[6. Sung / Conflict, Six in the First
Place, Nine in the Second. Changing to: 25. Wu Wang / Innocence (The Unexpected)]
A painting is
not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick presence
all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history.
How does the
flag sit with us, we who don’t give a hoot for Betsy Ross, who never think of
tea as a cause for parties?
This
is the second of four essays on non-musician artists in the second half of A Year From Monday (although Nam June
Paik was a musician, his primary medium was video). It is also John Cage’s
major statement on Jasper Johns, another member of the American
neo-avant-garde. It is noticeably dense and long, comparable only to Cage’s
essay on Rauschenberg in Silence, and
I find it interesting that Cage spent so much time describing these two artists
while devoting very little space to composers such as Edgard Varèse and Arnold
Schoenberg—even to Merce Cunningham for that matter. Cage notes in the
introduction to the essay that he spent a great deal of time investigating the “aura
of his personality,” and the literary style of personal anecdotes is in
contrast to the Whitmanesque prosaic tone of “On Robert Rauschenberg Artist,
and His Work.”
I
am not an art historian, and as with the Rauschenberg essay, I defer to the
standard criticisms and stylistic boundaries. It is tempting for anyone in the
humanities to dabble in a neighboring field, a dalliance that in the beginning
often feels exhilarating, but ultimately ends with an embarrassing hangover.
The same can be said of Cage himself; while he did have a general understanding
of modern art from his early studies (including the often-cited anecdote of his
brief stint teaching art history to Santa Monica housewives in the 1930s for
extra cash), in this case and in many others, Cage reads any and all artistic
programs against his own, and thus this is less a reading of Johns and more a
reading of Cage’s aesthetic of silence in relationship to Johns.
There
has been a recent rush to publish on the history of sound art, and many of
these investigations, such as Seth Kim-Cohen’s In
the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, prop this history
against the solid weight of twentieth century American art criticism. Theories
of the acousmatic, reduced listening,
and the objet sonore are of
particular interest to electroacoustic composers and sound artists, and as with
many auditory histories, theory tends to rely on the primacy of the visible
over the audible in writing and constructing sonic history. Thus, audio
examples of phenomenological experiences are described using the many visual
metaphors critics carefully constructed to describe the radical pace of
innovation in postwar American art.
As
a musician and a musicologist, I naturally feel that this trend is unjust, yet
realize it is inevitable, due to one simple fact: the steep commodity market
value of art versus the tenuous value of a musical object or composition, thus
providing a consumerist imperative to construct theory to add weight to
artistic objects. The relationship between Cage and his two counterparts in the
visual arts, Johns and Rauschenberg, perhaps epitomizes this drastic economic disparity,
and it is surprising that this perhaps rather touchy topic has largely gone
unnoticed. In Cage’s essay on Johns, he casually mentions Johns’ Jaguar sitting
unused in the garage of his summer home on Edisto Beach, the registration
unfiled. He goes on to allude to what was no doubt a difficult situation for a struggling
composer to witness:
The Jaguar
repaired and ready to run sits in a garage unused. It has been there since
October. An electrician came to fix the thermostats but went away before his
work was finished and never returned. The application for the registration of
the car has not been found. It is somewhere among the papers which are unfiled
and in different places. For odd trips a car is rented. If it gets too hot, a
window is opened. The freezer is full of books. The closet in the guest room is
full of furniture. There is, and anyone knows there is, a mystery, but these
are not the clues.
I
think it would be unfair and unjust in any way to implicate the artists in this
economic disparity; it is a curious fact of modern society that we value and
identify tactile visual material as objects and denigrate or devalue ephemeral
auditory experience—no one except for the artists themselves really decried the
fall of the music industry, yet vintage clothing, or custom handmade knots
(admittedly a joke) continue to demand a premium. Concrete objects are more clearly
defined as property, and thus it is easier for one to ascribe them a commercial
value by reifying their status as unique and original. In the end, however,
musicians have managed to survive via a thick skin coupled with a heavy dose of
self-deprecation and irony.
