Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
___________________________________________________________________
Andy
and John Get Ordinary:
Ontological
Issues in the 1960’s Work of Warhol and Cage
by
…that
which is outside the frame…:naturalization of the frame. There is no natural
frame.There is frame, but the frame does
not exist.[i]
It
leads to the thought about hearing anything in the world since we know that
everything is in a state of vibration…chairs and tables, for instance, could
be heard. One could go to an exhibition of sounds in which you would see
something and hear it as well. I would like to do that.[ii]
During a visit to John Cage’s home in Stony Point, in speaking of
Cage’s remarkable achievements and innovations, Cage was praised for the
enormous progress he had brought to music. ‘Cage walked over to the window,
looked out into the woods, and finally said, “I just can’t believe I am
better than anything out there.” [iii]
In what follows I want to
investigate this idea of liminal art making; between ‘inside’ and ‘out
there’, across binary divides. To do this I want to broach another divide,
that between the practices of the art historian and the musicologist. By working
across this border interesting ontological issues connecting contemporary, but
seldom related artists, can be reviewed. Both John Cage and Andy Warhol made art
in a wide variety of media, Cage made prints, drew and painted, wrote poetry and
made music. Warhol too produced work in different media. As regards his interest
in music the most obvious relationship is the extension of his obsession with
popular culture into The Exploding Plastic Inevitable that combined the
live music of The Velvet Underground with projections of film and
coloured light. Much can be said about Warhol’s multi-media interests, and his
involvement with popular music, which in its distance from ‘classical’ or
art music has always been hybrid, as much concerned with image as sound.
However, I want to consider what we might best call art music. Art music was the
context within which Cage worked, and since the Romantics it came to be
identified throughout the modern period as qualitatively distinct, in a
formalist state of autonomous ‘pure’ sound characterized in the concept of
‘absolute music’. Art music is most often conceived as a special category of
sound standing alone from the world of sights and ordinary sounds (the later
often defined as noise). In this way art music became a model for art, and
specifically the paradigm for Clement Greenberg’s project to define the
essential characteristics of Modernism. It is the art to which all arts aspire,
in Walter Pater’s famous words. Popular
music and culture, on the other hand (what Greenberg might have defined as
kitsch) was a vibrant site of alternative meanings, one which attracted a new
generation of artists who, for various reasons, found this Modernist and
formalist sensibility less than satisfactory.
My
analysis is not going to focus on Warhol and rock music. Rather, I want to bring
Andy Warhol together with John Cage, to deconstruct this notion of art music
from the inside via Cage’s aesthetics.
In doing this I shall build points of contact with Warhol’s aesthetic.
I shall expose what I consider to be some of the most important consequences of
their work, and to help understand the moment of which they are both, in their
different ways, emblematic - the moment of a fundamental crisis in the ideology
of Modernism.
One of the main engines that powers modernist concepts is binary
configurations, dividing the world in ‘either/or’ categories. The binary
pairing I want to address here is not so much that of popular verses high
culture, but another ubiquitous coupling. It manifests itself in different
guises; sometimes as ‘art or nature’ and often as ‘art or the everyday’,
to which the opening quote made reference.
One thinker who has been particularly interested in theorizing the
relationship between art and the everyday, who is of importance to what I want
to say, is the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto. The relationship
between art and the world outside it, through its modes of re-presentation,
makes art fundamental to Danto’s whole philosophy. As he wrote in the preface
to a recent book The Body/Body Problem.
In
the past some years I have written extensively on the concept of art, but what
these essays make vivid is the degree to which that concept has dominated the
way I have thought philosophically about any topic...Philosophy and art are not
discontinuous fragments of a divided subject, but facets of a single unitary
philosophy which thinks of art philosophically and of philosophy from the
perspective of art.[iv]
To clarify his terms for
those unfamiliar with his philosophy; Danto’s conception of humanity is of
‘beings who represent’ (actual or possible worlds, and who can in addition
misrepresent); works of art he understands as materially embodied
representations; philosophy is defined as the discipline concerned with the
various borders between reality and its alternatives, and from this it is clear
how art becomes axiomatic to his ideology.
