the bohemian critique of the bourgeoisie.
(p. 233)



In the 1960s revolutionary students adopted slogans much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx: "All power to the imagination"; "It is forbidden to forbid." The continuing appeal of such ideas, thirty years later, should be obvious to anyone who casts an eye over the academic scene and the media. The postmodern mood, so-called, is defined on the one hand by a disillusionment with grand historical theories or "metanarratives," including Marxism, and by an ideal of personal freedom, on the other hand, that derives in large part from the aesthetic revolt against middle-class culture. The postmodern sensibility rejects much of modernism as well, but it is rooted in the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, constructing identities for themselves as they choose, leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art.
(p. 234)

Bodies and Artifacts (iii)—Jones' Voice

LeRoi Jones
Blues People (1963)

For a Westerner to say that the Wagnerian tenor's voice is "better" than the African singer's or the blues singer's is analogous to a non-Westerner disparaging Beethoven's Ninth Symphony because it wasn't improvised.
(p. 30)

So what if a Westerner says this about Beethoven? What if a small but vocal subculture emerges within the Western world itself where this disparagement of Beethoven is nothing less than the storefront signage, the secret handshake, and the honor code all rolled into one? What if several such subcultures emerge independently, and what if they have little else in common among them besides this?

What tf then?

Bodies and Artifacts (ii)—Partch's Corporeality

Harry Partch
Genesis of a Music (1974, orig. 1949)

For the essentially vocal and verbal music of the individual—a Monophonic concept—the word Corporeal may be used, since it is a music that is vital to a time and place, a here and now.
(p. 8)

Hmm. I thought corporeal meant something like "relating to a person's body, especially as opposed to their spirit." (-Google)

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn's Distrust of Photography

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...distrust of the prefabricated image in fact led him [Jorn] at first to dismiss—shortsightedly—the artistic and critical potential of photography. Jorn writes that excessive faith in the progress and objectivity of science leads to the view that photography is the best art form, because it is the most objective and realistic. But there is no objective reality even in science, he argues, since it is always tied to the needs and interests of those who fund it. Rather than make art more objective, Jorn argues for the subjectivity of science. Writing in the late 1940s, he warns of the danger of considering photography a substitute for reality, the equivalent of armchair traveling instead of real experience. Jorn argues that the close connection of photography to reality is precisely what makes it the least artistic. He was unable to see the potential of photography as a creative medium because of its associations with impersonal, mass reproduction. Jorn reductively associated photography with the culture industry... While hopelessly limited for any contemporary understanding of photography, these views were typical of the 1950s. (198)

It seems once again that an opportunity has been missed and an opponent talked past rather than hit where it hurts: is "artistic" or "critical" potential really the issue, or is it rather that both potentials are in fact so shockingly vast in relation to the type of agency required that a certain devolution in the latter respect was now simply inevitable? The vast power of representation had in fact been democratized, and this rather directly and drastically cheapened initiative, intent, vision, subjectivity...it is hard to name an "artistic" or "critical" value that was not cheapened this way; that is, for the abundance of those potentials rather than their lack. Photography, in the moment that it was new, was too easy in proportion to the power inhering in it. This is not a denial that photographic skill exists, but rather that it was now both harder to distinguish from the ordinary and more widely dispersed and rather less scarce. Seems to me that these are material questions susceptible to material validation, whereas I cannot imagine successfully teasing out the objectivity/realism/science question raised here (certainly not only on the broadest of strokes painted here). The "substitute for reality" seems equally absurd on the surface, but I think it ultimately has been materially validated; in this case people can tell the difference but even so don't seem to care about the difference. But even here, the given discussion has suddenly shifted entirely to the consumption side of things; nothing is said about initiative, accessibility, technique, etc. as this pertains to creators, whereas it seems to me that the accounts of Jorn's chosen mediums throughout center around creation rather than reception. Continuing on, the word "impersonal" is used; this also demands that creation and reception both be explicitly accounted for; otherwise the impression is that of reactionary bluster rather than considered critique.

