popstock makes my popstock

My new solo exhibition, Tomorrow Is The Question? Is The Question!, opens at Audio Visual Arts (http://audiovisualarts.org/) March 30 and runs through the month of April.

My piece, The Ocular Bridge, will be included in the show, Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, opening at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art in October 2012 and travelling to Toonto’s Power Plant in June 2013. I’m currently expanding The Ocular Bridge from a single-channel video into a three-channel (or chapter) work. I will also be contributing to a book to be published by the University of Chicago Press in conjunction with the exhibition.

More details as they emerge.

Now that the installation is finished at Audio Visual Arts, I’m posting audio from my 4 Songs Sung Site-Specifically.

First, an image.

Car Wash
Run Run Run
See Saw
Telephone

Burden Bangs Joy
Delivered November 6, 2011
Sound Art Theories Symposium
School of the Art Institute, Chicago

1. And… A Rock and Roll Aesthetic

The first of a sequence of proposals: A rock and roll aesthetic is an aesthetic of intensity.

It’s not that an aesthetic of intensity has never been proposed before – it isn’t born with rock and roll. But no other proposal has caught on: not Baudelaire nor Rimbaud, not Artaud, not Situationism, nor Viennese Actionism. Each of these episodes stands alone. One can try to connect the dots, but these episodes, if they connect at all, connect only to each other, remaining subcutaneous in the cultural body. None has infected the culture at large, creating a visible symptomology: lesions on the skin; boils, blisters, hives or pox on the surface of the to and fro of the everyday. That is, until rock and roll. Rock and roll is the first aesthetic proposition to disseminate intensity entirely in praxis. It has made intensity a viable category of experience in mainstream culture. And while art practice has, in isolated instances, responded to the influence of Baudelaire, Artaud, and Situationism, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that art as a whole had to respond to a rock and roll aesthetic of intensity.

And… Returning to a Return of the Return

In 1977 Semiotext(e), published an issue double-entedrely titled “Nietzsche’s Return.” The included essays tie renewed interest in Nietzsche – especially in France – to a post-68 critique of capitalism and its institutions. Jean-François Lyotard’s contribution called “Notes on the Return and Kapital,” proposes that Nietzsche’s philosophical project suggests an alternative to capitalism’s bland, bloodless obedience. This alternative, according to Lyotard, goes by the name “intensity.”

Since we are in Chicago, it’s convenient to mention an exhibition presented here at the MCA in 2007 and 08, “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967.”  The exhibition catalogue includes a couple of essays that provide useful, sometimes provocative, connections. The most direct of these occurs in an essay by German critic, Diedrich Diederichsen. Diederichsen borrows Lyotard’s use of the term “intensity” to situate rock and roll and politics in the wake of punk nihilism. Diederichsen says Lyotard’s “Notes on The Return and Kapital” was both motivating and polarizing, leaving his generation of Germans to decide if intensity was always a red herring value or if it was merely misused and abandoned by the hippies. Intensity, properly experienced, produces jouissance: not a simple pleasure, but a joy that teeters on the precipice of dissolution. Such intensity, such joy, evades representation. Of course, this makes identifying it difficult. And this is at least one of the things I mean to suggest with my title, Burden Bangs Joy: the burden of theorizing, of classifying, of identifying, bangs the joy out of the object of our intentions. Representation annuls intensity.

It’s a pickle. Because, as Lyotard notes,

Representation is an intrinsic part of philosophical discourse. The weakening of intensities, the production of concepts and re-presenting are congruent in philosophical discourse. (“Notes on the Return and Kapital” 44)

And it ain’t just in philosophy where we find ourselves pinched. Capital, as the most insidious and seemingly natural mode of representation, poses the greatest threat to intensity. Left to its own devices, capitalist representation subsumes its own representations, leaving even its foundational presumptions susceptible to the mechanism’s reifying impulse.

Kapital is but production as consumption, consumption as production, that is metamorphosis without end or purpose. Such a metamorphosis operates as a … self-dissolution of its own institutions, constantly undone and redone. (Lyotard “Notes on the Return and Kapital” 47)

And… Unwriting Intensities / Writing Untensities

So let me come around to making my second proposal about a rock and roll aesthetic.

Rock and roll, built in the best instances of little more than intensities, is especially vulnerable to representation. (Witness cultural phenomena from Hot Topic punk stores at the mall, to “Jackass” on MTV.) In the same 1977 issue of Semiotext(e) in which Lyotard’s essay appears, we also find the essay “Nomad Thought” by Gilles Deleuze. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s radical proposal is

to use all codes, past, present and future, to introduce something which does not and will not let itself be coded. (Deleuze 13)

Deleuze cites three societal encoding instruments: “the law [by which he means sacred law], the contract [meaning the social contract] and the institution [meaning political institutions].” (13) I want to fold these three encodings into one master-encoding which I think would have to retain the name institution, because all three behave identically in relation to those beholden to them and are instituted by the same societal and psychological mechanisms. As Lyotard writes,

What I mean by institution, here, is anything which offers itself as a stable signification (political, legal, cultural…), i.e. anything based on set intervals and conducive to representation. (Lyotard “Notes on the Return and Kapital” 47)

Reading Deleuze and Lyotard, reading Nietzsche, I am tempted to imagine the unstitution, that which is unstituted. This is what Deleuze means when he says that Nietzsche introduces “something that isn’t encodable, the jamming of all codes.” (15) I’m tempted by the idea of the unstitution because it performs a microcosmic version of its intentions in its constitution. The unstitution is produced in the code of typing – arguably the master code of our technological time – by shifting a finger a few millimeters to the left, from the keyboard’s I to it’s U – a minor physical perturbance (to the left, mind you) creates a major semantic disturbance. It is not planned, not targeted, it is a typo, a mistake. If institution seeks to regularize everything, even perturbation, then unstitution is that which resists set intervals, the hiccup, the glitch.