In his earlier, and perhaps
most influential book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), [v]
Danto argues that, beginning in the late 1880’s, painters throughout Europe
and America began to break away from pure representation and became increasingly
preoccupied with the question of what constitutes a work of art. For a variety
of reason mimesis - technological, political, philosophical etc. - became
weakened as the primary mode through which painters and sculptors sought to
convey their ideas and intentions. The nature of the medium became a point of
focus, especially in abstract art. However, the most radical challenge to
mimesis was not made by moving further from the likeness of the world (into the
realm of abstract art), but rather the opposite, by moving closer to it. This is
not directly stated in Danto’s account, but is, I think worth making explicit.
Dada introduced the phenomenon of ready-made objects, replacing representation
with re-presentation. This culminated in the art of the 1960’s when art for
the first time achieved a philosophical understanding of its own essence. At
this point, as Danto has more recently expressed it, art ended. He uses end in
this context not to mean termination, this would obviously be absurd. What he
means by ‘the end of art’ is the conclusion of a narrative: ‘There was no
question in artistic practice but that a certain idea of painting in place since
about 1300, had come to an end. The issue was what was painting now to be, and
this in the end could only be answered with a philosophical theory which...the
painting movements of the twentieth century (made) a massive effort to
furnish.’ [vi] This Modernist phase ended
with the introduction into art of objects with no visible difference for their
everyday equivalent, and the concomitant turning from painting as the principle
vehicle of artistic expression. The emergence of sculpture as a more dominant
medium is in part generated from the ready-made, concerned with objects or
re-presentation, rather than painting, which more commonly represents.
With Pop Art this is most paradigmatically manifested, for Danto, in the
example of Warhol’s sculptures of commercial packaging, dated from the early
sixties
Brillo Box was first
exhibited at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan in the spring of 1964. It would not
be an exaggeration to describe Danto’s experience of this work as epiphanic -
‘my revelatory moment in art’ is how he retrospectively expressed it in
1994. The question that presented itself to Danto’s receptive mind was ‘why
should this object be seen as a work of art, when something that looks just like
it (an ordinary box of twenty four brillo packages) should not’? It is an
ontological question of great significance, but it should be noted it is
generated from a mistake. That is, Danto on first seeing Warhol’s work mistook
the artist’s object for the real everyday thing. However, close visual
consideration of Warhol’s sculpture reveals that these slightly oversized,
painted and silk screened plywood boxes are indeed representations, in fact
almost parodies of the real thing, not true identical simulacra. They are
significantly not ready-made and re-presented, but handmade representations.
However, through another form of reproduction, namely photographs (and slides),
and in Danto’s first encounter, one can mistake the imitation
(signifier) for the real thing (referent). This can clearly be seen in Danto’s
own account of his first experience of the advent of pop – in a passage that
is also a description of the contemporary sixties photographs of bland urban
intersections by Dennis Hopper or Edward Ruscha:
Pop redeemed the world in an intoxicating way. I have a most vivid
recollection of standing at an intersection in some American city, waiting to be
picked up. There were used-car lots on two corners, with swags of plastic
pennants fluttering in the breeze and brash signs proclaiming unbeatable deals,
crazy prices, insane bargains. There was a huge self-service gas station on a
third corner, and a supermarket on the fourth, with signs in the window
announcing sales of Del Monte, Cheerios, Land O Lakes butter, Long Island
ducklings, Velveeta, Sealtest, Chicken of the Sea…I was educated to hate all
this. I would have found it intolerably crass and tacky when I was growing up an
aesthete…But I thought, Good heavens. This is just remarkable.[vii]
Danto’s personal disavowal
of taste again follows Duchamp, but his conception is more complex than some
criticism of it might lead us to think. He has generally not been closely read,
and in this regard his clear and lucid prose sometimes works against him. Some
of his readers tend to paraphrase his words too easily, adopting a more cavalier
attitude to his expression than they might with the more opaque jargon of some
other philosophers.
