Contemporary Art

EXPRESSION

07 November 2012 Issue 1

Featured: Marcel Duchamp John Cage

Marcel Duchamp: Putting Modern Art on the Map The story of modern art is in many ways the story of the 20th century. Art shaped and was shaped by events, people, ideas and innovations far beyond the narrow confines of its world. The modern skyscrapers of Manhattan, TS Eliot, Monty Python, the Sex Pistols, the iPhone and the great political, philosophical and social movements of the last hundred years all owe something to the art produced

by Manet, Monet and those pioneering artists who followed in their wake. [...]

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welcome. He was an artist who had not yet lived in the city for two years: long enough to know his way around, too short a time to have become blasé about its exciting, sensuous charms. The thrill of walking southwards through Central Park and down towards Columbus Circle never failed to lift his spirits; the spectacular sight of trees morphing into buildings was, to him, one of the wonders of the world.

But there is perhaps one person above all others whose influence and personality dominate 21st-century artistic activity and critical thinking – an individual who was able to impose his will on the world without recourse to courting the media, becoming a celebrity, or having vast amounts of money. It is an incredible story within a story that starts on 2 April 1917; on this day, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, was on his feet in Washington DC urging Congress to make a formal declaration of war on Germany – a historic and world-changing moment.

The trio ambled down Broadway. As they approached midtown the sun disappeared behind impenetrable blocks of concrete and glass, bringing a spring chill to the air. The two Americans talked across their friend, whose hair was swept back exposing a high forehead and well-defined hairline. As they talked he thought. As they walked he stopped. He looked into the window of a store selling household goods and raised his hands, cupping his eyes to eliminate the reflection in the glass, revealing long fingers each of which was crowned with a perfectly manicured nail.

Meanwhile, in New York City, three welldressed, youngish men had emerged from a smart duplex apartment at 33 West 67th Street and were heading out into the city. They were oblivious to Wilson’s exhortations, just as they were to the fact that their afternoon stroll would also have epoch-making consequences on a global scale. Art was about to change for ever.

The pause was brief. He moved away from the storefront and looked up. His friends had gone. He glanced around, shrugged, lit a cigarette and crossed the road – not to find his companions, but to seek the sun’s warmth. It was now 4.50pm, and a wave of anxiety washed over the Frenchman. Soon the stores would be closed and there was something he desperately needed to buy.

The three friends walked and talked and smiled, occasionally breaking into restrained laughter. For the elegant Frenchman in the middle, flanked by his two stockier American companions, such excursions were always

He walked a little faster. Someone shouted his name. He looked up. It was Walter Arensberg, the shorter of his two friends, who had supported the Frenchman’s artistic endeavours in America almost from

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the moment he stepped off the boat on a windy June morning in 1915. Arensberg was beckoning him to cross back over the road, past Madison Square and on to Fifth Avenue. But the notary’s son from Normandy had tilted his head upwards, his attention focused on an enormous concrete wedge. The Flatiron Building had captivated the French artist long before he arrived in New York, an early calling card from a city that he would go on to make his home.

His initial encounter with the high-rise building had come when it was first built and he was still living in Paris. He had seen a photograph of the 22-floor skyscraper taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1903 and reproduced in a French magazine. Now, 14 years later, both the Flatiron and Stieglitz, an American photographer-cum-gallery owner, had become part of his new-world life.

Arensberg called again, this time with a little frustration in his voice. The other man in their party laughed. Joseph Stella was an artist too.

He understood his Gallic friend’s precise yet wayward mind and appreciated his helplessness when confronted by an object of interest.

United again, the three made their way south until they reached 118 Fifth Avenue, the retail premises of JL Mott Iron Works, a plumbing specialist. Inside, Arensberg and Stella chatted, while their friend ferreted around among the bathrooms and doorhandles that were on display. After a few minutes he called the store assistant over and pointed to an unexceptional,

flat-backed, white porcelain urinal. A Bedfordshire, the young lad said. The Frenchman nodded, Stella raised an eyebrow, and Arensberg, with an exuberant slap on the assistant’s back, said he’d buy it.