Later, Deleuze says of such uncodeable phenomena, that they

must not be translated into representations or fantasies; ….they must not be sifted through codes of … the institution; … on the contrary they must be turned into flows which carry us always further, closer to externality, these experiences precisely constitute intensity. (18)

And… Deleuze, Guitary

The British critic, Simon Reynolds, who, incidentally, also has an essay in the “Sympathy for the Devil” catalogue, compares the structure of the music of the German band, CAN, to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, which Reynolds says is characterized by “the conjunction ‘and … and … and,’” This “and… and… and…” of CAN is also exemplary of how intensity is generated. So, as a kind of performative strategy, I’m adopting this “and … and … and” as the structure for this talk, a sequence of bulletins on a rock and roll aesthetic.

The insistence inherent in this structure echoes what I want to propose as one of the immanent features of intensity. But let me try to be more precise. In the book Deleuze and Music, Jeremy Gilbert identifies “intense ‘peak’ moments which characterize most improvisatory musics.” (Gilbert, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation,” 126) I want to insist that the insistence of rock and roll intensity does not depend on peaks. What insistence depends on is just banging on: banging and banging and banging. This is why Reynolds cites CAN, impeccable bangers on. If we were focused on peaks, then the and … and … and wouldn’t matter, or it would have to be converted into and … and … AND, which would force us back into the same old patterns of development and instrumentality that Deleuze and Gilbert and Can and intensity and rock and roll, all want to avoid.

So, proposal number three: Intensity is a matter of pressure, not peaks.

Insistence, persistence, and ultimately, resistance, are the qualities, the forces, that intensity brings to bear.

And… Bangs

So, what does Lester Bangs – the great rock critic, dead in 1982 at the age of 33 – say about this insistence upon which I’m insisting? Writing of Iggy Pop’s forays into long-form, insistent, self-abuse in the mid-1970s,

Bangs writes: “He’s crying in every nerve to explode out of [his body] into some unimaginable freedom.” (Bangs, “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” 207) This is the funhouse mirror image of what must be the best known writing of insistence in our literature, Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Instead, Iggy’s insistence says: “I can’t go beyond, I’ll go on.” There’s a desperation in Iggy that doesn’t exist in Beckett. Beckett is resigned to futility but sees no alternative to simply playing the futility out – or is it the resignation that’s played out? Beckett’s insistence may be morose, even apocalyptically numb, but it’s not desperate in the sense of clawing at the lid of the coffin from the inside.

In a piece published in the Village Voice in 1977, Bangs identifies the source of Iggy’s psycho-somatic mania. Conveniently, the name he assigns to this pathology is the same one I’m pursuing here.

[Iggy’s] intensity comes from a murderous drivenness that has in the past made him the most dangerous performer alive: the plunges into the third row, cutting himself and rolling in broken glass onstage, getting into verbal and occasional physical brawls with his audiences. … That there is no solution but death is why all the rest of it happens. (Psychotic Reactions, 205)

Iggy is not resigned to anything. He has forgotten that it’s futile. At the same time, he’s internalized that truth. It forms the material of his neurons as well as his synaptic voids, it flows in his arteries, and puddles in the cavities of his intestines. It crystalizes in the geology of his musculature. Sinew rises up against the skeleton that is its architecture, threatening to break free, either fully and finally escaping his body’s gravitational pull, or simply dropping like a soft turd on the pavement. The focus of Iggy’s amphetamine-amphibian gaze lands on a somewhere else no one else can see. And he refuses to resign himself to the material destitution of the here and now. He thrashes against location and time, like a shark in a tight cage. He doesn’t go on despite merely fearing he can’t. His plight is more tragic than that. He goes on as the embodiment of his own immanence and ours.

And… Bang!

Christof Migone’s Quieting is a sly and stealthy piece of work – its slyness and stealth contributing to or even constituting the intensity that lurks in its heart. I want to take the opportunity to engage Quieting and Salomé Voegelin’s reading of the piece in her recent book, Listening to Noise and Silence. Since both Salomé and Christof are here, I though this would be a great opportunity to cross-reference three of the presenters and the positions we occupy in the discourse on, and practice of, sound. You will hear directly from Salomé and Christof tomorrow morning. And I hope at some point this weekend they’ll have a chance to respond to the following comments.

Christof Migone released Quieting as a CD in 2000. The disc consists of 36 tracks ranging in duration from 16 seconds to 3 minutes and twelve seconds.] 18 of the tracks contain digital silence. Of the remaining 18 tracks, most include short snippets of very quiet environmental recordings that read for all intents and purposes as quietness, if not silence. But three of the tracks include content that Migone has singled out in the CD’s liner notes: Track 18 is the temporal and thematic centerpiece of Quieting.

Twelve seconds in a cannon is fired. It’s not particularly important for the listener to know that the cannon in question is fired every day at noon in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Track 22, four tracks after the cannon, uses audio from the video recording of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), although, importantly, the audio Migone uses does not include the gunshot of Burden’s title.

Track 36, the final track, is silent for all but the last six seconds in which we hear a garbled voice extracted from First Contact, a documentary which recounts the story of armed Australians subjugating the Papua New Guineans in the 1930s.

The total duration of signifying audio on this 42-minute CD amounts to 38 seconds. Those 38 seconds all refer, in one way or another, to ballistics: a cannon and two rifles. Voegelin’s attention is focused on the 33 tracks of silence and near-silence. For her, the cannon is a framing device. Voegelin writes:

The cannon brackets the silence and reveals the intention of the work: to make you listen, to quieten yourself and hear your own process and location of engagement. (88)

Voegelin never acknowledges the ballistic thread running through Quieting. Instead she focuses on her own sonic/somatic experience of listening:

[It] becomes material through my fleshly encounter: hooked inside my body its silence tugs on the surface of my skin to hear it as a whisper all over my body. (90)

Voegelin’s experience seems to be self-generated and to exist independently of Quieting’s content and means of presentation. At times she claims to have produced or co-produced the work, its meanings and intentions, in her act of listening:

[T]his frame is the contingent act of listening rather than a particular instruction to hear. It happens on the composer’s wish but the desire of the audience to hear fulfills it. (89)

This is a claim that runs throughout Voegelin’s book: what we might call “authorship-via-listening.” And I’m certainly post-Death-of-the-Author enough to be on board with a bit of listener empowerment. But I also think that listening has an obligation to work with what it’s listening to and to attend to its particularities. So if we’re going to listen to Quieting, let’s listen to it.