The
key issue here is the constitution of philosophical understanding. Danto’s
position depends on the possibility of separating off something called
philosophy from something called art, despite the fact that are ‘facets of the
same thing.’ It is a metaphysics with its own modernist characteristics.
Danto’s view it seems, is essentially Kantian, in that philosophy is primarily
concerned with concepts, while art is concerned with making visible, with the
production of ‘materially embodied representations.’ Philosophy and art
stand as opposing facets of the same thing. Philosophy, as described in the
title of one of his most important essays, disenfranchises art - it takes
away art’s freedom. It does this by making art aspire to be a form of itself,
a form of philosophy. Art and theory have an increasing tendency to meld. This
is encapsulated by Marcel Duchamp (philosopher
manqué) who recognized in his work the necessity for art to transcend
the ideology of the ‘purely’ retinal - the definitive characterization of
art as visual art, encapsulated in Greenberg’s theory that art seemed
orientated towards discovering a purely visual practice. The conception of art
as simply visual founders on its mono-sensory characterization; that is, it
understands it as possible, and desirable that one sense, sight, can encapsulate
all that art was, is, or could be. It is the conceptual corollary of absolute
music.
For
Danto, Duchamp aspires to the philosophical saturation of art. As the visual
loses its dominance, so theory become more influential. This is only a
significant issue if theory is always associated with language, and that
language (problematically in my
view) is seen as outside visual art, rather than always, and necessarily,
entangled with it.[viii]
Duchamp was well aware of the coexistence of language and image, as can be seen
in for example, his ‘assisted’ ready-mades Apolinere Enameled (1916) and L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), the notes
for the Large Glass, and most tellingly the fact that he referred to the
titles of art works as their ‘invisible colour’. The ‘ready-made’,
before Warhol, demonstrated that ‘art and reality could resemble one another
to whatever degree one desired.’ [ix]
The
subject of Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, at the Ferus Gallery in Los
Angeles in 1962, was reminiscent of such assisted ready-made images: what
amounted to portraits of thirty-two individual Campbell’s soup cans, each
different only by virtue of its contents, signified by words (Tomatoes, Beef
Broth, or Minestrone etc.), not its formal composition, which in all cases was
identical – text was the difference. The mode of display, a row of his
‘products’ at eye level – as if on a store shelf - was an echo of the
aesthetics of supermarkets and mass-production.
In
the following year, October 1963, in Pasadena, the new director of the Art
Museum, Walter Hopps, who had previously been the director of the Ferus,
organised Duchamp’s first American museum retrospective: By or of Marcel
Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy. This exhibition was the first opportunity for many
American artists to see the range of Duchamp’s oeuvre. Edward Kienholz, Larry
Bell, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses and Edward Ruscha were among the visitors, and it
was the occasion of Richard Hamilton’s first visit to the United States
(following his translation of the notes for the Green Box, and his work on the
copy of the Large Glass now in the Tate Modern). Also showing during the
Duchamp retrospective, again in the Ferus Gallery, was Warhol’s second one-man
show. He had sent the director of the gallery, Irving Blum, an uncut roll of
canvas on which the same photographic stencil of Elvis Presley had been
repeated, leaving it to his dealer to decide on how to ‘package’ the images
into art works. It is notable that although both Duchamp and Warhol were long
time residents of New York city, they first met thousands of miles away on the
West Coast. It is also worth remembering that Warhol’s homosexuality and camp
sensibility found a more supportive environment (he was more visible) here than
in the more macho post-Abstract Expressionist New York art world.
