kagablog

Between 1955 and 1961 Adorno sought a counterculture to everything he disliked at Darmstadt. Opposed to serialism as method and watching this error expand from precomposition to project entire works he needed to find his alternative future for the postwar break.

In tachiste painting he found a laboratory of concrete, skillful and perceptible abstraction to replace the formalist one that he- in common with all twentieth century Marxists- viewed as so menacing..

Armed with this precedent and fresh from dramatizing his fallen formalist Schonberg in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus, he lashed out at Goeyverts and Stockhausen labeling them Adrian Leverkuhn and his famulus.( probably unaware that Stockhausen had literally been assistant to a magician) and set up the obligatory demon for pictorialists through Feldman to Volans.

Abstract expressionism is aptly called the New York school because it traveled so badly. Despite CIA promotion in Europe - with jazz concerts- as the art of the free world -it produced there the monotony of Wols, the mannerism of Riopelle and the theatric pomp of Mattheiu. It is doubtful that Adorno had in mind recipients it did actually liberate: the young Josef Beuys making his transition out of sculpture, Yves Klein who would make it a pretext for a Scelsian music and Lucio Fontana who turned it to an earnest interrogation of camp.

To Adorno it gave a whiff of his lost atonalism and reason to suspend his own fixation on method- allowing him to revisit forgotten sidings in composition where spontaneities of timbre, sequence or metre flourished beyond the hail of Schonberg and the nail bed of Schenker.

His wanderlust ended sadly in domestic platitude – music was pictorial because it became spatial ( though spatial illusion was exactly what all modern painters avoided ) and painting become musical because it was structured in time ( every painting except a readymade is structured in time)

Marx said that society only poses a question after it has developed the answer to it. Adorno forgot this insight; clearly electronic music studios had, with their fine leftover US army equipment given composers literal ability to take on the role of the painter - working straight onto their material and hearing the immediate result : while occupying the position of the spectator or hearer and free to adjust technique to sensation and reception . Cage immediately identified this as the place where, without metaphor ,a direct dialogue with painting had arisen. Stockhausen shot back from here at Adorno: : Professor you are looking for the chicken in an abstract painting.

Morton Feldman was Adorno’s intimate nightmare: he was- with Cage Brown Tudor and Wolfe –the New York School of music. His intimacy with the great painters is legendary – hearing from his sometime teacher Stefan Wolpe that music ought to be understood by the man in the street, he glanced out the window to see Jackson Pollock crossing the road.

Feldmans pictoriaism was not the Indian summer of an ambivalent modern moralist: if Adorno was Hegel then Feldman was Nietzsche- with the same nomadic wit, aphoristic force , piercing judgment and refusal of system.

If anyone could detach the rational kernel from the mystical shell of Adornos stance against postwar music it would be Feldman

My obsession with surface is the subject of my music. In that
sense, my compositions are really not “compositions” at all.
One might call them time canvasses in which I more or less
prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music. I have
learned that the more one composes or constructs, the more
one prevents Time Undisturbed from becoming the
controlling metaphor of the music.
Both these terms - Space, Time - have come to be used in
music and the visual arts as well as in mathematics,
literature, philosophy and science. […] I prefer to think
of my work as: between categories. Between Time and
Space. Between painting and music. Between the music’s
construction, and its surface

Everything seems to be there- the negative dialectic of the in-between, the a-categorial act subtly dissolving method, the forceful , comprehensive cashing in of the painting metaphor –but also in the mix - and utterly obstructing all that Adorno’s musicated philosophy wished to achieve -is the Time Undisturbed- an aim so indelibly Heideggerian as to place Feldman- and Cage in the grip of ontology-smitten theological commentators to this day.

Too dialectical for the Frankfurt school and too exact to bowdlerize, Feldman leaves nothing to commentary - providing himself with all the means for his task. Feldman lived the wager of music having painting as its norm But his lucidity had a shadow:– as he wrote his music became the mausoleum of a painting under eclipse by its unruly successors.

Jasper Johns Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol were obnoxious accents in Feldman’s serene exchanges with the New York School. Everybody knows his unforgiving stand on Gustons return to image but this apostasy was nothing compared to Johns historic merger of abstract expressionist rhetoric, minimimalist blankness, figurative citations and conceptualist readymades or Rauschenbergs literal chicken in an abstract painting or Warhols denuding of authorship.

Painting, which became indigenous to itself and seemed to reach insurpassable authenticity in Pollock suddenly spilled into an, impure , complex ,institutional game- improbably scattering its own history and tools and raising its stakes far above sincerity of gesture and truth to materials.