The quiet or silent tracks before the cannon shot are set-ups, each track persistently pushing forward to the next. Why not one long track of silence? Because these tracks tick by with the persistence of a ticking bomb: tick-tick-tick. These tracks are the methodical set-up before the punch line. They are the ruse that allows the con. They are the complacency that precedes the moment of violation. The tracks after the cannon shot are the ticking emptiness of conscience in the aftermath of trauma. Both the firer and the fired-upon ask questions that cannot be answered: tick-tick-tick. These silences are the silence of history, the silence of moral certitude in which all questions and doubts and explanations dissipate into muteness. The quieting of the work’s title is not a Zen quieting of the mind, but the oppressor’s quieting of the oppressed. It is also the oppressed’s quieting of herself in a vain effort to evade the gaze and grasp of the oppressor. The quieting of the title is the sound of the victim erasing himself in the shadow of mounting threat: tick-tick-tick.

The intensity of Migone’s Quieting is produced by the pressurized persistence of its silences. But this pressure is motivated, inflated, so to speak, by the peak moment of the cannon shot. Without the cannon shot the silences do not produce intensity. But without the quiet and silent tracks, the cannon alone would not create the intensity we’ve been defining here. In the two tracks that reference rifles, the shots that link them to the cannon are absent. Both offer what is apparently language, but neither is easily parsed. The tracks resist simple decoding. What we are left with is pressure, insistence, intensity.

In 2000, the same year he released Quieting, Migone published an essay, tellingly titled “Ricochets.” He seems to be referring to the silences of Quieting, when he describes,

Silence without agency. Silence as the sound fear makes when at the end of the barrel, the suspension of time after the shot. (Migone, “Ricochets”)

By surrounding the cannon blast, the audible imprint of power, with more than forty minutes of “silence without agency,” Migone requires the listener to contend with both conscience and consciousness, with both self and other, with the undismemberable entity that we and they form in the crucible of history. The essay reads this history as a series of befores and afters of human enterprise and its calamitous endgames:

Past the vessel/shipwrecks, train/derailments, automobile/car crashes, electricity/electrocutions at the end of the corridor we find ethnography/… . Perhaps an elliptical silence is the only possible response on the other side of that slash. Perhaps silence is the ultimate catastrophe. We can’t be silent anymore. ‘Silence is complicity.’
(Migone, “Ricochets” [embedded quote, Kim Sawchuck]) http://www.christofmigone.com/html/projects_gallery/ricochets.html

And… With Every Bang, A Burden

Chris Burden’s “White Light/White Heat” (1975) started with a request to Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York:

I requested that a large triangular platform be constructed in the southeast corner of the gallery. The platform was ten feet above the floor … The size and height of the platform were determined by the requirement that I be able to lie flat without being visible from any point in the gallery.

After this request, the piece shuts its mouth.

For 22 days, Burden lives on the platform, invisible to visitors. He does not eat, talk, or come down.

Burden is, of course, better known for more visceral violent works, like “Shoot” (1971), the piece referenced in Migone’s Quieting, and “Transfixed” (1974), and these might seem better examples of intensity and a rock and roll aesthetic than “White Light/White Heat.” Last year in e-flux Journal, Diedrich Diederichsen revisited Lyotard’s term “intensity,” describing it as “a devotion to unreserved investment into the potential of grand moments.” (Diederichsen, “People of Intensity,” 3) But Lyotard would reject the notion of a “grand moment,” and insist that intensity occurs in the hollows of time, in moments that barely register as moments. While grand moments, like Gilbert’s “peak” moments, demand reportage, intensity evades it, coming to visibility or audibility only as its pressure begins to distend the frameworks in which it occurs. Intensity is the result of pressure exerted. It needn’t be loud nor frenetic nor shocking nor life-threatening. That’s why I’m using words like “insistence” and “persistence” and “resistance,” rather than a word like “violence.” Let’s call this point number 4:

Intensity is defined as a great pressure exerted against the limits of a situation or a structure.

“White Light/White Heat” creates more of this kind of intensity than Burden’s more overtly violent pieces. It’s not just that it takes its name from the great 1968 album by the Velvet Underground. It’s that Burden’s piece is about pressure, simultaneously inflating and deflating its situation. The tension created in the gallery space pushes beyond the pressure recommended by the manufacturers (i.e., the gallery, art historians, preceding artists). Eyewitnesses claim that though there was nothing to indicate that there was a human being up there on that platform, they could feel his presence. At the same time, the expectations a gallery-goer must have had for a Burden show in 1975 are totally deflated. Nothing “happens.” These differential pressures created by “White Light/White Heat” amp up its intensity. And I use the verb “amp” with some intent at a confab such as this, devoted to sound. The amplitude of a sound wave is the product of the difference between the pressure of the undisturbed air and the maximum pressure caused by the wave. Amplitude, then, is the product of differences in pressure. Metaphorically, I want to claim a similar causal relation for intensity as I’m defining it here and applying it to Burden’s “White Light/White Heat.” The difference between the pressure of the undisturbed air of the gallery and the maximum pressure caused by Burden’s invisible presence produces an intensity that connects Burden’s work back to its namesake.

About which a quick word:

When the Velvet Underground recorded White Light/White Heat, they told producer Tom Wilson to keep the needles constantly in the red. The result is a pressure exerted on the amplifiers, the compressors, the mixing desk, but also on bodies, on ears, on our attention, on our tolerance, on the notion of song form, and an intensity – known as “saturation” – imparted to the magnetic tape. Something similar is produced by the pressure exerted by Burden’s “White Light/White Heat.” What if we also call this intensity  “saturation”?

And… Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s $19.99

Diederichsen worries about the cooptation of Nietzschean and punk intensities. Labor, camouflaged and convinced of its uselessness-value, merely serves the end of frittering time, money, and energy. Wastefulness, perversely, becomes a Capitalist goal. His worries boil down to the concern that

intensity and experience are at stake in name only, … the values have actually been shifted from one place to another in order not to preserve them but to betray them, to use them as pure decoration. (“People of Intensity,” 5)

The betrayal here is that radical experience becomes a style and that style becomes a commodity. Rock and roll is exemplary in this regard. The burden of representation, quantification, even qualification or description, threatens to bang the intensity, the jouissance, out of the joyful abandon of not giving a fuck.

Diederichsen looks to the example of advertising agencies in the 1970s and 80s – proto versions of Adbusters or similar anti-capitalist meta-corporations – that endeavored to become factories of non-production, employing people to make and sell nothing, even boasting that “I myself enjoyed an opportunity to spend half a year working at [such] an agency.” This is conceptual capitalism – not leisure as capital, but capital as leisure, an attempt to do to capital what it does to everything else: to appropriate it in the name of the very things whose existence it denies. Diederichsen sees such enterprise as an exercise in intensity because it disobeys capitalism’s demands for instrumentality, pursuing, instead, a program of wastefulness.

Intensity and wastefulness, at least at first glance, obey extra-economic, if not counter-economic, principles … Wastefulness is the opposite of husbandry. Intensity enjoys potential and irresponsibility. (“People of Intensity,” 4)

When its irresponsibility is seen as a critique of, and resistance to, dominant modes of experience and evaluation the wastefulness of the do-nothing corporation increases, putting pressure on situations and structures. Diederichsen is not so pie-eyed as to overlook the possibility that such exercises are often swiftly repatriated by capitalism:

[P]rinciples of intoxication and wastefulness function only when they are precisely not subject to deflective interpretation, watered down by entrepreneurs, instrumentalized, devalued: when we can believe in them without allowing ourselves to get screwed. (“People of Intensity,” 6)

So the tension here is between screwing up the system and getting screwed by it. The question is whether we can reverse the flow of our title (and keep it reversed), to arrive at a fifth proposal:

Joy bangs burden; or: an aesthetics of intensity subverts the dual instrumentality of the market and the academy.

For Bangs, the Party –capital P – is another synonym for intensity and a response to Diederichsen’s concerns.

I believe in the Party as an exhilarating alternative to the boredom and bitter indifference of life… The Party is one answer to how to manage leisure in a society cannibalized by it. (Psychotic Reaction, 75)

In the elision between the joy and the bang, between screwing up and getting screwed, something emerges. We become aware of the difference between answers and action. The Party is all action. Or maybe more accurately, the Party is action as answer. The party rejects telos, and with it, instrumentality and its logic. As, Bangs puts it elsewhere:

[F]ar from being anti-intellectual, the Party is a-intellectual; it doesn’t make any promises or ask for any field workers. As an answer to the mysteries of life, it’s a Bronx cheer. (Psychotic Reaction, 75)

And… Joy

So, let’s end where we ought always to start: with Joy. Camden Joy, too impatient to wait out the natural cycles of artistic call and journalistic response, took to the streets in the early-1990s, becoming the first, and maybe only, guerilla rock critic. A series of  wheatpasted manifestoes and photocopied pamphlets assail what Joy calls “the advertocracy.” Coincident with Diederichsen’s championing of conceptual capitalism, Joy ends his greatest-ever pamphlet, the one entitled, “The Greatest Record Album Singer that Ever Was” by recalling a project – possibly apocryphal – from his past. He and a friend start a business, making advertisements for absurd services.

Unsurprisingly, Joy and his friend find no takers, leading Joy to pursue the activities for which he is best known. Although, truth be told, “best known” is hardly an appellation that sits well on his scrawny shoulders. Of the 100 manifestoes Joy distributed in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, only 22 survive.

One of these, handed to Christmas shoppers at Macy’s, takes the form of an open letter to History (capital H), suggesting that History is too old and no longer fit for its occupation. Joy offers to take over, replacing the “weary and near-blind” History with “ruddier blood.” Among Joy’s litany of charges against History:

…that communism has gone down as a failure (why not also Love, old bastard? Love too hurts and disappoints why not as well murder it, foolish History? But no – arbitrarily you steal from us communism and leave us Love!)

Another manifesto, “attached with hat elastics before Gracie Mansion,” reads, simply:

Joe Strummer Where Are You

A third, pasted around the World Trade Center in early October of 1995, arranges scraps of cut-and-paste text in a circle. Eight blurbs crown spokes emitting from a central hub labeled “Pleasure thyself.” One epithet reads, in part:

In dimmed rooms of velvety incense dank with unfair death, devoutly call on the ones who led us here that they may yet guide us to merry freedom: Mayakefski, Duchamp (he’s de champ), Oldenberg, Daniel Johnston.

Another, pleads,

Give people the goddamned chance to believe in something, anything.

I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the weekend and I thank you for your kind attention.

A snapshot of “4 Songs Sung Site-Specifically” on the Silver Sound Box at Audio Visual Arts (34 E. 1st St. NYC). Trust me, it doesn’t sound as good as it looks.

My new piece, “4 Songs Sung Site-Specifically” will open September 18 at Audio Visual Arts (outside on the “silver sound box”): 34 East 1st Street NYC.

The silver sound box features 4 headphone jacks. Passersby can plug in and listen to each of the songs anytime, 24/7. The piece consists of 4 audio recordings, each one of me singing along to a well-known song while listening to it on headphones. Each song is sung in a site or situation suggested by the song’s lyrics.