Pop
art inhabits a post-Duchampian site and is important for Danto because it
‘drew its energy in part from the fact that it allowed itself everything that
had been repudiated as extrinsic to painting by earlier revolutions.’[x]
In the use of objects and images perceptually indistinct from non-art, Pop art
showed ‘whatever was to distinguish art from reality was not going to be
something evident to the eye’. It is in this sense an inheritor of Duchamp’s
non-retinal emphasis. However, if we take a slightly longer historical
perspective, we can see that both Cubism and Dada, in their different ways, did
much the same - in the former’s development of collage and the latter’s Merz
and anti-art aesthetic. Closer to Pop in time are the ‘Combines’ of
Rauschenberg in the early 50’s. In Pop art and other movements at this time
there was a challenge to ‘the formal boundaries that segregated painting from
sculpture, from dance, from poetry or music or drama,’[xi]
the same boundaries that certain critics of modernity saw as fundamental to
art’s progress and its securing of quality. This maybe true, but again it did
not originate with Pop art. It was equally the case half a century earlier with
Italian Futurism, or even earlier in Greek tragedy, in fact as I’ve argued
elsewhere, Modernism, with its origins in Lessing’s spatio-temporal divide, is
in many ways historically anachronistic, in its dogged pursuit of media purity.[xii]
Pop art, like Dada, Futurism and even Cubism before it, soils the purity of art
by trafficking in the ordinary.
Theatricality
and performance, the return of figuration, (and, in many cases, a fictive,
three-dimensional space – especially in Pop art) together with the use of
everyday forms and images (kitsch), the mixing of media and such like, brought
about the ‘end of art history’ (the end of one story) in Danto’s view,
precisely because a movement that overturns the limitation of boundaries leaves
no future boundaries for its followers to cross. Here we must add Fluxus as
another, and in my view more radical paradigm, which simultaneously with Pop,
was engaged in rampant border crossings. Such revolutionary, transgressive art
movements bring the idea of historical progress to a stop. For Danto, pluralism
is all that can possibly follow.
I want turn now to Cage, for a consideration of his work adds much to our
discussion of formal boundaries; the relationship between art and the everyday
and the differences between art forms and media.
For Cage,too, the 1960s signal an important aesthetic shift, and this can
most clearly be mapped out by reference to his work 0’00”(4’33” No.
2) composed in 1962. This work, like Danto’s first encounter with the Brillo
Boxes begins with a confusion, but here a confusion between composition and
performance. The work was simultaneously performed and written, its first
performance being its composition. It was dedicated to the then married couple
Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, and scored as a solo ‘to be performed in any
way by anyone’. Despite the seeming chaos of such an indication, the work is
highly regulated. The score is in the form of a text that reads:
0’00”
In
a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a
disciplined action.
The first performance took place in Tokyo on October 24, 1962, and was
the amplified writing of the manuscript, which is told in an indented note in
the score added the following day. In addition Cage appended four qualifications
to the basic score:
1]the
performer should allow any interruptions of the action.
2]
the action should fulfil an obligation to others.
3]
the same action should not be used in more than one performance and should not
be the performance of a musical composition.
4]
the performer should pay no attention to the situation he finds himself in,
whether electronic, musical, or theatrical.
Perhaps the best know performance, by Cage, took place three years later
in May 1965 at the invitation of Alvin Lucier at the Rose Arts Museum at
Brandeis University. The museum is built on two levels, connected via a
small landing by an open stairway that enables each level to be visible to the
other. Before the audience entered, Cage began the performance. The sound the
concert-goers heard when they did enter were loud squeaks, gulps and taps coming
from speakers located in various spaces. Appropriately, Cage was to be found in
the liminal space on the stair between the two floors, answering letters at an
amplified typewriter, and seated on a similarly amplified squeaky chair, which
he had brought with him from New York. Now and again he quaffed from a glass of
water, the sound of his swallowing amplified by a Second World War aircraft
pilot’s throat microphone. When he had finished writing the letters, the sound
equipment was shut off and the next work on the programme began (Lucier’s
marvellous Music for Solo Performer – which also employs the body of
the performer as the corps sonore, a form of bio-music). But what are we
to make of such a radical work and how does it relate to the rest of Cage’s
aesthetic?
One of the most striking things about 0’00’’ is that it
recognizes no measurement of time at all, thus negating the fundamental element
through which music is said to exist. In a similar way to Warhol’s Brillo
Boxes the major problem for conventional conceptions of art is that 0’00’’
does not appear to be music at all. There are, however, a range of affiliations
the work has with other contemporary art; notably some of the Fluxus artist
George Brecht’s ‘event’ scores. Yet it appears to stand apart from all
that Cage had composed before. Significantly, there is a different relationship
between the act of composing, the outside world and the sounds that were his
medium.
