Before the Art of New Media

By Lidija Merenik

The restaging of Tendencies 4, the 1968 Zagreb based exhibition series and colloquium, in the recent show bit international – [New] Tendencies – Computers and Visual Research does more than deepen and internationalise our understanding of computer art’s early history. It also presents an opportunity to revisit the cultural landscape of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Here Lidija Merenik considers the show in Graz and [New] Tendencies’ unique engagement with international avant-gardist concerns, technology’s utopian potential and the socialist cultural landscape of ex-Yugoslavia

Even though they have been reviewed extensively in historiographic terms, primarily in the work of Professor Jerko Denegri, [New] Tendencies were the subject of their first serious retrospective: bit international – [New] Tendencies – Computers and Visual Research at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz this summer.[1] Curated by Darko Fritz, the show was comprehensively prepared in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb,[2] which possesses a major collection of [New] Tendencies works, and the Neue Galerie in Graz. Like all pioneering projects, this exhibition comprehensively follows the genesis of [New] Tendencies, offering a lot of art works rarely seen or not exhibited until now. The curatorial rationale lies, it seems, not only in the need to mount a ‘pioneering’ retrospective, but also in the actual logic of the progressive developmental phases of [New] Tendencies. Without the representation of its early stages, it would be impossible to understand the group’s ultimate achievement – its movement towards computer art and its final exhibitions in 1968/69 and 1973.

However, it must be said that the importance of this exhibition lies not only in its comprehensive approach – which sheds light on a little known phase of a strong international movement of post-war avant-garde – but also in its highlighting of a unique moment of artistic, ideological and ethical opposition to the ‘liberalised’ modern art of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Indeed it provides us with insight into [New] Tendencies as a sort of [un?]proclaimed ‘dissident’ art of the socialist era.

Julije Knifer: Untitled, 1978

The genesis of NT begins with the first exhibition, held in 1961, which coincided, in terms of time but not language, with the European post-art informel situation. The ultimate aim of the 1961 project, on the international not local level, was to transcend, through a pronounced emphasis on discontinuity, the crisis of art in the process of ‘overcoming informel’ and to establish a different artistic philosophy and ideology. The first exhibition was revolutionary in every respect, and is as important as the exhibitions Monochrome Malerei (1960), held in Leverkusen, and Bewagen-Bewegung (1961), held in Amsterdam, in the sense of a shift from painting towards object, or as a shift from art towards science and new technologies (in an essentially synchronous connection with Arte programmata e cinetica (Programme and Kinetic Art). Hence we perceive a succession of apparently heterogeneous concepts, from Piero Manzoni, through Piero Dorazio and François Morellet, to Julije Knifer and Ivan Picelj, which were unified, however, through the idea of the need to create, as stated by Morellet, ‘a revolution in art that will be equally great as the one in the sphere of science’. It is clear that this first segment of development contains the seed of the future kinetic, and subsequently, computer art, but it is not differentiated in this respect and is primarily founded on various notions of the spiritual and the experimental circulating in the early ’60s and underlined by this exhibition underlines. The ensuing [New] Tendencies exhibitions (1963, 1965) mark one progressive development path of not only the Croatian but also the European avant-garde as well, aspiring to create a great international movement.

In the course of this process, the actual artistic ideology of the artists gathered around [New] Tendencies was defined: team artistic work, the grand entry of science into art, a pronounced anti-commercial attitude, exploring new artistic values, visions, if not utopias, about art – as Meštrović states, needing to be ‘an entirely sober, aware and precise voice of the emerging world’. In the catalogue of the second (1963) exhibition, Getulio Alviani wrote: ‘convention has always been very important in history, and it (convention) should be abolished.’ In this respect, [New] Tendencies are indeed a form of concrete utopia, for they argue in favour of the realisation of the ‘constructivist project’ in the society of the 1960s, which was obviously moving fast towards uniting science, technology and art, to effect what Miško Šuvaković has called a ‘rationalisation of art through scientific methods and an aesthetisation of science through artistic visualisations.’[3] For, both the second and the third (1965) NT exhibition give priority to experiments with new technical and technological media (for example: Alberto Biasi’s Light Prisms; Grazia Varisco’s Schema Luminoso Variabile; Bridget Riley and Gruppo MID’s work... ). Their ensuing research elaborated on the chromo- and kine-visual which also clearly referenced inherited artistic tendencies such as constructivism, kinetic art, concrete art, fully acknowledging Malevich, Mondrian, Nicholson or Vasarely.