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They left the store. Arensberg and Stella called a taxi while the quiet, philosophical Frenchman remained on the sidewalk holding the heavy urinal. He was amused by the plan he had hatched for this porcelain pissotière, which he intended to use as a prank to upset the stuffy American art crowd. Looking down at its shiny white surface, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) smiled to himself: he thought it might cause a bit of a stir.

Duchamp took the urinal back to his studio, laid it down on its back and rotated it 180 degrees. He then signed and dated it in black paint on the left-hand side of its outer rim, using the pseudonym R Mutt 1917. His work was nearly done. There was only one job remaining: he needed to give his urinal a name.

He chose Fountain. What had been, just a few hours before, a nondescript, ubiquitous urinal was now, by dint of Duchamp’s actions, a work of art.

At least it was in Duchamp’s mind. He believed he had invented a new form of sculpture: one where an artist could select any pre-existing mass-produced object with no obvious aesthetic merit, and by freeing it from its functional purpose – in other words making it useless – and by giving it a name and changing its context, turn it into a de facto artwork. He called this new form of art a readymade: a sculpture that was already made.

His intention was to enter Fountain into the 1917 Independents Exhibition, the largest show of modern art that had ever been mounted in the US. The exhibition itself was a challenge to America’s art establishment. It was organised by the Society of Independent

Artists, a group of free-thinking, forwardlooking intellectuals who were making a stand against what they perceived to be the National Academy of Design’s conservative and stifling attitude to modern art (just as the impressionists had done in a very similar fashion over 40 years earlier).

They declared that any artist could become a member of their society for the price of $1, and that any member could enter up to two works into the 1917 Independents Exhibition as long as they paid an additional charge of $5 per artwork. Duchamp was a director of the society and a member of the exhibition’s organising committee. Which, at least in part, explains why he chose a pseudonym for his mischievous entry. Then again, it was Duchamp’s nature to play on words, make jokes and poke fun at the pompous art world.

The name Mutt is a play on Mott, the store from which he bought the urinal. It is also said to be a reference to the daily comic strip Mutt and Jeff, which had first been published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907 with just a single character, A Mutt.

Mutt was entirely motivated by greed, a dim-witted spiv with a compulsion to gamble and develop ill-conceived get-rich-quick schemes. Jeff, his gullible sidekick, was an inmate of a mental asylum. Given that Duchamp probably intended Fountain to be a critique of greedy, speculative collectors, it is an interpretation that would appear plausible. As does the suggestion that the initial R stands for Richard, a French colloquialism for moneybags. With Duchamp nothing was ever simple; he was, after all, a man who preferred chess to art.

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Duchamp had other targets in mind when selecting a urinal as a readymade sculpture.

He wanted to question the very notion of what constituted a work of art as decreed by academics and critics, whom he saw as the self-elected and largely unqualified arbiters of taste. His position was that if an artist said something was a work of art, having influenced its context and meaning, then it was a work of art, or at least demanded to be judged as such. He realised that although this was a fairly simple proposition to grasp, it would revolutionise art if accepted.

Until this point, the medium – canvas, marble, wood or stone – had dictated to an artist how he or she could go about making a work of art. The medium always came first, and only then would the artist be allowed to project his or her ideas on to it via painting, sculpting or drawing. Duchamp wanted to flip the hierarchy. He considered the medium to be secondary: first and foremost was the idea. Art could be constructed from, and mediated through, anything. That was a big idea.

The hidden meanings contained within Fountain don’t end in Duchamp’s wordplay and provocation. He specifically chose a urinal because as an object it has plenty to say, much of it erotic, an aspect of life that Duchamp frequently explored in his work.

It doesn’t, for example, take much imagination to see its sexual connotations when presented upside down. That allusion may or may not have been understood by those who sat alongside Duchamp on the organising committee; either way his co-directors were unimpressed. Fountain was rejected and banned from the 1917 Independents Exhibition. The feeling among the majority of the society’s directorate (there were some, including Arensberg and Duchamp, who argued passionately in its favour) was that Mr Mutt was taking the piss.