Jorn suggests that abstract art addresses our imagination more directly that the "indirect and superficial" art of photography. He writes that "visual art means first and foremost visual effects, and the most elementary, direct visual art is that which effects our power of imagination by means of colors, forms, and direct visual effects." (198)

Now we're talking! But there is again an unsatisfying, overgeneralized aspect betokening another missed opportunity. Is it photography itself which is "indirect," or is the photograph in fact the intermediary begetting an unduly "indirect" response in the subject? Is the problem in fact that the photograph is so direct (or perhaps simply suggests/imposes this conceit whether or not it is true) that the subject's imagination is subdued not for lack of "direct" stimulation but in fact for (the conceit to/impression of) an overabundance of it, thereby constraining the imagination inside thick walls of information rather than inviting it on an open-ended journey guided only by the occasional signpost? This analysis certainly is available re: representation and reproduction, as against abstraction/nonrepresentation and singularity. We may well read "elementary" as "leaves something to the imagination"; of course it is not just photorealism which fails this prescription precisely where nonrepresentation succeeds, but also language properly construed which fails where non-/pre-/supra-linguistic cognition succeeds. This is indeed a role (dare I moralize and say a Function?!) for abstract art and music; yet that aspiration to utilitarianism hits a snag if the ultimate, final, exalted end product of whatever particular process we are talking about remains representational, photorealistic, linguistic, communicative, etc. Seems that those types of thought are necessary, by definition, for any social intercourse at all, hence serial abstractifying exercises can be only a means, never their own ends, and in fact uniquely vulnerable to the conquering dictates of social ends which are contingent rather than absolute.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Abstraction and Inhumanity

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...this renewed interest in painting [in the 1950s] had an important social function as a profound rejection of what critics perceived as the threatening aspects of the spread of mass-media technologies mostly experienced on a screen. (196)

...cultural critics who contrasted the material specificity of painting as the ultimate medium of sensory engagement to the alienating effects of the mass media, despite the media's own claims to collapse distance into televisual "immediacy." (197)

Jorn's interest in gesture was about singularity itself, meaning not an especially talented individual but rather the volatile presence of a subjectivity at a particular moment or in relation to such a specific image. ... Jorn's emphasis on irreproducible singularity turned its back on the ideas of technological progress that the historical avant-garde had believed in so strongly before the war. (197)

In 1962, Jorn wrote that the great inhumanity of both the camps and the bomb was their dehumanization of people as a mass: [quoting Jorn directly] "The threatening thing about the German concentration camps as well as the American Hiroshima explosion lies in no way in the atrocities, which are no worse than those happening in many other places on earth. The shattering thing is their colossal and blind mass effect that makes humanity more and more valueless." (197)

Here, then, is a dissent from mass-ification but NOT from abstraction per se. This seems more lucid than lumping the two together, since the concurrent use of the A-word to denote both (1) nonmaterial intellectual images, and (2) visual representations skewed to the edge of recognizability, inevitably clouds more than it clarifies; and so here we have an excellent demonstration of just what is NOT abstract about so-called Abstract Painting, i.e. its materiality...or at least one could choose to parse "immediacy" and "singularity" of "gesture" this way. Abstract art is itself; here KK gives an account of a moment in history wherein Jorn and others (Adorno is mentioned) would/could not see television as simply being itself, but rather fixated on its ability to REproduce, and on a "mass" scale. I suppose the theory of Medium as Message would hold that TV is an "immediate" experience of TV itself, not merely an uncanny reproduction of other content. There's really no Right Answer to that disjunction, just different ways of looking. But looking in BOTH cases is passive, so the fact that the painterlies also had powerful theories of collective (NOT mass!) artisthood really ought to be acknowledged as a factor here. It unifies their theory, makes it whole, and supports their claims above. Mass communication technologies would not be democratized for decades yet, hence there was no such thing as active/generative participation in either the medium or the message of the new mass culture. Hence when KK subsequently points to Jorn's own use of some modern reproductive techniques in his own ongoing work, it must be borne in mind that the analogy to television (which is the specific example used above) breaks down over the question of activity/generativity; also (more so yet) over the lack of mass access to the network of TVs. (The network, by the way, seems to have since become both the medium and the message; if Jorn et al failed to see this coming, it was because they didn't have to see it coming to know that anyone could paint but not just anyone could broadcast.) And as for "mak[ing] humanity more and more valueless," few developments have contributed more to that process than the networks by which us humans have been forced to learn how many of us there are and how much we all suck. The media theorists carried the day as soon as the mass- became able to generate media content as easily as they could smear fingerpaint; but this has indeed made everyone more interchangeable, hence "valueless," than ever before, and it has not actually brought us either literally or figuratively closer together.

