on stroke fests and bursts of epiphany

this past saturday night i went with friends and my brother to see kronos quartet and the bang on a can all stars. the former we had intended to see, and the latter left us in a bit of a conundrum: if the audience hates it, is it still really art?

kronos played some wonderful pieces, including the suite from "requiem for a dream", music from the soundtrack of "the fountain," and a beautifully rearranged traditional swedish piece that all of us loved. so why did they have to go and make us angry with their self-indulgent banging on broken radiators (literally.)?

twentieth century music has always been a bit of a conundrum for me. and for many people, i think. it is hard to enjoy music that is deliberately conceptual and designed to break sound conventions we have spent centuries accustomed to enjoying. while i get the theory of this, one has to ask when leaning away from the stage in the hopes of getting away from the screeching, how far is too far?

the performance began with the bang on a can all stars, featuring iva bittova. bittova began on the stage lone, with an unusual pairing of wailing vocals mixed with violin, which she played while singing, if one could call it singing. her vocal ability is extremely impressive and technically superb, but when used to screech, ululate, and make tick-tock clicking noises with her tongue, it obscures what she might be able to do with another piece of music. two of my party are trained musicians; my brother and i are not. all of us were irritated at the end. and so this begs the question we kept asking, if the audience thinks it's just a stroke fest, is it just a stroke fest?

if we return to my earlier whining about post-modernism, i think it has a point here. according to the theory, everyone's point of view is equally valid: we can think it is a stroke fest; the performers can claim it is genius. but if that is really how our culture thinks, then why do we still have critics?

and what is the point of art, anyway? while we like to think of artists as geniuses, delivered a unique path to the Truth we may try to follow by looking at their work, (and we do still think this, even this far along in time), how do we handle work that seems to be solely for the artist's own gratification- "because they can" if you will?

all of us agreed that we loved about 15% of the show- all of which was contained within kronos's set- were indifferent to about half or 60%, and hated the rest. is this an acceptable ratio for a professional concert? what are we looking for when out seeing this kind of thing. while a performance on ucla's campus is probably composed of audience members looking for something more challenging than basic "entertainment," how much is it simply a transference of different values of what entertainment is if we simply apply a larger cultural reference vocabulary to what is considered "entertainment." (although intellectuals rarely want to admit to a desire for simple entertainment- perhaps this is what would make many of them, to our shock and dismay, jump up in a frenzy of clapping after one of kronos's pieces that involved banging on hunks of metal, a radiator, broken chair and taking a power saw to a non-specific metal box.) the relationship between entertainment and the artist is nothing if not complex.

in many ways this dialog began with duchamp, around this time last century, when he submitted a urinal for consideration in a salon show. it was, of course, rejected- but, strangely enough, was accepted after he revealed himself as the artist. he was disgusted at this turn of events and went on to make a series of "ready mades" or pieces of art made out of found objects.

duchamp's position was, in many ways, a protest against the excess of restrictions on what was considered art. we have certainly gotten his message and now i would argue that, if anything, there are too few restrictions on the concept of "art." i say we need to revisit the issue and get that pendulum swinging back towards the mid-line, if only because i am sick of screaming being mixed with string chamber music and feeling nauseated by the teeter-tottering and click -clacking of contemporary violinists tongues.

who is with me?

Comments

[dada]

I love this discussion, and in fact, I have a contained obsession about it. It's not up to the audience to decide what is and is not art, really.

You can think about it like this: an audience can be diverse in their ideas of art, or everyone can share the same philosophy. Going with the latter, if you take a group of unsophisticated, retinal-art-loving, middle-class grandmothers and show them Warhol's Brillo Box, then they'd tell you it wasn't art.

If you take the same object and show it to a group of Warhol-loving fanatics, they'll not only declare it art, but chances are, at least one of them already has a brillo box tattoo.

The big question I like to propose here is, what isn't art? Honestly, the only answer I can see to this is "nothing."

But I do agree with you. It's much easier to read about conceptual music than it is to listen to it, it seems. "You dance with your hips, not with your brain." Well, that is unless you're me, and are too anxious to dance in public.

Annoying and hideous sounds are exceedingly more invasive than even the worst aesthetic crimes. I think that's because sight is really the only sense you can effectively cut off in an instant.

[caroline]

i agree, and i think perhaps there is more urgency in condemnation of music because it is so much harder to avoid when encountering it. it would be much harder, for example, for a visual image- excluding a very graphic or personally distressing one- to elicit as visceral a response as a headache or a throbbing or ringing in the ears as music can. and i think the ability to shut visual art out completely makes it less of a threat. i never fear a visual art show's impact the way i do with a film, for example, which engages the most senses possible in any art medium commonly seen today. i have never seen a visual image that throws me off or changes me for much longer than the time i see the show, but a film can do that very easily. perhaps this is why there is much more casual dialog about film and its merits and values as "art" than there is with any other medium, except perhaps popular music as a distant second. as visual artists, we need not only engage with the audience in a meaningful way, both to us and to them, we need to do it at a deficit of sensory input they are used to having access to. a challenge, i think, but one that is worth accepting.