Which of course he was. Duchamp was challenging his fellow society directors and the organisation’s constitution, which Image provided by Invisiblebook.com All Rights Reserved

he had helped to write. He was daring them to realise the idea that they had collectively set out, which was to take on the art establishment and the authoritarian voice of the conservative National Academy of Design with a new liberal, progressive set of principles. The conservatives won the battle, but as we now know, spectacularly lost the war. R Mutt’s exhibit was deemed too offensive and vulgar on the grounds that it was a urinal, a subject that was not considered a suitable topic for discussion among America’s puritan middle classes. Team Duchamp immediately resigned from the board. Fountain was never seen in public, or ever again. Nobody knows what happened to the Frenchman’s pseudonymous work. It has been suggested that it was smashed by one of the disgusted committee, thus solving the problem of whether to show it or not. Then again, a couple of days later, at his 291 gallery, Stieglitz took a photograph of the notorious object, but that might have been a hastily remade version of the readymade. That too has disappeared.

But the great power of ideas is that you cannot uninvent them. The Stieglitz photograph was crucial. Having Fountain photographed by one of the art world’s most respected practitioners, who also happened to run an influential gallery in Manhattan, was important. It was an endorsement of the work by the avant garde, and provided a photographic record: documentary proof of the object’s existence.

No matter how many times the naysayers smashed Duchamp’s work, he could go back down to JL Mott’s, buy a new one and simply copy the layout of the R Mutt signature from Stieglitz’s image. And that’s exactly what happened. There are 15 Duchamp-endorsed copies of Fountain to be found in collections around the world.

When one of those copies is put on display it is weird to see people taking it so seriously.

You see hordes of earnest exhibition visitors craning their heads around the object, staring at it for ages, standing back, looking at it from all angles. It’s a urinal! It’s not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object.

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John Cage: Music Sound and Silence

The theories of avant-garde American composer John Cage (19121992) on music, sound, and silence are of more interest than his musical compositions. To Cage, there is no such thing as silence. Music is a succession of sounds and the composer the “organizer of sounds.” Historically, music has been a communication of feelings, but Cage argues that all sounds have this potential for conveying feeling in the mechanical and electronic sense. As Cage puts it in the essay “History of Experimental Music in the United States”: “Debussy said quite some time ago, ‘Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity.’”

Silence was perhaps the pivotal aspect of Cage’s theories. If silence could be shown not to exist, then feelings, too, could be pushed into the category of nonexistence.

Theory While interested in breaking down traditional definitions and concepts, Cage did not elaborate on the premises of de-constructionism or modern aesthetics, merely presenting them. He held neither a college degree nor studied in a music academy, learning music personally from Arnold Schoenberg, the archmodern composer of twelve-tone music. Cage’s popularization of

random sounds as music do not bear regular listening -- he anticipated the “happenings” of performance art or spontaneous art in the 1960’s, and indirectly foresaw the success of electronic music created exclusively with synthesizers and other electronic devices. Cage had hit upon a formula for creativity, calling his musical creations “purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”

Paraphrasing the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Cage maintained that disharmony is a harmony “to which many are unaccustomed.”

At times, as in the essay “Experimental Music,” Cage appears to want to draw inspiration from nature and human emotion.

Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant that grows?

These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond

with another’s. Emotion takes place in the person who has it.

And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.

Thus music is not merely the sound of musical instrument but that of other human-made objects and, ultimately, the sounds of nature. While this may be a novel definition of music, Cage does not acknowledge that while program music attempts to evoke images and feelings, abstract music need not, even while adhering to compositional standards.

Cage’s project is not so much to expand but to overthrow the definition of music. His compositions, Cage admits, are called Dadaist, but he argues in the essay “Indeterminacy” that in Dadaism actions occur but space or emptiness is not taken into account, as in his music.

For Cage, silence is that space, although absolute silence does not exist. Cage’s affinity with contemporary architecture, specifically glass-walled buildings as in Mies van der Rohe and with modern art, as in the deconstructed images of Marcel

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Duchamp, emphasize the analogy between looking through rather than looking at. Cage’s music intended to look through sounds and not at them, the latter being traditional music.