[from a notebook, 2018]

The First of the Rest

I
Early last spring, spurred on by a band director's curious statement as reported to me by a mutual student, I sat down to write my next pointed tract on the relationship between technical and creative musical development. My greatest initial trepidation therein stemmed from the danger of slipping into needless reprises of arguments which I had already presented here and elsewhere several times over. Yet even as such fears melted away in the face of fresh insights, a new problem presented itself: while the line of development was clear in my head from the outset, the task of fleshing out each small detail of the argument suddenly seemed inexhaustible; the simplest statements of position on a particular matter led to multiple pages of excursus on all manner of peripheral details, musical and otherwise, details which I had never intended to dredge up but which the offending statement itself had shown could not be taken for granted. Indeed, the realization that nothing could be taken for granted quickly displaced the particulars of the incident as the impetus behind the essay, and at this point the task seemed too broad.

The paper I had envisioned writing was hence threatening to take on dimensions all out of proportion with the real salience of the theme. In short, I found that I was no longer capable of addressing the obstacles faced in refining and enriching our pedagogy without being burdened by their rootedness in so many intractable real-world questions which otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with music. This came as a particular shock to someone who for the bulk of his formal education would simply stop writing when he felt intuitively that he was finished, who consistently turned in papers that were a half-page short of the prescribed minimum length, who repeatedly dared his instructors to blink, and, if I may brag a bit, succeeding without exception in doing so. Then one day, all grown up and having become thoroughly burdened and preoccupied with "adult" concerns such as feminist separatism in the arts, cultural co-optation, the ethical dimensions of aesthetics, and so on, this student opened up an already sprawling text file on his laptop and was overtaken seemingly in an instant by a classic case of paralysis-by-analysis. There was at that point no possible way for me to continue with the arduous project I had begun, not even if it has yet to entirely cease appearing as the logical and necessary next step in the portion of my life's work concerned with education.

This only feels like a setback. It certainly looks like a setback as far as the right sidebar of this blog is concerned. In reality, it is a realization that had to be made in order for me to move ahead, final confirmation of something I've known for a long time but haven't been willing to fully accept: that everything I've written prior is fundamentally naive, no matter its learnedness on particular subjects here and there; that I've learned just enough to emerge from naivete but not nearly enough to be considered wise; and that until I obtain the requisite book smarts, everything I write subsequently will issue from the middle ground between these two poles, which is the absolute worst place to be in every way both as a thinker and as an artist. And so as most anyone else would, I did initially absorb all of this as a setback, emotionally at least. This is the primary reason for the long silence here. The other reason is the immense amount of time I have been investing in offline reading projects with an eye towards pushing through this impasse. (Against my better judgment, I am now tracking all of this through a Goodreads account if anyone wants to make contact there.) There is not much for me to write passionately about right now other than to post book reports on esoteric authors as a way of laying my proverbial nuts on the floor. Having read plenty of these book reports in the course of my first decade of blogging, I've chosen to forgo this thirtysomething rite of passage until I've had time to digest the material and conceive some more original insight.

Such it is that the final nail has belatedly but inevitably been hammered into the coffin of my intellectual adolescence, of which there can be no doubt this blog has served as the focal point since its inception. I do not intend to give up blogging, nor to cease raising the occasional ruckus over mainstream music education's myriad vicissitudes of expedience, but it is high time to admit to myself and to anyone who cares about me and/or my work that things simply cannot remain as they have been, and that the necessary changes are not all comfortable ones to make.