Cage- who always saw far into the potentialities of painting became colleague, catalyst and exemplar to the usurping trio and more importantly, created a new kind of relation between homosexuality and the American public realm, a cool, ironic yet engaged stance which made him the Socrates to Johns and Warhol’s Plato

Feldmans exquisite equilibrium could not track the maddeningly indirect utterances of the new art or the coolly oblique lives charged with new identity they manifested. By the time he wittily claimed to evangelize at Darmstadt, he was a hero crushed by the fall of his own metaphor.

When Kevin Volans took his turn at pictorialism he would inevitably ‘…describe composition as an attempt to redefine reality (in music)’ because he was standing by then not on the shoulders of giants but on their contested estates

By 1986 Painting in New York Berlin London and Milan was far along the circumference drawn by Johns proceeding from literal installations , conceptual and minimal traps inflected by sexual politics to a fraught borderline between abstract rhetoric and epiphanic , deadpan or camp images.

Immendorff, Richter, Baselitz,, Polke Fettung ,Clemente Cucci Schnabel , Tansey Fischl, Auerbach, Freud and even Kitaj took an individual responsibility for the conundra informal techniques posed to imagery . painting was back- but not any painting-an epistemologically , historically politically charged painting negotiating all three of these planes simultaneously and manifesting an often regional or sectoral identity and bid for recognition

Analytic philosopher Arthur Danto reveled his way up this tower of Babel while disgorging a century of concepts onto the infinitely permeable art world. The commonsensical Robert Hughes grumpily withdrew to document Australia, Adornian Martin Jay lamented the denigration of vision and all around experience gave way to discourse analysis as touchstone of meaning and critical validity. October editors Kraus, Bois, Buchloh and Foster undertook sweeping historical and canonic revisions- one by one Weimar expressionism, Russian constructivism Bauhaus modernism, dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop, Beuys, minimalism underwent scholarly metamorphoses rivaling Alice in Wonderland

Painting was a fugitive swarm with a kaleidoscopic past riding a yuppie era snake of reputations and fortunes and charged with all the intellectual politics of the moment.

This was surely not the time to use it to adjudicate the prevarications of the composition world

Nevertheless Volans believes he can ride the perfect storm and still wring a definition of music or at very least a type of musical judgment from the image: he sequesters it within the citadels of method and technique making it the condition of their meaningfulness and sketching a hell of empty conceptualism as the only alternative

Technique is “the right method at the right time”, but what guides us in making the choice of appropriate method cannot be adequately explained except in terms of the resultant image. In other words, unless one is a conceptualist, a discussion of technique is meaningless without a discussion of imagery.
It is that indescribable relationship between the method and the image that interests me. It is in this dark area that composition lies

Method results in image and image must be used to select the right method at the right time- this is scarcely the indescribable dark area but perhaps the most over described theme of textual exegesis , philosophy of science and foundations of ethnography, cultural theory , new historicism, ethics and post godelian logic .in the twentieth century

Hans Georg Gadamer wrote an entire career on this putative circularity and decided that the hermeneutic circle was not the limit but the antechamber to all enquiry. His opposite number Willard Quine dramatized this dark area as radical translation and with it launched both modern relativism and the terms with which to steer through its costs and benefits and everybody else - karl popper Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn Paul Feyerabend Norwood Hanson Donald Davidson Nelson Goodman Ernst Gombrich discussed this as the theory-ladenness of perception and launched academic cottage industries around this in history of science ,new art history and cultural studies . Michel Foucault would call the relation between thought and non thought the defining question of the modern era.

Turning his back on the contemporary realities of art and of disciplined enquiry he now names his real adversary – the personification of error :

As a student of Stockhausen I used to believe that if I knew exactly why I was doing something I was composing well. Now I realize that this amounts to confining oneself to manipulating cliché. The rational application of method can at best set up a compositional problem, and with luck solving it will lead one into an area of genuine composition.

The Stockhausen in question had just completed a decade from Plus-Minus up to Aus den Sieben Tagen in which explicit tools for articulating music and unprecedented sound images emerged side by side and eventually becoming synonymous. In this sophisticated context it precisely becomes possible to compose by manipulating cliché – as demonstrated so brilliantly in Hymnen – to use , re organize or disorganize almost any material or imagery by means of manipulative procedure . film makers do not re invent cutting every time they concatenate cliché and literal banalities into the poetics of montage.
And of course :Cage became himself and invented minimalism by deriving unknown outcomes from methodically manipulated cliché

This may seem self-evident, especially to someone involved in the visual arts, but if it is self-evident, why is there so much talk in music of technique AS THOUGH IT WERE TRANSFERABLE? Why is there so little awareness of MUSICAL IMAGE?