But
more to the point, there are some very good comparisons to be made between Cage’s
“sound-as-sound” thesis and the painterly strategies of Johns. While Rauschenberg
presented artworks that epitomized Cage’s extremist dictums of nothing at once or
everything at once through his White Paintings and assemblages, Johns provided
something else: literal self-reflective images, paintings that were abstract yet
representational, providing, as one critic puts it, “a twist with a knife
attached” in the Abstract Expressionist criteria. Naturally Cage was in full
support of the attack.
“Any fool can
tell that that’s a broom.” The clothes (conventions) are underneath. The
painting is as naked as the day it was born.
There
are certain self-admitted natural affinities between Johns and Duchamp’s
retinal literalism, with one marked difference: Duchamp signed literal everyday
objects, while Johns literally painted everyday objects, leaving traces of the
painterly object embedded within the encaustic. I believe that, in the end,
this was one line of differentiation between Cage and Johns, though in the end any
surface contradictions in style were overridden by their mutual respect and
friendship.
In
the center of the essay Cage reproduces Duchamp’s famous dictum of retinal
literalism: the suggestion “to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual
memory transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint,” a concept I
believe to be comparable to the sound-as-sounds thesis, which in certain ways
paralleled theories of the acousmatic and reduced listening espoused by French
engineer and acoustician Pierre Schaeffer. Musicologists, and especially
theorists, have tried desperately to link Cage’s program with Schaeffer’s, and
while it is true that Cage visited his studio in Paris during his first
Guggenheim fellowship in 1948, there is scant evidence that he truly understood
or embraced the concepts, and even if he did, they were in many ways anathema
to his concept of unmediated perception.
The
problem with theories of the acousmatic and reduced listening is fundamentally an
audiovisual one, related directly to Michel Chion’s notion of “synchresis,” the indelible weld
between sound and image that occurs upon first experiencing an audiovisual
event. To review, acousmatic sound refers to the Pythagorean experience of
listening to a veiled sound, the source unseen, and reduced listening advocated
for an auditory goal similar to Duchamp’s impossible situation. What Schaeffer
failed to incorporate in his thesis was Duchamp’s precondition: reduced
listening was an impossibility, and the goal was not to succeed, but to attempt
to reach toward that impossibility of memory transfer – to get away from the
literalness of the thing.
This,
in my mind, was Cage’s ultimate sound-as-sounds goal of unmediated perception,
something reflected time and time again in his writing as an ideal rather than
a possibility, hence the extensive veil of Zen dictums and east Asian heuristics
that speak of a pure situation of “imitating nature in her manner of operation.”
Does viewing a flag purely for is visual pleasure cause one to reach a state of
unmediated perception in the same way as hearing a frog croak amidst the
clatter of Williams Mix? In my mind,
no, and this is the inherent problem of the modern mediated subject: we have
developed our facilities for spatial perception purely according to visual calculations,
and thus our ability to develop visual theories is much more adept, while our
auditory facilities are largely untrained, even among the best musicians. One
can look at a Schenkerian graph and understand the complexity of form, and
perhaps hear it on a local scale, but one can rarely and only partially
comprehend musical form (or deliberate anti-form, non form, or any other
structure) in its totality the way one can when looking at an architectural
form or a painting set against a relief. In the end, the debate remains more
concerned with the matter of degree, not kind.
I
believe that this conflict between optical and cochlear is inherent in Cage’s
critiques of visual artists, and his essay on Johns is in my mind less complete
than the essay on Rauschenberg. The problem seemed to lie in the issue of
literalness and specificity, which are difficult issues to parse in the Cage
aesthetic. Johns’ flags were not literally flags, yet they literally represent
them, while Cage’s sounds, particularly in experiments with magnetic tape, were
literal sounds, inscriptions of a reality, and they literally represent them, but there is no concern for what them is; Johns chose specific objects,
Cage chose any object. The brushstrokes embedded in the encaustic provided a
marker of the figurative, yet Cage’s tape splices, static, and various markers
of fidelity did not point back to the creator.
Perhaps
(or likely) these thoughts are incomplete, but this is a growing and notable
debate within sound art history, rich with new criticism and theory that will
hopefully, in the future, create a better understanding of the nature of the
auditory experience, one that relies less on the primacy of the visual, and one
defined more in terms of the audiovisual experience.
An object that
tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of
itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? Deluge.
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