II
I remain most interested in and committed to what for lack of another term with greater contemporary currency I must anachronistically continue to call "absolute music," or at least to the ideal of it if that is as far as the skeptic and the populist are jointly willing to indulge me on the matter. Nothing has yet convinced me that the abstract musical experience is somehow pathological or degenerate in any of the many ways it has frequently been made out to be, and I hasten to single out the accusation of escapism for an especially pointed disavowal. Rather, it is precisely because I have always been quite preoccupied with the bigger picture that music has always seemed both overwhelmingly ineffectual as activism and itself vilely disfigured by the weight of being asked to do so much more than it is capable of. Ignorance and/or apathy vis-a-vis the copious observable evidence in favor of this position has always stuck me first and foremost as a profound insensitivity on the part of those who would otherwise like to position themselves as the feeling, humane party to this debate, in contradistinction to the emotionless, tone-deaf formalists¹. Whatever the shortcomings of formalism, a blind faith that "music can change the world" in no way follows directly from them. Such blind faiths betray not sensitivity but numbness, not altruism but self-absorption; in other words, they betray precisely the condition which they themselves most customarily ascribe to formalism itself. Perhaps it takes one to know one?

I am, I will confess as if it were not so obvious from virtually everything I've written here, quite sensitive in this way and in other ways too. As a result, it is true that constitutional factors are at the root of my inability to abide the more-is-more aesthetics of so much contemporary art regardless of any of its alleged epistemological (un)moorings that may also contribute. At a certain point it makes no difference to me whether the artist's intentions are manifested as overbearing political content, multidisciplinarity, abuse of dynamic extremes, conceptual provocation, or, as befits the trope, all of these at once and more; eventually my fragile viscera simply reaches overload and I have to sign off.

I see a Hollywood movie in the theaters only every couple of years, and I feel downright autistic from the moment I enter the lobby to the moment I depart it. Contrary to the formalist stereotype, I am hardly oblivious to the calculated emotional roller coaster; rather, I am usually on the verge of tears and simply have to go home and sleep it off in order to come to my senses. The fact that such an overwhelming majority of my cultural compatriots not only willingly endure this but in fact actively seek it out and repeat it compulsively merely confirms that they must be wired differently than I am². At that point I am tempted to throw up my arms in a conniption fit of relativism and say, "Live and let live! We agree to disagree! It's all so byooo-tiful! " I have certainly flirted with this mindset during the recent dormancy period here, for reasons outlined above. But of course it is difficult (impossible?) to fully live up to this intention, it is an intention which is unlikely to be reciprocated by much of anybody else, and besides all of that, I would say that any time we neglect to unpack what is going behind the scenes of such a contentious issue, we evince a certain apathy that is unbecoming of a socially engaged artist. So let's continue to hash it out, no? I promise that dormancy periods here are only ever temporary, no matter how long they might seem to go on.

The oversensitivity defense certainly is a useful deflection for me to invoke here provided that the prosecution is capable of understanding this term matter-of-factly rather than in the pathologized sense so often invoked by faux-liberals eager to defend their habitual microaggressions. Even if I were a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, though, I think that after several years of concert-going in Los Angeles I would still greet the exceedingly rare opportunity to experience live music without the ubiquitous multi-media projections exactly as I do now; that is, with no small amount of relief. As it is, notwithstanding the inevitability of the (very) occasional masterpiece in virtually any idiom, it only seems clearer that the present inescapability of mixed media is a textbook case of turning up the volume of the conversation simply in an attempt to be heard over the chatter of cultural overproduction and oversaturation. If formalists are to be aggressively held to account for their alleged self-referentialism and sophistry, then conceptualists should be at least equally compelled to answer for their various excesses. I would say that they actually should be held to firmer account because the culture within which they operate incentivizes such excesses in wild disproportion to most every other modus operandi. What perplexes non-believers most about formalism is the difficulty of establishing motive; what perplexes about conceptualists is that there are so many motives to choose from that you can never know for sure which ones are real, intentional, or sincere, or in fact if any of these descriptors apply at all³. I think that what I just wrote is absolutely an instance of hating the game and not the player. Hence, as the Theorists would have it regarding more pressing social identity issues, we really do need to see difference here rather than simply reenacting the familiar relativist abdication of judgment, because difference is in fact political in this instance as in so many others. Aesthetic relativism is, as I have written before, both a social grace and a social ill, so let's indeed answer for ourselves even if no one asked and see what insights this exercise generates. Triangulation is most detectable where cheap thrills are appealed to the most shamelessly, but it would be a mistake to pretend that it was not at play elsewhere, including in absolute music itself. To be clear, I am all for cheap thrills; even so, we know what eventually happens to people who eat only junk food.