Cage’s famous composition 4’33”, consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, was intended to point to the ambient sounds around the listener of the work, which then become the work of music. The work revolutionized modern music, but the work only illustrates a theory or argument -- few listeners will return to “listen” to such a novelty again. Some critics even argue that 4’33” is not nor cannot be intended as music at all, for it lacks the communication of feeling and felt time identified as musical aesthetics. They argue that Cage says his music does not convey feeling (or leaves itself open or transparent to feeling) but that this is not true. Cage’s performances convey feelings, indeed provoke them --and this was Cage’s unconscious or denied intention.

I’ve thought of music as a means of changing the mind. I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the artist to an audience but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves. And, in being themselves, to open the minds of people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than they had previously considered (Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz)

Thus Cage argued that the purpose of music (and art) must change: Art may be practiced in one way or another, so that it reinforces the ego in its likes and dislikes, or so that it opens that mind to the world outside, and outside inside.

Since the forties and through the study with D. T. Suzuki of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, 8

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Cage insisted that his music differed from any previous music because it carried the insights of Eastern philosophy and opened the mind in a way that no historical music did. In this Cage anticipates the claims of modern electronic music, of minimalist, ambient and New Age music. But these styles of music are still radically opposed to his contrived and random sounds, being deliberate in evoking a specific feeling that “opens the mind” and represents music that lets the “sounds be themselves.”

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More theory In composition, silence is well known as a musical element, rendering a pause, a particular frequency of sound (its absence), an accompanying duration of sound -- or of silence.

For Cage, “Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. But if you avoid it [sound], that’s a pity, because it [sound] resembles life very closely & life and it are essentially a cause of joy.” Here Cage is referring to “the first sound

that comes along.”

This randomness of sound is equated to music, in contrast to music as understood hitherto.

Cage’s writings quote influences like Ananda Coomaraswamy, T. D.

Suzuki, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, and readings (or excerpts) from Meister Eckhart and Sri Ramakrishna; observers have detected the larger influence of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. But these popularizers and influences clearly had no sanction for the type of music Cage composed.

I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions. I shall continue making them (“Foreword” to Silence, 1961).

Likewise Cage’s Westernized and 1950’s notion of Zen as an influence:

had a good understanding of the language, and books, and you could tell that by visiting him in his home and by the pictures he had on the wall, which were 1890ish (“John Cage interview,” 1974 May 2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).

What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen (attendance at lectures by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, reading of the literature) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done.

I am told that Alan Watts has questioned the relation between my work and Zen.

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Watts did not like Cage’s music, but after reading Silence did appear at some Cage concerts, though Cage, in 1970’s, dismissed Watts asa man who had no understanding of the arts. He

In the 1950’s, Cage hit upon a method of composition that would be the counterpart of the frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, etc. that constitute the mechanisms of tradition composition. The avant-garde method was randomness. Cage discovered the I Ching. By tossing the coins he came to hexagrams that offered ideas, and from the ideas he developed parameters for

“chance-controlled music.” He does not elaborate on the nature of this inspiration except to say: I derived the method I use for writing music by tossing coins from the method used in the Book of Changes. It may be objected that from this point of view anything goes. Actually , anything does go but only when nothing is taken as the basis. In an utter emptiness anything can take place. And,

needless to say, each sound is unique ... and is not informed about European history and theory: Keeping one’s mind on the emptiness, on the space, and can see anything can be in it, is, as a matter of fact, in it. (“45’ For A Speaker”).

In later years, Cage referred to his 1940’s approach to music and composition as “disinterestedness,” reflecting the perennial thinking that surrounded the topic of East and West. But after his pivotal 1952 composition of 4’33” Cage used more technical terms such as chance and indeterminacy.

Cage argues that his work takes into account the shift of cultural influences quintessentially American: the “movement of the wind of the Orient and the movements against the wind of the Occident meet in America and produce a movement upwards into the air -- the space, the silence, the nothing that supports us.” It is this upward space or silence that Cage claims to bring to music.

But though he sensed that music was a social and cultural product, Cage still did not elaborate on how his music fit into this perspective.

He criticized the Dadaism of the 1920’s (his nearest predecessor) as reduced by time to mere art. He used radios and phonographs as sources of sounds for his 1940’s compositions but criticized the dominance of radio, television, and the recording industry during the next decade and thereafter.