The songs:
Car Wash by Rose Royce
Run Run Run by the Velvet Underground
See Saw by Aretha Franklin
Telephone by Lady Gaga

I’m pleased to have been asked to contribute to the exhibition, “Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art” opening November 2012 at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art and travelling thereafter. My piece The Ocular Bridge, from 2008 will be included in the show.

Curator, Andrea Andersson, has also asked me to contribute to a book to be published in conjunction with the exhibition. My essay, entitled “N.B.” will consist of foot- and endnotes culled from texts related to conceptual writing and conceptual art. These noted will then be cited in footnotes with my commentary appearing in endnotes – notes on notes on notes.

Artists in the exhibition include: Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Pavel Buchler, Claude Closky, Monica de la Torre, Dexter Sinister, Craig Dworkin, Rob Fitterman, Michelle Gay, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Emma Kay, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Simon Morris, João Onofre, Pratchaya Phinthong, Paolo Piscitelli, Vanessa Place,  Seth Price, Kay Rosen, Allen Ruppersburg, Joe Scanlan, Lytle Shaw, Andy Warhol, and many more.

Writers contributing to the book: Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Patrick Greaney, Liz Kotz, Marjorie Perloff, among others.

I’ll be one of the featured presenters at the Sound Art Theories Symposium at the SAIC November 5 & 6. Also presenting: Christoph Cox, David Grubbs, Salomé Voegelin, and Allen S. Weiss. It should be a great event. Open call for papers and more details:

http://www.cvent.com/events/school-of-the-art-institute-of-chicago-sound-art-theories-symposium-2011/event-summary-59dd142f3d614f719123b427b19a4490.aspx

I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be a Visiting Artist at the SMFA in Boston this year (2011/12). I’ll join Nate Harrison in the Sound Area. I’ll be teaching a variety of courses including, “Intro to Sound,” “Silence,” “Non-Cochlear Sound,” and a “Radio Art Practicum.”

I am no longer affiliated with IDSVA.

A piece recently submitted for The More The Merrier, a project and publication organized and edited by Jens Maier-Rothe and Hong-Kai Wang at Project Fulfill Art Space, Taipei.

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Before Becoming The Music, The Music Was Just A Word:
Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman (remix)
Seth Kim-Cohen

Translator’s note: The meeting between the saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman and philosopher Jacques Derrida is documented here took place in late June and early July 1997, Coleman and during three concerts at La Villette, a museum and performing arts north Paris complex, which houses, among other things, the famous Paris Conservatory. Here Derrida interview Coleman about his views on composition, improvisation, language and racism. Perhaps the more interesting point of the sample is the convergence of their respective ideas on the “Languages” and experiences of racial prejudice. This interview was conducted in English a few days before the concert of Coleman, but since the original transcripts could not be located, Timothy S. Murphy has translated into English in the text published in French. Seth Kim-Cohen then copied a PDF file of the interview, found at www.ubu.com and, using www.babblefish.com, Kim-Cohen interview translated into French and then again in English, coming to the text below.

Jacques Derrida: The year in New York you’re a program called presentation Ting Civilization2. Does the relationship have to do with music?

Ornette Coleman: I am trying to express a concept that you can translate something into another. I think the sound has a much more democratic relationship to information, because you do not need to understand the alphabet ” Touhas most musicians think you’re hiring them to keep that music alive. And most musicians are not as tièmeoleman: GENDER music. This year, New York, I am setting up a project with the New York Philharmonic and my first quartet sans-Don Cherry-ousiasm more when they play the same things every time. So I prefer to write music that they have never played before.

JD: You want to surprise them.

OC: Yes, I want to encourage them instead of just asking them to accompany me in front of the public. But I find it very difficult to faire, because the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting person, in that it prefers to destroy what the composer wrote or said.

JD: SA vousy When the sound is more “democratic”, what do you think of this as a composer? You write music in a coded form all the same.

OC: In 1972, I wrote a symphony called Skies of America and has been a tragic event for me because IEur gives the score. And [repeat] next rehearsal I ask them to show me what they found and we can go from there. I am with my musicians and my students. I truly believe that whoever tries to express in words, in poetry, in whatever form, can take my book harmolodic etnstantly protest against this accusation.

CB: Yes. People outside think it is a special form of freedom, but I think it ‘is a limitation. So it took twenty years, but now I’m having a language of another part played by the Symphony Orchestra of New York and its leader. The other day as I was meeting with some members of the Philharmonic, they said, “You know, the person in charge of the scores needs to see that.” I was upset, c It is as if you wrote me a lettre composer according to him, do it with the same passion and the same elements. In PREPARATIO not had such good relations with the music scene [in the music] as when I was free jazz, most people thought that I just pick up my saxophone and played everything going on in my head, without following any rules but it was not true.

JD: But all your partners share your conception of music?

OC: Normally, I start up something that I have analyzed, I play with them, then I confirm that there was nothing that could irritate me. We must ensure that the Philharmonic will not be disturbed. Then they said, “The only thing we want to know is if there is a point in that place, a word to another,” he had nothing to do with music or sound, just with symbols. In fact, I wrote the music for thirty years and I call harmolodic is as if we were making [manufacturing] our own words, with an idea prev. No such projects in New York, you must first write the music for yourself, then ask participants to read, agree, and even transform the original version?

CB: For the Philharmonic I had to write parts for each instrument, copy them, then go see the person in charge of scores. But with jazz bands, I write and I give the parts to the musicians in rehearsal. What is really shocking improviet someone had to read of what we want to model frame, then brings his touch to it.

OC: Yes, the idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate or lead. What I mean is that you should be. . . smart, I guess that’s the word. In improvised music, I think that musicians are trying to assemble a puzzle emotional or intellectual, at least a puzzle in which the instruments set the tone. This is especially the piano that was used at any time as an executive in the music, that despite its name, most musicians use a “frame [frame]” as a basis for improvisation. I just recorded a CD with a European musician, Joachim Kiihn, and the music that I wrote to play with him, that we recorded in August 1996, has two characteristics: it is totally improvised, but at the same time, it follows the laws and rules European structure. And yet, when you bring to our days. What you’re talking about the shape that morphs into other forms, I think it’s something healthy, but very rare.