[FLO]

Well Caro, I couldn't agree less. Art has nothing to do with the audience loving it, it is more about creating an emotion, love, hate, or even the lack of emotion. Now of course i happen to dislike traditional music when it comes to "classical" if you want to call it that, and am in love with c20th cent music, that sticks to none of the traditional forms of this music. I would have been the opposite of you, since the last thing i'd want to see is some group redoing movie themes, which in my opinion shouldn't even be played outside of a fim to begin with.

Plus my last point would be: IT BEGAN WITH DUCHAMP????

[dada]

Duchamp did a few musical pieces with his family where pieces of paper had a single note written on them, and then were drawn out of a hat and written down. The randomly composed piece was then played. I think he may have done more experimentations with music, but that's the only one I know of.

Caroline - you forgot about performance! I think it's the only artform where every sense can be engaged. Film can be powerful, though.

[caroline]

FLO- i think it is more complex than that. i don't believe that the audience should constrict the artist in any way, nor do i think the artist should even think about the audience when creating- i certainly agree with you there. plus i think people are entitled to taste. what i am really about here is the intention of the work: does the artist want the audience to connect with it or not? and what percentage needs to connect for it to be a success? this is tricky, because then you wonder if you are looking for a sappy greeting card that lots of people like, but many well-read people can't stand, and that will sell well, or are you trying to get to the very well educated smaller group to understand your construct. or are you saying fuck you to constructs and that is your thing- like bunuel and dali with "un chien andalou." i guess my question is about constructing an experience for the viewer, which is my objective when i edit a body of photographs for a portfolio. the idea is mine, the images are mine, and i want it to come across so i select images both based on my aesthetic criteria of an image i am satisfied with, but also because it works in service of my idea. in the case of this show, i don't feel that the lack of cohesion among selections made any of them build and communicate the way they could with less of a spotty choice. and while i agree that, for the most part, film scores have no place in performance halls, these do have a level of sophistication that allows them to stand in this setting as well.

also- i agree with you, dada, about the performance aspect, as well as theater, both of which, when done well, are even more engaging that film because they are performed concurrently with the audience's experience of them and the immediacy of its only existing while performed heightens the experience as well.

thanks for the great comments!

[FLO]

Quote 1: "nor do i think the artist should even think about the audience when creating"

Quote 2: "what i am really about here is the intention of the work: does the artist want the audience to connect with it or not?"

I rest my case.

[caroline]

i don't know if it is really about resting ones case on that. my argument is that the creative process is private, and the exhibition process is public. one must consider the reaction when assembling something to show. and in the case of this performance, i feel the assembly and presentation were poorly done. i don't debate the right to bang on radiators at home or in the studio; i just think that some things ought to remain private constructions as their value and meaning seem to be mostly just that: private.

But if you are a performance artist, it needs a show. Not all can be done in private, the auditorium becomes the studio, hence the name performance piece.

[dada]

No, you don't need an audience for anything to be a performance. You just need an idea, and then you just make the idea happen.

Documentation is an important topic in performance. If the audience isn't there, but the documentation is (such as work with a video/still camera and tripod), then the work is still valid as being about a performance.

The idea's still there. If you take away all documentation, and do the piece by yourself, that doesn't make it any less of a performance piece.

The audience is not necessarily a vital element at all in any art. It depends on what the art is, exactly (i.e. what the concept is). Art that never sees the light of day is still art.

One of my favorite quotes: "The only way to be avant garde anymore is to not let anyone know you're working." (Duchamp).

The lack of an audience can be the only audience necessary in one's process.

[Dan Morehead]

"i don't know if it is really about resting ones case on that. my argument is that the creative process is private, and the exhibition process is public."

I think the private/public distinction is faulty and largely untenable.

I think one should discuss Duchamp as a protest (calling it a protest against the excess of restrictions on what was considered art is too limited and somewhat mutes dada voice) but probably not as a point of departure for anything constructive. This exposes the limits of dada and the perversity of neo-dada. Should these limits necessarily be applied to the multi-faceted (perhaps fractured and fracturing) complex of so-called post-modernity? I don't think so.

I think Duchamp's quote about the avant garde is true given Duchamp's position, but again that need not be definitive (nor true for a Warhol, Basquiat, Messiaen, etc.)

I think everyone should read Eagleton's "The Ideology of the Aesthetic."

I think I should get back to reading so that I can get to the books on my reading list that I've never sent to Caroline.

I think cheeses from Switzerland are better than swiss cheese.