Most
of Cage’ previous works had used scores to filter intention away from the
performer towards ‘sounds in themselves’. Here, however, there is no
reference to sound at all, only to its possible enhancement; the sonic element
already exists in a sense, the performer acts simply to magnify it. The only
possible acoustic information provided by the score is that the performance
should be amplified; but this only implies that sound will be audible. We know
from Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber that while there is life there
is sound, but this theoretical knowledge is not the same as hearing sound.
Although conceptual sound is always present in the mind’s ear - in the act,
for example, of asking ‘is there any sound?’, the words themselves sound[xiii]
In short 0’00’’ does not exist as a compositional object, but only
as a process.
This
move from objects to processes becomes characteristic of most of Cage’s works
that follow. The title is significant too, 0’00” refers to the
concept of ‘zero time’, derived from the work of Christian Wolff
You
see, if music is conceived as an object, then it has a beginning, middle,
and end, and one can feel rather confident when he makes measurements of the
time. But when [music] is a process, those measurements become less
meaningful, and the process itself, involving if it happened to, the idea of
Zero Time (that is to say no time at all), becomes mysterious and therefore
eminently useful.[xiv]
What Cage is pursuing here, then, is music beyond space - which
is its objective presence - and music beyond the element that has been
thought of as synonymous with it, time. The model Cage holds as paradigmatic
here is nature itself; indeed a rather Bergsonian conception of nature. The
world of nature is perceived as immeasurable, the site of a vast number of
simultaneous, apparently unrelated activities, outside human conceptions
manifested in the fluid flux of experience which is not susceptible to static
measurement (beyond the ‘veil of appearance,’ as Kant put it). Any attempt
at measurement restricts and curtails that fluid experience. The aesthetic
corollary to this for Cage was the promotion of action and environment over
sound-as-object. That is, he came to focus on facilitating sites for action, or
producing a situation for action which is focused on as action, but
allowing the sonic results of such action to function as music. 4’
33” (number 1) had shown the impossibility of absolute silence and the
interdependence of sight, sound, and embodiment in musical discourse[xv],
0’00” (4’33” number
2) focused on unintentionallity in a different way. In 4’33” music
arose from inaction; apart from raising and lowering the keyboard cover of the
piano, David Tudor remained still and inactive. In O’00” music arose
from unintentional action: writing a letter is an intentional action, but the
amplified sound is not, and this constitutes the music. Amplification acted to
focus attention on the sonic results of unintended acts; acts that were to be
performed in an unselfconscious and unselfish way.
It
is a work that cannot, in any meaningful way, be rehearsed. It is, from a
performing point of view, a technique which results in no technique. The action
will have a spontaneous, although disciplined, quality. Diverse actions are
perceived as a single event, as the work. Andrew Culver has described it,
‘Anybody can do anything with it; the piece won’t change if I do something
with it different than anybody else. The score is still the same.’[xvi]
We therefore arrive at the conventionally paradoxical situation, where the
traditional conception of a score as a fixer of musical meaning is inverted; the
score’s identity is stable, but the resulting event is potentially infinitely
variable. In the way Danto saw Brillo Box as art and non-art at the same
time (this is indeed a prerequisite of the experience of the revelation), so the
sympathetic recipient of Cage’s work is the agent, the bringer of meaning:
We need first of all a music in which not only are sounds just sounds but
in which people are just people, not subject, that is to laws established by
anyone of them, even if he is “the composer” or “the conductor”.
The
situation relates to individuals differently, because attention isn’t focused
in one direction.” [xvii]
Boundaries between art and life were to be breached via the act of
reception. A rapprochement between aesthetic and everyday experience was
the intention:
the
piece tries to say...that everything we do is music, or can become music through
the use of microphones...By means of electronics, it has been made apparent that
everything is musical.[xviii]
Everything being music was possible only by the mid-twentieth century, a
technological moment that extended the range of human hearing by means of
amplification technology.