How strange this is becomes evident against decades of Andy Warhol transferring technique and procedure from film to print making and back – each time in order to free his art from the dominance and rhetoric of the image. Or jasper johns whose notebooks of the time are filled with koan like prescriptive written techniques which replaced preparatory sketches and which he applied with deliberate indifference across the images in his paintings and sculptures –or the Fluxus artists who always detached techniques for realizing their art from its actual occurrence in order to overcome the commodification of the image

…. Or does it stem from the tacit assumption of many composers (from conservative to radical) that if you MAP a set of values from an extra-musical model (be they numerical proportions…topographical aspect of a landscape…symbols of states of mind…”laws” of nature…) onto an aspect of the music, you have explained it, or worse still, found a rationale for a composition?

Here Volans , believing he is caricaturing Stockhausen from the modulor in Klavierstucke via the mountain profile of Gruppen to the text imagery of Aus den Sieben Tagen actually provides the recipes for Kagels wonderful mappings- fecund and critical precisely for their arbitrary extra musical models that provide both the explanations and rationales for his compositions.

Feldman made it clear that what mattered was NOT A METHOD OF COMPOSITION, BUT AN ATTITUDE TOWARDS MUSIC.

Feldman would certainly step aside and credit Cage with this declaration .and Cage of course had a number of elaborate methods of composition all of which were carefully adhered to in order to demonstrate, fuel and maintain his attitude towards music .

I understand this as involving a feeling (love) for material (”know thy instrument”), an awareness that everything depends on the context (no universal rules for all situations), and a sensitivity to image.
If there are to be no fixed laws of composition, no formal concepts, then musical discussion (even of technique) needs be via imagery –

Assuming that Volans means imagery in a metaphorical musical sense he arrives by a circuitous route at the point Pierre Schaeffer and Herbert Eimert were in the early nineteen fifties when they each asked- one through a vast catalogue and an aural taxonomy and the other through the articulation principles of information theory – how sheer imagery –whether recorded and defamiliarised or generated– can organically engender the appropriate techniques for its use.

Volans ricocheting argument is not however out of momentum- he now reveals the key image that , with its coda on the idiographic space and holism of African music must redeem his ride on the white waters of analogy :

If you dance in the dark, you know exactly WHAT you are doing. WHERE you are and where you are going is less clear. Obviously, some skill is required (in the thirties one danced with a partner and hopefully there were other dancers on the floor). There is a difference between dancing in the dark and stumbling in the dark. WHY you are dancing is an existential question. I can’t think of any good justification for it - one dances for the joy of it and for establishing a relationship with an unseen partner. Only when you make a mistake or when someone turns on the lights does it become a social question. Turning on the lights makes what you are doing public. It also makes you aware of what others are doing. Obviously this has its value, but it carries with it the temptation to compete with others from the point of view of style, at the expense of sensation. You no longer do something for how it feels, but for how it looks.
The struggle to grasp the reality of what you are doing in the dark is easily deflected into competitive display in the bright light of the marketplace. So now I am really beginning to show my wounds.

It is not surprising that an argument based on the primacy of perception should finally focus on the body, claiming it as a foundation and pivot to use all that went before in a qualitatively different way.. Maurice Merleau Ponty had made an influential antitechnological philosophy from just such an edenic body centered perception – as nearby as a shift in attitude– and he like Volans invoked painting at all the crucial steps in its elaboration.

It is here that the really central issue emerges- and perhaps explains each of his strong misreadings of art , ideas and of other composers- in fact his perverse burning of the entire 1986 consensus becomes a kind of Gnostic ash to frame his defining insight.

Volans is letting an extremely elusive cat out of a gossamer bag – for throughout Adorno and Feldman’s tutelary texts- which seem like Cicero next to his rough , sincere early Christian swipes , there is no mention of the body – only of perception, sensation and gesture- the tropes of subject and agent but nothing of the body ,of being a presence. In Adorno’s case this is part of his horrified avoidance of existentialism and particularly of Heidegger’s Dasein- which he goes to the ludicrous lengths of imagining a society of medically assisted immortals to refute.

In Feldman’s case its more complex - when Rudiger Meyer was my studio assistant in the early nineties he endlessly regaled me with recordings of the Feldman -Volans provenance. I still recall his remark- in the middle of Rothko chapel that this was the music of a large guy sitting smoking. More likely something of Clement Greenberg’s pure opticality has infiltrated into Feldmans way of thinking and this kantian doctrine had room only for a perfectly general , transcendentally bound subject as correlate to the artwork. This was Greenberg’s way of getting a formalism and a constructivism out of the most subjective and expressive painters in history .but it did militate against a further doctrine of the body.