See how you can be a socially conscious musician without burning effigies of politicians during your concerts? It's not impossible, people. Get over yourselves.


III
Of course, my frozen essay was not to be about absolute music, activist art, or multidisciplinarity, but rather about particular technical aspects of music pedagogy in young brass players. I'm taking this diversion only to head off the accusation of hypocrisy, that is, the notion that my awakening to the inadequacy of my extramusical learning is an indictment of my previous insistence on absolute music-making. To the contrary, this awakening has only confirmed more strongly for me that musicianship and citizenship are overwhelmingly separate spheres. I've never advocated for ignorance or escapism, just for a necessary degree of compartmentalization as dictated by the facts on the ground. It is a compartmentalization which, in my humble opinion, any human being capable of wiping their own behind ought also be capable of maintaining without spiraling uncontrollably into the nihilism and narcissism of the archetypal Formalist strawman. I certainly consider myself amply capable of this maintenance (I've had some practice), and if lengthy reflections such as this one aren't enough to earn at least a modicum of credibility on this front, then I should probably just give up trying.

I will at least concede that the narcissism is kept at bay far more easily than the nihilism which seems to lurk around every ontological corner⁴. I suppose it was only a matter of time before nihilism started to penetrate the part of my self-constructed intellectual inner sanctum most explicitly concerned with people; that is, with pedagogy and "The Theory-Technique-Creativity Nexus," which was to be the title of my paper. Disembodied works of art are easier to get along with on a daily basis than people are, even if there's no such thing as perfection in either case. Such it is that I find it (perhaps temporarily, but in any case quite thoroughly) impossible to spill another ounce of effort inveighing against scale nazis, pattern pushers, or passive recreators, each of whose conditions I am now compelled to see as ineluctably contingent upon their wider cultural worlds, and which I hence have no hope of meaningfully reforming, no matter how well-conceived or well-executed my writing on the topic might be. Members of these groups, some of whom I count as valued colleagues and collaborators in other ways, will just have to lie in the beds that they have made for themselves, and I in mine. These people will continue to dominate the pedagogical scene as long as the culture at large continues to produce them in such numbers and favors their paint-by-number expediency over the long road of pan-stylistic internalization. Having reached that conclusion, belatedly it would be fair to say, it is no longer worth my time to agonize over how to best communicate ideas that will not be received with action, even if they are received with a variety of more superficial, ultimately meaningless praises, as some of my earlier pedagogical writings have been. To be sure, I have no illusions of being able to change the larger culture all by myself either. That is a larger task, not a smaller one. But at least an ill-fated joyride in that direction sounds interesting to me; at least I can be stimulated by it; at least I can sound smarter, if not actually be smarter, by investing earnestly and intensely in extramusical learning for the first time since my mid-teens. As friend and bandmate Max Kutner aptly put it in a recent conversation, reading French Theory is great as long as you don't start writing tunes about it. I really couldn't have said it better. I have a different relationship to "tunes" than I do to people, and I think that makes me a scholar, not a hypocrite.

Responding to incredulous, disbelieving rejoinders when I reveal that I have not earnestly practiced scales since 10th grade, that I credit this very intentional decision with helping me get to where I am today creatively on the horn, and that I later discovered a modicum of laboratory support for my youthful conjecture in the form of the "exposure effect" is something which no longer interests me as it once did. I would like to think that thoughtful contributions to this effect could be considered part of good citizenship broadly construed, but at this point it feels more like an entropic blowing of smoke in the direction of old dogs of all ages who are incapable of learning new tricks. Therefore, unless you are my student or otherwise make a conscientious inquiry on such matters, I am done with them for the time being. Let's talk about culture, and then let's "escape" into music-making as whole people and conscious citizens without either forgetting or being limited by what we've learned.


notes
1. By the same token, the next time you see a musician or their work described as "introspective," ask yourself, "Can one become an artist of any caliber, by virtually any value system, without a fair quantity self-reflection?!" I think not, which seals the fact of the co-optation of the term. It also seals the diagnosis of (b)latent sexism when this term is indiscriminately applied to the work of women musicians.