The privileging of the act of reception over the prevailing emphasis on
intention in composition, echo in Warhol’s love of consumption, and its place
as subject in his work. Warhol too took a ‘cool’ view of the act of
composing his works, often ceding aesthetic decisions and responsibilities to
his ‘Factory’ workers. This aesthetics of cool has been most effectively
characterized by Mora Roth in her 1977 article ‘The Aesthetics of
Indifference’.[xix]
It is an analysis of the work of Cage, Merce Cunningham, Duchamp, Jasper Johns
and Robert Rauschenberg in the context of the McCarthy and Cold War period. It
portrays this group as emblematically cerebral, celebrating mind over expression
(in distinction to the physicality of an artist such as Jackson Pollock, and the
actionists). Duchamp was heterosexual, albeit with an active female alter ego,
Rrose Selavy (‘co-exhibiter’ at his Pasadena show). The others, as gay
artists in a highly oppressive (homophobic) environment, resorted to an
aesthetics of indifference, of irony and distance. This resulted, Roth’s
argument concluded, with the avoidance of overt political alignment. The key
word here is overt. Cage was by no means a political artist, but neither was he
apolitical. He was an anarchist, a political position that has two main paths of
praxis. One is the clichéd image of the lone figure with cloak and bomb,
attempting to destabilize society through violent intervention. The other is of
a figure whose fundamental belief in the sanctity of the individual leads them
to attempt change only through example, rather that revolution
(in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s words ‘Whoever puts his hand on me to
govern me is a usurper and a tyrant’ [xx]).
The key concepts here, to return us to our example of 0’00”, are
discipline and obligation. To live with respect for others requires the
disciplining of your own desires and the obligation to care. Given the
complexities of Cold War culture and the vindictiveness of McCarthy, silence
ensured survival. ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it’, as Cage put
it – but, as Jonathan Katz has pointed out, this is not real silence, but
rather the performance of silence.[xxi]
Warhol too, as Thomas Crow has argued, while grounding his art in the
ubiquity of the package commodity, produced in much of his work a dramatization
of the breakdown of commodity exchange.[xxii]
The work of Cage and Warhol can be seen as examples of social protest, not least
through their insistence on returning art to the everyday (and to everybody).
This,
however, is not the same as making art into non-art; it is not the Dadaist
inversion of a Rembrandt as an ironing board. It is rather to draw attention to
the constant ontological struggle between art and the everyday, a dialectic that
is essentially an issue of framing.
In the chapter on parergon in his book The Truth in Painting,
Jacques Derrida considers Kant’s Critique of Judgement and within it
the ‘peripheral’ discussion of ‘ornaments’ [parerga] and frames
(‘those things which do not belong to the complete representation of the
object internally as elements, but only externally as complements…[xxiii]).
Kant regards frames as ornamental to the work of art, but necessary to
differentiate the intrinsic object of address.
“What
is a frame?”…it’s a parergon, a hybrid of outside and inside, but a
hybrid which is not a mixture or a half-measure, an outside which is called to
the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside…[xxiv]
Kant
regards artistic form, or the work of art, as autonomous and auto-telic, that
is, goal-directed but with no use in the ‘outside’ world. It signifies
nothing, it has no conceptual content. The frame is what sits between this
autonomous object and the outside. But, as Derrida points out, a frame, if
necessary, is not just ornamental and contingent. Derrida proposes that the
frame functions paradoxically to separate the work both from its context and
from the frame itself. In relation to the work of art the frame appears part of
the context (the museum wall for example), but in relation to the general
context it appears part of the work (Seurat’s painted frames are a particular
example). Thus, Derrida seeks to emphasize that ‘framing effects occur’,
rather than frames. Frames are the points of liminal focus. In addition, as
already implied, the frame both defines the work (is necessary) and is mere
ornament (is contingent). The important point here is that the edge of a work,
its border or boundary is theoretically permeable; or, to put it in other terms,
text and context are in flux or in dialogue. Warhol’s work requires a frame,
either a literal one in the case of the Soup cans, or an institutional one in
the case of the Brillo Boxes. The frame selects and emphasizes. It
necessary and contingent at the same time, just as Danto saw the Boxes as art
and non-art simultaneously.