JD: Maybe you’ll agree wimais it is more necessary and, indeed, the commercial aspect of music is very uncertain. commercial music is not necessarily more accessible, but it is limited. When you start to repeat, is ready, in writing, or do you leave a room for you hear it, it has a totally improvised air. First musician litntre the specific event that is the music concert and pre-written or improvised music? Do you think music prewritten prevents the event from taking place?

OC: No, I do not know if this is true for the language, but in jazz, you can take a very old piece and make a different version of it. What is fascinating is the memory Evu? Suppose we’re playing and you hear something you think could be improved, you could tell me, “You should try it.” For me, music has no leader.

JD: What do you think of the relationship bIn its structure. Thus, it is a repetition in the work, which is intrinsic to the initial creation, one that endangers or complicates the concept of improvisation. Repetition is already in the improvisation so when people want trap you between improvisation and pre-written, they are wrong.

OC: Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.

JD: Do you think your music and how people act can or should change, for example, politically or e emoi the fact that the very concept of improvisation verges on reading, because often what we mean by improvisation is the creation of something new, but something that n’excnot read the prewritten framework that makes it possible.

CB: Right.

JD: I’m not an “expert Ornette Coleman,” but if I translate what you do in an area I know best, that of written language, the unique event which is the language of the other produces a single time is nevertheless répétéh music. I was in Texas, I began playing the saxophone and support my family playing on the radio. One day I walked into a place that was full of game and the prostitute there, people arguing, and I saw a woman being stabbed and then-I thought I’d get out of there. I told my mother that I did not want to play this music more because I thought I’d add that all this suffering. She replied: “What’s got his hands on you, you want someone to pay you for your soul?” I had sex pase? Can or should your role as an artist and composer have effect on the state of things?

OC: No, I do think so, but I think many people have already experienced that before me, and if I start complaining, they will say, “Why are you complaining, we have not changed for this? someone you admire more than you, so why should we change it for you? “So basically, I do not think so. I was in the South where minorities are oppressed, and I identified with them through pensé this, and when she told me it was as if I ‘had been re-baptized.

JD: Your mother was very lucid.

OC: Yes, she was an intelligent woman. Since that day I tried to find a way to avoid feeling guilty about doing something that others do not.

JD: Were you successful?

OC: I do not know, but Bebop had emerged and I saw it as a way out. This is instrumental music that is not connected to a certain scene, which can exist in a more normal. Everywhere I was playing blues til there were many unemployed people who did nothing but play money. Then I took bebop, which was hapPENING GENRE especially in New York, and I told myself that I had to go. I’m about 17 years, I left home and headed south.

JD: Before Los Angeles?

CB: Yes. I had long hair like the Beatles, was in the early fifties. So I headed south, and just like the police, blacks fight above all, they did not like moais looking for music that I pouvais jouer without feeling guilty about doing something. So far I have not found it yet.

JD: When you arrived in New York as a young man, have you a premonition of what you’ll find musically harmolodic, or did it happen much later?

OC: No, because when I arrived in New York, I was more or less treated as a southerner who does not know the music, who could neither read nor ewrite, but I never tried to protest that. Then I decided I would try to develop my view with the use of new technologies in your music?

CB: Since Denardo was my manager, I understand how technology is simple, and I understood its meaning.

JD: Did you feel that the introduction of technology has been a violent transformation of your project, or has it been easy? On the other hand, your project in New York on civilizations have some had too weird a look for them. They hit me in the face and smashed my sax. It has been difficult. In addition, I was with a group that played what was called “pipe-minstrel music,” and tried to bebop, I made progress and I am committed. I was in New Orleans, I went to see a very religious family and I started playing in a “sanctified” church when I was little, I played in church all the time. Since my mother said those words to me, I was European are perhaps half a dozen. As for technology, inventors I’ve heard most are Indians from Calcutta and Bombay. There are many Indian and Chinese scientists. Their inventions are like reversals idéesy own design, without anyone’s help. I rented the town hall Dec. 21, 1962, which cost me $600.1 hired a group rhythm and blues, classical and a group a trio. The night of the concert there was a storm of something to do with what they call globalization?

OC: I think there is some truth in both, it’s because of what you can ask your exemplaire elf if there were “primitive white men”: the technology does seem to represent the word “white.” Equality is not complete.

JD: You challenge the concept of globalization, and I think you’re right.

OC: When you take music, composers who were the inventors of Western culture invention, which is sad because it’s the equivalent of a sort of propaganda.

JD: How do you disrupt this “monarchy”? By combining your own creation with Indian music or Chinese, for example, in this project in New York?

OC: What I mean is that the differences between men and women or between races have a relationship to education and intelligence to survive. Be noir contact whatsoever with my native language, or rather that of my ancestors believed. Do you ever wondered if the language you speak now interferes with your real thoughts? Is a native language influences your thoughts?

JD: It is an enigma to me. I do not know. I know that something speaks through me, a language I do not understand that sometimes I translate more or less easily in my “language”. I am of course a French intellectual, I teach in sch-speaking françaisees tools, but I feel that a journalists’ strike, a strike by doctors and an underground strike, and the only people who came were those who had to leave their hotel and come to City Hall. I asked someone to record my concert and he committed suicide, but someone else has registered, has based its spirit house disquesil am, and I never saw again. Everything that made me realize once again that I did for the same reason that I told my mother that I don ‘ome thing forces me to do something for the French language …

OC: But you know, in my case, the U.S., they call the English that blacks speak “ebony”: they can use an expression that means something other than English in their lessons. The black community has always used language meaning. When I arrived in California, he was the first time I was in a [middle] where a white man was telling me that I could not rest did not want to play there more. Clearly, the state of things in terms of technology, “See Coleman, Town Hall, 1962.’S ANOTHER lan GE Financial, social and penal view was worse than when I was in the South. I’ve been knocking on doors that remained closed.