2. On the other hand, Jon Wagner's Contemporary Film Theory class at CalArts not only served as an ideal survey of Critical Theory but also made me realize how easily I could get sucked into Second Cinema. I had to bald-face lie my way into this class, for which the prerequisite is "an abiding interest in film." By the end of it this was only a little white lie. Only Mrs. Stammers' IB Theory of Knowledge has had the impact on my intellectual life that this class has, and it meant a tremendous amount to me to receive a totally unexpected email from Mr. Wagner at the end of the term thanking me for my papers.

3. If no one else who went to CalArts is willing to speak what we all saw, then I will: multidisciplinarity at CalArts is first and foremost a way for third year BFAs to keep in touch with friends from other programs after they all move out of the school-mandated dorm stay and into their own far-flung apartments spanning the seven boroughs of Santa Clarita. Operating in parallel to this surfeit of juvenilia are a handful of graduate students, many of them working professionals and fantastically talented, who seek out the school specifically for its emphasis on collaboration across disciplines. I lost track of all the bitter stories I heard from this latter contingent about how departmental turf wars undermined access to resources they needed to do this work. You may socialize free of charge, but equipment and space cost money.

Contrary to my stated anti-relativism, those who know me offline know that I'm a very good sport about being involved in projects which don't necessarily align with the "absolute music" orientation I outline in this post. At school I almost always had fun performing in multi-disciplinary projects (as I say, I think that was the point of most of them), and occasionally I learned something of enduring value too. Overwhelmingly, though, what struck me most immediately and intensely about the bulk of the multidisciplinary work made at CalArts was its sheer callowness. The work I've seen out here in the postgraduate Real World is only slightly more encouraging, and really, how could its evolution be any more than slight having incubated in such an environment?

While on the whole I wouldn't trade my time at CalArts for anything, this was and is all very dispiriting. How could the social and turf war issues possibly be unrelated to it?

4. Early returns indicate that reading more books is making me less certain about important issues, not more, and hence more readily threatening to toss me to the dogs of nihilism rather than snatching me from their jaws. But at least I've found the ability in early middle age to have fun doing something other than music and sports.

[sc]airquotes (ii)

"...speaking as a precocious therapist as well as a true philistine, Plato insinuates that mimetic art is a sort of perversion–a substitute, deflected, compensatory activity engaged in by those who are impotent to be what as a pis aller they merely imitate. And who, Plato asks, would choose the appearance of the thing over the thing itself; who would settle for a picture of someone he could have, as it were, in the flesh; or would pretend to be something in preference to being the thing as such? Those who can, do, we might interpret him as having maintained; those who can't, imitate."

Arthur Danto. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1981. 12.


A philistine, my dictionary app tells me, is "a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them," which if we define "the arts" the way Danto does I suppose I am. "In the philosophy of science," he writes, "there are no observations without theories; so in the philosophy of art there is no appreciation without interpretation. Interpretation consists in determining the relationship between a work of art and its material counterpart." (p. 113). A problem, I might add, which clearly belongs to a particular art-historical epoch, even if it was always there lurking behind the cloak of improbability: it was not until artworks had known material counterparts (identical objects which were not artworks themselves) that the question he seeks to answer here became a pressing one.

For Danto, the non-art material counterparts serve as a kind of control group: by bringing into higher relief the differences between them and those things identical to them in every way except in being artworks, we home in on the essence of art itself. It is an unusually persuasive approach precisely because it describes so well the reality of the art world. A suitemate of mine here at school, a visual artist, showed a work earlier this year that was painted with mixture of paint and his own blood, but this was not transparent in the work; rather, blood was the final entry on the materials list, which in my lack of art world acculturation I merely skimmed without interpreting. I found the work aesthetically pleasing anyway and offered the compliment, but he was none too happy and an animated discussion ensued later that night with roommates and guests alike polarized into what in the language of Danto you might call the Philistines and the Interpreters. It is thus more clear to me that Danto has identified an important feature of the art world he inherited than that he has located the essence of art. I get the sense from this book as well as his "After The End of Art" that much as music theorists analyze the music which their theoretical tools enable them to analyze, Danto seeks to explain the things that philosophy can explain, and aestheticism is not one of them. (Fine with me, by the way, that we not try too hard to explain it, but I often wonder if simply ignoring it is the best course of action.)