The frame that usually surrounds music is silence, but Cage brought this
outside silence into the heart of his work, fashioning his composition out of
this framing silence[xxv].
The edge of his work is set up to be permeable and transparent (but also
visible):(4’33”).
There are what we might think of as two kinds of silence. The empirical,
ritual and institutionally organized silence at the beginning and end of a
musical work. Wagner was one of the first musicians to insist on adding a visual
marker by requiring the lights of the auditorium to be lowered to prepare this
framing silence. In addition, there is also silence at the limits of human
hearing. But even this is challenged by Cage through the power of amplification.
Cage’s friend La Monte Young, serves as an interesting
additional example in this regard. Consider his Composition No. 5, of
1960, also known as the ‘butterfly piece’. The sound in this work is
performed by the butterfly or butterflies as they are released. No one present,
neither the ‘performer’ who releases the butterflies nor the audience, can
hear the sound of the non-human ‘instrument.’ But they can see it; the
effect is visual. An insect of celebrated beauty,
often understood as a symbol of metamorphosis in art, performs a flight which
acts as a visual metaphor for the absent sound. Young is reported to have said
to his colleague Tony Conrad, ‘Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to
something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?’[xxvi]
The
score says;
Turn
a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.
When
the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.
The
composition may be any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available,
the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the
composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.
The concert hall is, as the museum for the Brillo Boxes, the
frame. Writing of this piece, Young raises the issue of audibility as a
prerequisite for music: ‘I felt certain the butterfly made sounds, not only
with the motion of its wings but also with the functioning of its body . . . and
unless one was going to dictate how loud or soft the sounds had to be before
they could be allowed into the realm of music . . . the butterfly piece was
music.’[xxvii]
The Modernist (post-Romantic) aesthetic urgency to place the frame as
ancillary comes from the acknowledging of its necessity. Minimalism, in the eyes
of Michael Fried for example, in its overt ‘theatricality’, draws attention
to its context and moves it across the great divide between art and the state of
objecthood, and the test of a work of art was the suspension of that very
objecthood in favour of the everyday.[xxviii]
Minimalism therefore committed the modernists sin of borrowing from another
discipline’s effects. Such objects needed the theatre of the site to be
meaningful. They were not self- possessed and were therefore unable to free
spectators of their self-awareness. Rosalind Krauss has written;
...this
very abstract presence, this disembodied viewer as pure desiring subject, as
subject whose disembodiment is, moreover, guaranteed by its sense of total
mirroring dependency on what is not itself - that is, precisely the subject
constructed by the field of pop and the world into which it wants to engage, the
world of the media and the solicitation of advertising.[xxix]
This passage brings together the consumer of pop images with the idealist
viewer of Fried and Greenberg’s Modernism - the gap between High Modernism and
Pop art may not be so wide, or at least they may not be in opposition.
Perhaps Warhol’s closest contact with the everyday was in the form of
money. His own ‘counterfeit’ screen-printed dollar bills were produced after
he was informed that he could not, as he had wished, display real dollar bills
on a gallery wall, as this was a federal offence. But even with the display of
real money (as ready-made) there is a play of signification, for money is by
definition a medium of exchange. The 1960s were a moment of aspiration to
unmediated contact with the everyday in Pop, in Minimalism, and in Arte
Povera, that aspiration was symbolic of the hope for unfiltered and
undistorted knowledge, felt against
the backdrop of the Vietnam war, and May 1968.
History matters, and so does art’s history, or perhaps more accurately,
art’s histories, for in the end both Cage and Warhol are in dialogue with
art’s histories. Just as Danto argues that pluralism was the consequence of
art after Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, so there is more than one history.