Then, too, Cage’s 4’33” had its predecessors in Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement or “furniture” (that is, unobtrusive background) music and

the rising 1940’s company Muzak -- to which, Cage said in jest, he ought to sell 4’33”).

An element of showmanship pervades Cage’s work, and the implied silence of 4’33” can equally represent transparency as it can a silencing of both stage performers and theater-goers at odds with the “anything goes” theory of music.

With the passing years, Cage become increasingly interested in audio technology, amplifying sounds with ma-

chines and microphony, even using Geiger counters in one composition -- all ironic tendences toward the silencing of silence. Cage was determined to show that silence did not exist. But in that premise he had separated himself from the perennial philosophy he had professed in the 1940’s and gradually abandoned after his 1952 composition of 4’33”.

The idea of breaking institutional structures in music and art is analogous to breaking down structures in society, as Theodor Adorno, the Marxist critic of Cage, has noted. The indirect purpose of Cage’s music is to break

down repetition and structure. Wrote Cage: In contemporary civilization where everything is standardized and where everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an object and its duplication. If we didn’t have this power of forgetfulness, if art today didn’t help us to forget, we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects (For The Birds).

Other critics have seen Cage’s assumptions of expanding music to include all sounds and using technology to identify and amplify sound is simply an extrapolation of Western cultural ideas of domination and do not take into account Eastern ideas after all. Critic Donald Kahn concludes: Cage’s dominion of all sound and of the corresponding capacity for panaurality is reminiscent of the totalizing reach of the Romantic utterance resonating in voice or music throughout eternity and entirety, or of the nineteenth-century synaesthetes who also used their utterances to insinuate themselves throughout the cosmos.

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It is true that Cage explicitly sought to subvert tactics based in human centeredness, yet all he did was shift the center from one of utterance to one of audition. He simply became quiet in order to attract everything toward a pair of musical ears. He achieved through centripetal means the same centrality utterance achieved through centrifugal means.

Indeed, Cage’s musical renovation was built on a larger cultural association in which listening was thought to be intrinsically more passive, peaceful, respectful, democratic, and spiritual than speaking, as it intersected with Western art music which, on the one hand, had produced itself through the sonicity of utterance and, on the other, promoted a proscription against speaking, signification, and mimesis.

Cage’s shift, in other words, entailed a production of music through the sonicity of audition while retaining all other features of Western art music.

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Shifting sound from speech to music, and using silence to, in effect, silence articulation or feeling, makes Cage’s theories on silence an ominous departure from both Eastern and Western traditions. Silence in modern art differs from the uses of silence in traditional and historical settings. Modern art fades in significance and cowers in its reaction to larger political, social, and

technological structures into a hushed and compelled silencing. Metzer sees the use of silence in other modernist composers (Webern, None, Sciarrino) as a confrontation with and scrutiny of expression. But in music this scrutiny remains unresolved. To resolve it, Cage’s project used silence to to make sound (i.e., music) louder, randomized, dominant, ultimately extirpated.

As early as 1954, Cage was no longer defending his compositions as works of art but as counter-works, anti-works: Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or could be art. He simply thinks it was irritating. Irritating one way or another, that is to say, keeping us from ossifying. It may be objected that from this point of view anything goes.

Actually anything does go, -- but only when nothing is taken as the basis. In an utter emptiness anything can take place [emphasis Cage] (“45’ For a Speaker”) Conclusion The nature of silence is a key concept of both Eastern and Western thought.

Cage understood from his popular readings that they could converge. He applied the concept of silence to music and tried to liberate silence from feelings or context, from an social and historical context. But Cage’s compositions, while mak-

ing statements opposed to historical aesthetics, did not discover therein a psychology or philosophy of silence, less an aesthetics. Silence became a utilitarian tool for compositional use, not unlike those historical composers he criticized. Though he argued for the equal status of all sounds, sounds, music, had no meaning, though they did not need were not useless but meaningless. Cage meant that Beethoven, Mozart, and sounds of traffic in a big city were all equivalent -- except that he didn’t need any of them. In the 1992 documentary film Listen by director Miroslav Sebestik, Cage remarked: The sound experience which I preferred to all others is the experience of silence.

By The Hermitary

Silence.

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