JD: What impact has your son been on your work does elledes European and American inventors, but the word “inventor” took a sense of domination race is more important than there somewhere. Somewhat a descendant of slaves, I have no idea what my original language was. If we were here to talk about myself, which is not the case, I would say that differently, but like, it’s the same for me. I was born into a family KIND of Algerian Jews who spoke French, but it really was not their native language. I wrote a little book on this subject, and somehow I’m still talking about this qAsse. I only understood much later, through stories that told me who I was, so to speak. And even with regard to your mother, we know who she is and she is in some way through the narrative. J’aiACS] and your own words or those that people try to impose what you do? The problem of choosing the title, for example, how do you do that?

CB: I had a niece who died in February this year and I went to his funeraland when I saw him in his coffin, someone had put a pair of glasses on her. I wanted to call one of my songs She was asleep, dead, and wearing glasses in his coffin. And then I changed the idea and called “Blind Date”.

JD: That the tide has imposed on you?

OC: trying to guess what time you were in New York and Los Angeles, it was before civil rights were granted to blacks. The first time I went to the United States in 1956, there eu call the “monolingualism of the other.”  Pasni began to ask me many questions, and I did not follow, so I decided to go see a psychiatrist to see if I understand. And he gave me a prescription for Valium. I took the valium and threw it down the toilet. I do not always know where I was, I went to a library and checked every book imaginable on the human brain, I read them all. They said that the Cervantesu had a conversation. They did not say this, but it made me realize that to ed’encrage and know not only depends on the place of origin. I understand more than what we call the human brain, in the sense of knowing and being, is not the same as the human brain that makes us who we are.

JD: It’s always one thing: we know from what we believe. Of course, in your case, it’s tragic, but “Whites Only” signs everywhere, and I remember how that was brutal. You’ve experienced it all?

CB: Yes. Anyway, what I like about Paris is that you can not be a snob and a racist at the same time here, because it will not. Paris is the city I know where racism is never in your presence, ilJ’essayais to understand that someone had put glasses on a woman dead …. I had an inkling of what it meant, but ist universal, we know or think we know what we’re through the stories told to us. The fact is that we are exactly the same age, we are born of Samoya year. When I was young, during the war, I am never to France before the age of 19.1 living in Algeria at that time, and in 1940 I was expelled See Derrida. THE OTHER lan GE of the school because I was a Jew, in the wake of racial laws, and I did not even know what had the prosthesis of origin. Chapeau?

OC: No.

JD: How can you understand or interpret your own verbal statements? Are they something important to you?

OC: It interests me to have a human relationship with you in a musical relationship. I want to see if I can put into words, sounds that have to do with human relationships. At the same time, I would be able to talk about the relationship between two talents between two actions. For me, the human relationship is much more beautiful, because it allows you to get the freedom you want for yourself and for each other. That is very difficult to understand the feminine side of life when he has nothing to do with the men’s side. GENDER.

JD: Do you think your songwriting has something fundamental to do with your relationship to women?

OC: Before becoming known as a musician when I worked in a department store one day during my lunch break, I came across a gallery ud ha someone painted a rich white woman who had absolutely everything you may want in the vI, and had the highest expression alone in the world. I had never faced such a solitude, and when I got home I wrote a piece I called

JD: “Lonely Woman.” So, the choice of a title has not been a choice of words, but a reference to this experience? I am asking these questions on language, on words, because for me to prepare for our meeting, I listened to your music and read Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the other or Atlantic, 1959 – City Hall, 1962. New York: ESP, 1963. and Joachim Kiihn. Colors: Live from Leipzig. New York: Harmolodic. The scholars have written about you. And last night I read an article that was actually a conference presentation given by one of my friends, Rodolphe Burger, a musician whose band is called Kat Onoma. It was built around your statements. To analyze how you formulate your music, it started from your STATEMENT, the first of which was: “For reasons that I am not sure of, I am convinced that, before becoming the music, the music was just a word. ‘Do you remember saying t’s something that you hear. That does not mean that there is no racism, but one is obliged to conceal the extent possible. What is the strategy of your choice of music for Paris?

CB: For me, being an innovator does not mean being smarter, richer, this not a word, this is an action. As it has not been done, it is useless to talk about.

JD: I understand you prefer to [do] to the floor. But what do you do with words?

(Recorded by Thierry Jousse and Genevieve Pereygne.)

I’ve been giving some thought to the seminar I’ll be participating in at MoMA throughout 2011. The seminar is being held in conjunction with planning the exhibition, “Inventing Abstraction, 1912-1925.” Other participants include Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Charles Bernstein, Christine Macel, David Joselit and Christoph Cox. These are some initial thoughts for a paper MoMA wants to provoke initial conversation. (Note: This is a revised version of an earlier post, updated on 8 February 2011.)
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1. Writing of the Salon of 1767, Diderot describes Vernet’s landscapes by way of imagining himself strolling through them with “a tutor-abbot, his two young pupils, and two servants carrying picnic baskets.”[1] Addressing his account to the philologist, Friedrich Grimm, Diderot describes his conversations with the imagined abbot and his journey through (among, on, in – what is the right preposition?) the oil paint mountains and lakes. As Lyotard has noted, Diderot erases the distinction between “reality and fiction, history and narrative, diegesis and metadiegesis.”[2] The painter (Vernet), the critic (Diderot), the fictional interlocutor (the abbot), the addressee (Grimm), and the reader, are each destabilized and allowed to intermingle freely among grades and shades of realness, representation, and fiction.