Volans did not read Merleau-Ponty – of if he did he ingenuously hid it behind his quaint reliance on Suzanne Langer as the latest word in philosophy but he did read john blacking – as his conclusion makes abundantly clear. Blacking is perhaps the most astonishing musical mind this continent has fostered and under his modest feint of extending Deryck Cooke he is on a deeply piagetian quest to understand what kinds of structure can arise from actions – with such complex actions as dancing having all the potentials - reversibility, transitivity, recursion- to furnish a primary articulation of music and a logic

In any case Volans body- always dancing ahead of the music- is all the argument he needs for a primacy of perception- allowing him to release the tortured pictorialism and to entertain the thought of a perceptual indivisibility of music coupled via the dancing body like a moebius strip to a music which –because it is teachable and learnable- is also therefore articulated

And at this point the pictorialist Volans and the africanist Volans coalesce- because Blacking’s unraveling of articulation carries with it an entire musical register – a constructivism at permanent right angles to the indivisible duree of movements

It is no coincidence that the problem of primary articulation -folllowing a century of music like a dog – should return at the heart of Volans collapsed sublimation of Stockhausen , Feldman, painting and Darmstadt neue einfachkeit manifesto- and even less co-incidental that ethnomusicology should announces this return.

As the great media historian Freidrich Kittler has shown, music was thrown into crisis by the gramophone- in Edison’s day a recording device- because suddenly an entire circuit of reading and writing of music – a schriebmaschien as intricate and vivid as the culture of the book – found itself doubled by a machine directly writing in sound.

Such sound-writing devices had been Helmholtz tools in proving that the ear possesses receptiveness to consonance and dissonance beyond all chordal convention or orthography- in a word , the ear articulates- and Hornborstel immediately drives this insight home in ethnomusicology by suggesting that half speed playback on the gramophone can sift primary articulations out of the field-recording -too rapid or too arcane for the living ear to notice.

Transcription- writing from the ear - has to take second place to the time base manipulation of the music image- itself literal but arcane, inextricably mixed with the errors and the grit , the gutturalness and the unique textures of the real . quickly this ability to interrogate the sound shape spawned phonetics- with Troubetskoi statistically, comparatively, siphoning out the phoneme- an articulation finer than any syllable –arranging meaningless atoms of meaning in geometric constellations from deep within the grainy fieldwork of the grooves.

An entire secondary orality springs up around this new medium with its rich and indiscriminate imaging of the real . its currency is the endlessly fertile sound image with its , primary unwritten unsystematic, unconceptual ,immanent , context-heeding articulations which Volans and Feldman and Adorno hallucinate before them in informal painting.

In case there is any doubt that music, ethnography and articulation share a history, Levi- Strauss , who had championed the articulation of continua as the fundamental way to understand how culture arises from nature –wrote in 1964 that music was the supreme mystery of the human sciences and held the key to their progress- why? Because it was a language intelligible to all but untranslatable . if music held the profoundest secrets of articulation and thus of structuralism itself- an articulation in itself inarticulable- it was important to clear its future of false conceptions- and hence his famous critique of Boulez . Umberto eco was wrong to see in this a feud between structural and serial thought for it was in fact a clash between two rival conceptions of articulation- with Boulez ( and all modernists ) believing articulation can occur on a single level and with Levi Strauss retorting that all articulation is either double layered or is fatuous- unable to prevent its own elements from inexorably drifting apart.

It should also be clear why electronic music- the parameter-morphing successor to the wax cylinder – should provide such a gruesome mirror to the pictoriaists: it grew out of the cold war search for automatic translation and shared its resources with phonologists- those sound image mappers dancing in the dark of high speed soviet transmissions. It inhabited – as cage was quick to realize – a formative borderline with nature and noise- with everything articulation rejected- Rilke poetically grasped this edge in his essay Primal Sound- and there gave birth to expressionist and concrete poetry - when he suggested playing the groove of the foramen magnum on a human skill with a gramophone needle and in Variations V Cage and Tudor have Cunningham dancing in the statistical contingent dark of a dozen tape recorders. Electronic music is the drama of sound shapes melting into spectra and lives not in the image but on the edge of that shore where we grasp our senses through our senses-endlessly jeopardized by unheard fingers of noise, accidentalness and death

And perhaps this is why seeing music with its face and its skull together was too bleak for the pictorilaists , who , like the child who jubilates in the mirror at an mage more coordinated and fascinating than their poor clumsy selves- extolled the idealized potentials of painting- the wondrous mirror of the senses which like film, can edit sensation and freeze it in being for a long time . Kittler argued that film was the medium, the technology , underpinning Lacans realm of the imaginaire- and that fantasy needs no more than the gentle splice to go on forever- in any case he also argued that the gramophone, which records every clumsiness and misprision of the real – is a harbinger of dissolution where images never form except shockingly , as unwelcome as our own voices overheard in a recording- and where we never get the answer to the question of whether my backside looks big in this dress.

Between the imaginary and the real —of if you prefer, as I do– to give them their names in the media network- the film and the gramophone- an entire battle over the future of music rages — an eye replacing an ear and the lost authority of the transcriber returning at the tip of a brush.