And so to return just briefly to Plato and his insistence on being over imitating, I would say that for me the most powerful thing about abstract art is the fact that it is the real version of itself. I would call this quality "immediacy" if that word had not already been claimed for the opposite usage by those who would insist that every work of art is representational of something or other, and that the higher the degree of abstraction, the less "immediate" the impact (Danto might say the more interpretation is necessary). I think there is similarly something to be said for such abstract works which cannot in any sense be called commonplace, or in other words, whose hypothetical material counterparts do not yet exist. Call my theory "The Fetishization of the Anomalous." The best part about being a philistine, I guess, is that you get to be a hedonist as well.

Other Aspects of the Art

In my rush to keep the dream alive, I omitted two important considerations from yesterday's discussion. The first is spontaneity. These pieces are essentially improvisations, albeit within severe enough constraints that the variations among them are of the subtle variety. Even so, this is an important parallel with my musical endeavors. I sense similar faculties at work and similar sensations present during the creation of these pieces as I do while improvising musically, and both acts take more out of me mentally than they do physically. That the sketches would take anything out of me is odd, since they only take about 20 minutes to make, but the "endgame" so to speak is always a bit suspenseful, and I sometimes even feel the slightest bit nervous as it approaches. I don't stop, though; working from start to finish without the opportunity for revision is an important part of the process. Perhaps I should start calling them "improvisations." I do hate titles, though.

As you could have guessed from the above points, the second consideration is temporality. While ultimately I intend the completed works to be observed statically, I think it would be interesting to "perform" them. There would have to be some technology involved, but it could be done: you would need some kind of touch screen beneath the paper to detect the sketches as they're made, and a projector to bring the show to an audience. A "virtuoso" could sketch with both hands at once, beginning the pattern at opposite ends of the paper and moving toward the center. I imagine that the idea of an audience sitting silently in a room watching a monitor would meet the same criticism that abstract symphonic music meets these days; I would say the same thing in response.

I Write Draw for Myself

The art I posted yesterday is the fourth such piece I've created. It's a bit juvenile, and that's part of the point. When I was a kid, this was the form that my doodles always seemed inclined to take, a series of straight (or almost straight) lines connected (or not) to infinity. I detested music as a child, but was very interested in drawing. Representational drawing defied my abilities, however, this despite a near fixation on the subject for a time, and a few separate attempts at seeking formal instruction. Had I the slightest inclination towards abstraction at that young age, I may have spent my life creating these monochrome sketches rather than composing music, but for better or worse, like most young kids, my interest in the arts was always driven in some way or another by the entertainment industry, and as we all know, abstraction doesn't sell.

To be sure, I'm worse than a dilettante when it comes to visual art, but that's also part of the reason I thought it might be worth sitting down to draw again. With so much handwringing, here and everywhere else, about the differences between initiates and non-initiates when it comes to modern music, I started to wonder if this might not be a good way to more truly put myself in the shoes of a naive musician. Additionally, when I started considering the implications that much of my musical philosophy might have in the visual realm, I realized that this silly childhood scribbling actually reflects that quite well. I had "found my voice," so to speak, as an artist long before I would as a musician, probably because the technical demands of my musical voice are enormous compared to the minimal ones required by the art I posted yesterday. This mystifies me a bit, though. While a high degree of abstraction and a minimum of discernible sequences or patterns are indeed two features I value highly in a piece of music, there are other facets of my art that are severely at odds with my musical value system, the most obvious being the severe economy of means.

Musical minimalism greatly intrigues me conceptually and philosophically, but as a listener, I generally don't care much for the results. Conversely, I remember encountering Donald Judd's concrete work as a teen and being fascinated by it without having a clue why. I still am, and I still don't know why; it's tempting to conclude, as many would, that this is a predictable case of training influencing reception, but I think if you presented me with the Ferneyhough of visual art, I'd probably like that too. (Actually, that sounds awesome; anyone know who that might be?) I'm also a stylistically restless musician, whereas I can't imagine being comfortable working in any visual medium other than these sketches. That conflict intrigues me as well.

I hope to use these works as cover art on some future releases, and may post some more here. However, I've seen too many faux-musicians trying to pass off their own juvenilia as some kind of earth-shattering aesthetic triumph, and I certainly don't want to come off that way. Let's just say that I write draw for myself, not as a gesture of contempt, but one of respect.