If this sounds like a capsule definition of the Postmodern as Lyotard, among others, has described it, it still cuts against any reduction to mere recapitulation. As Lyotard has noted, Postmodernism is a tendency – perhaps the founding tendency – of Modernism. As such, to detect the Postmodern in Diderot, is to bear witness to the mechanism of history, to the Möbius strip of causality. Diderot proposes a relation of narrative to event that is far more complicated and complicit than the conventional cause-and-effect view of referent and reference. History, as object lesson, is meant to arrive at clearly delineated, unravelable, syllogisms. But, in truth, all roads do not lead to Rome, nor to the Dome of the Rock, the Palme d’Or, Sacre Coeur, or, MoMA.

Not only the what, but the how and the who, when, where, and why, are all equal contributors to history. Kandinsky’s story, or Malevich’s, or Mondrian’s, are in, and not just of, the paintings. Even the monochrome, bereft of pictorial illusion, represents how and when and why it came to be. Each who in this drama has a walk-on part. No one – not the painter, the collector, the critical apologist, the museum director – can claim sole authorship or the leading role. History’s diegetic urge is equally its metadigetic message: everything could be otherwise. As Lyotard writes of Diderot’s account,

… these interlocutors in turn are never original but are instead themselves the possible characters of one or more games that are played out on other stages and related by and to other interlocutors, and … nothing is off-stage or … what is off-stage is a component of the stage, and … no eye can see all theatres at once.[3]

We’re probably more comfortable saying that Malevich (as opposed to Vernet) paints in response to, as commentary on, his political, art historical moment. But for every artist, what is in the painting, on the canvas, is part of a larger network of relations: social, political, historical. The work is always constituted by, and constitutive of, these relations. A work’s relations are the sine qua non upon which any secondary representation is built. These relations organize the spectatorial experience, yet they can’t always be located specifically in the work.

2. We all know the Pater quote about the other arts aspiring to the condition of music. Contemporary sonic practitioners and theorists stake their reputations on the notion that the sonic arts are purer, more abstract, than anything on canvas, celluloid, pedestal, or stage. They claim for sound a self-referentiality that has no need of signification. Sound, by this account, is either real in itself, a material artifact and, therefore, the opposite of representational; or it represents only the forms in which it is arranged, like stars in a constellation. As an artist who often works with sound, I am an anomaly in disavowing abstraction. I cede the valuations that typically grant sound its entitlements.

Elsewhere I’ve argued for rethinking this Pater-patter by subjecting the past sixty-odd years of sonic art to the same tests faced by the visual arts in this time span: minimalism, conceptualism, institutional critique, performance, relational aesthetics, and so on.[4] Here, however, I’ve tried to abide by the timeframe of the exhibition and limit my discussion to the history of art and ideas available to the artists in the period in question: 1912-1925.

Still, it’s worth considering how a reevaluation of abstraction – both in its early visual moment and in its current sonic moment – might inflect a reading of contemporary practice. Today, artists have initiated a genuine reconfiguration of the equations, distributions, and propositions of artistic encounter. The contemporary work that strikes me as most interesting, and possibly even genuinely new, doesn’t genuflect to any kind of in-itselfism nor to a self-contained formalism.

One way to think the new work in relation to the subject at hand is to ask whether this work operates along a spectrum defined at one end by representation and at the other by abstraction. Liam Gillick’s work certainly engages a history that runs through LeWitt to the Bauhaus and Mondrian. But is it accurate, useful, or informative, to call it abstract? There is no doubt that Tino Seghal’s work indicates a set of concerns. But is our understanding of the work enhanced if we think of it as representational? What about Trisha Donnelly, Harrell Fletcher, Francis Alÿs, Carey Young?  Such questions don’t register on the palimpsest of practices that carve out a situation-space in which a set of relations – real/imagined, active/passive, diegetic/metadiegetic –  may be explored or invented, embraced or renounced. Instead this work nominates what I’ll tentatively call a rich content framework, a forum in which a broad set of relations are evoked as possibilities, rather than dictated as commands. The message, ”everything could be otherwise,” is both implicit and unavoidable. This is not a replay of the “open work” debates of the 1960s, which located contingency in the act of interpretation. This work accepts contingency as an ontological condition of making, an epistemological condition of knowing.

By engaging the evasive, liminal, nuances of content and context, positions and presentations, this work attempts to deal more honestly than previous work with what Roland Barthes referred to, variously, as the neutral, the punctum, or the obtuse. The relations in play don’t submit to representation, yet they are surely experienced. Nor are they a blunt material fact; they cannot be easily introduced into consideration like a ball into a tennis match (sound into space, paint onto canvas). The neutral, to land on one of Barthes’ terms, doesn’t focus on the form-content antagonisms of the representation-abstraction continuum. These works propose frameworks – institutional, signifying, categorical – in which the neutral is both constituted by, and constitutive of, the relations potentially in play in a given situation. At the same time, these works realize that any rich content framework – as organizing structure – omits as much as it captures. What slips through the cracks may be ineffable, but it’s not transcendental. Nor is it any kind of it in-itself, beyond the grasp of signification. Such omissions are the result of conventions of thought and language that seek singularity in both subject and object; of imperatives that depend upon the clearly delineated, unravelable, syllogisms of history-as-object-lesson. This rich content framework engages emergent content, yet keeps the otherwise-that-might-have-been perennially in play.

I have responded to the question of abstraction without really addressing abstraction. That’s because I deny abstraction as a “special case.” Diderot, in 1767, was already in touch with an alternate history that folds contradictorily back on itself. The contemporary work I mean to indicate, and the rich content framework, acknowledges the complications and complicity of content-as-quarry. It’s not a question of whether the content lies in the world or in the work. The critical questions (in both senses of the phrase) are: How is content arrived at? By and for whom? When? Where? and Why? What happens to the terms abstraction and representation when we engage works by Vernet and Malevich as if they were Rirkrit Tiravanija’s or Kirsten Pieroth’s?

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[1] Jean-François Lyotard, “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity,” in The Lyotard Reader, Andrew Benjamin, editor. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992, 183.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 184.

[4] See my In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. New York and London: Continuum 2009; and “The Hole Truth,” Artforum, November 2009.