Nothing can be taken for granted and perhaps the greatest task now facing us in
a post-Warhol, post-Cage, pluralist art world is, as Danto has argued, that
everyone is now required to be a critic. Thomas Crow has suggested that
philosophy has moved out of the academy and has taken up residence in art
galleries. To be an artist today is to philosophize by visual means, however
broadly. We must all learn to put
together the thought embodied in the work. This consequently puts greater
responsibility on viewer and audience, as both Warhol and Cage assume. This is democratic, but it also requires an informed public.
For this we need to learn from each other, to contribute our own histories and
understanding - perhaps through our
15 minuets in the spot light, or, more profoundly, by creating our own
4’33” of silence.
[i] J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting (translated by G. Bennington and I. McLeod), Chicago, 1987, p. 81
[ii] Conversing with Cage,: John Cage on his world and his work, compiled by Richard Kostelanetz (New York, London, Sydney, 1989 ) p 90-1
[iii] Morton Feldman, ‘Give My Regards to Eight Street’ from Give My Regards to Eight Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (ed. B.H. Friedman), (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 28
[iv] Arthur C. Danto, The Body/Body Problem: Selected Essays (Berkley & London, 1999), p. ix-x
[v] See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Berkley & London, 1981)
[vi] Danto, ‘Art after the End of Art’ quoted from The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, essays by Arthur C. Danto, selected and with a critical introduction by Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (G&B Arts International, 1998), pp. 15-16.
[vii] Danto, quoted after Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (1998), p. 29
[viii] See W.J.T. Michell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, (Chicago, 1986, reprint 1987)
[ix] Danto, The Body/Body Problem, p. 5
[x] Danto, ‘Blam! The Explosion of pop, minimalism and Performance, 1958-1964’ reprinted from 1984 in Horowitz and Huhn (1998), p 59
[xi] Ibid, p 57.
[xii] See S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (Yale, 2002)
[xiii] See Cage, Siloence (London, 1968), pp. 8, 13, 23, 51, 168. Note also the opening quote.
[xiv] After Pritchett p. 147 ‘Interview with Roger Reynolds’ (1961), in John Cage [catalog of works], p.49. As Pritchett points out Cage first mentions Wolff’s ‘zero time’ notations and their implications of music as process in ‘Composition as Process: Indeterminacy’ in Silence p.38
[xv] Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music (2002), pp 212-216
[xvi] ‘Cage the Composer: A Panel Discussion (James Pritchett, James Tenny, Andrew Culver, and Frances White) in Bernstein & Hatch (eds) Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, & Art (Chicago, 2001), p207
[xvii] Conversing with Cage, p. 257
[xviii] Ibid, p.70
[xix] Mora Roth, ‘The Aesthetics of Indifference’, 1977, p
[xx] See The Anarchist Reader (ed. G. Woodcock, Glasgow, 1977)
[xxi] J. Katz, ‘John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse’ in Bernstein & Hatch (2001), pp. 41-61. Katz suggests that Zen Buddhism help Cage come to terms with his homosexuality and develop an aesthetic based on the negation of self-expression. Cage’s silence was a moral stance. Silence opposed oppositional politics, which according to Cage, only ‘make matters worse.’
[xxii] See T. Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (L0ndon, 19967) esp. chapters 2 & 3.
[xxiii] Kant, Critique of Judgement (trans. J.H.Bernard, Hafner, N.Y. and London, 1951), p.61
[xxiv] J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting (translated by G. Bennington and I. McLeod), Chicago, 1987, p.63.
[xxv] This is not to suppose an absolute silence, but a relative non-music silence (ritual silence).
[xxvi] Quotation from E. Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington, Ind., 1993)
[xxvii] Quoted after D. Kahn, ‘The Latest: Fluxus and Music’, in J. Jenkins (ed) In the Sprit of Fluxus, (New York, 1993) p. 106
[xxviii] M. Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum (Sommer 1967), reprinted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, 1992) pp. 822-34
[xxix]
"Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop." In Hal Foster, ed., Discussions
in Contemporary Culture, pp. 59-64. Dia Art Foundation.1987