Ivan Picelj: [Nove] tendencije, 1969

A significant turnaround occurred with the symposium and the exhibition entitled NT 4 Computers and Visual Research, (1968/69), whereby [New] Tendencies defined the meaning, ideology and purpose of the experiment they had been running from the very beginning. The period until NT 5 (1973) was almost solely focused on the achievements of computer art. After Tendencies 4 and the first international colloquium [New] Tendencies, and until 1973, when the Tendencies 5 exhibition was held, the above mentioned vision entirely turned not only towards anticipating but also taking some of the first steps in computer art; a dialogue between art and ‘machines’ capable of creative activity.

That same year marked the establishment of bit international, a periodical arguing for a ‘symbiosis of art and machine (computer)’, an organ of ‘information theory, exact aesthetics, design, mass media, visual communications and related disciplines.’ It was certainly a very exclusive periodical, and the only one of its kind in Yugoslavia which, along with texts by Abraham Moles and Max Bense, published papers dealing solely with the relationship between computers and visual experimentation. Evidently, then, in that period the role of computers in the visual media was not the sole issue for [New] Tendencies; it is a radical, and we can now say, premature concept of Gesamtkunstwerk based on a vision of a high-tech world. The Graz exhibition is focused precisely on this, the most revolutionary phase of NT, and effort has been made to present a documentary film about NT 3 and digitally restored audio recordings of four NT symposia held in Zagreb (1968-1973).

At the Graz exhibition my attention was drawn by Vladimir Bonačić’s Computer-Controlled Light Installations (1971). In a photograph depicting Bonačić’s experiment in the centre of Zagreb on the NAMA department store, (NAMA standing for 'narodni magazin’ [people’s store] and representing Yugoslavia’s first well-stocked, Western style socialist department store), one can see a giant billboard placed on the city’s main street. It reads: ‘Citizens, extend a loan for the building of the Zagreb-Split highway.’ Such an almost bizarre combination of avant-garde artistic practice and the environment of socialist-populist self-management was characteristic of art in Tito’s Yugoslavia in general. More precisely, of the period from the political break-up with Stalin in June 1948 to Tito’s death in May 1980, designated as ‘socialist modernism’.

Vladimir Bonacic: DIN. PR 10 [NaMa II], 1971, computer-controlled dynamic object / light installation at the storefront of NaMa in Zagreb, Ilica Street

On the other hand, two decades separate this work of Bonačić’s from the advent of the seminal Zagreb group EXAT 51, and five decades separate it from the advent of the first international Yugoslav avant-garde movement (then designated as the Zagreb-Belgrade avant-garde), Zenit (1921). Mentioning Zenit and EXAT ’51 now presupposes a necessary understanding of the continuity in the establishment and operation of the few, albeit strong, international avant-garde movements in the former Yugoslav artistic space whose shared point of origin was Zagreb.

We are thus faced with at least two possible levels of reviewing [New] Tendencies. One pertains to the political and culturological climate of Tito’s Yugoslavia and Tito’s ambivalent attitude towards what he called ‘Western tendencies’ in art. The other is the line of continuity of avant-garde movements, so few and far between and so little understood, in ‘the first’ Yugoslavia (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918-1945) and ‘the second’ (Tito’s Socialist Yugoslavia) alike. Naturally, the last but not least aspect of this is the specific character of the radical modernist expression and avant-garde tendencies occurring in Zagreb after 1951, which were immeasurably different from the modernisms of other Yugoslav cultural centres and divergent from the climate of ‘socialist modernism’, ‘traditional modernism’ and ‘socialist aestheticism’.

How come, then, that ‘socialist modernism’ was the dominant climate of creative work and a cultural policy supported by the regime, one from which [New] Tendencies so greatly differed? Primarily politically motivated, the break-up with socialist realism (which was in full swing from 1945 to 1949/50) in Yugoslav art and the shift towards international modernism would not have been possible (or the process would have unfolded much more slowly and with difficulties, as in the USSR and most Eastern European countries) had it not been for the official break with Stalin, the Comintern, USSR and the Eastern bloc countries in June 1948. An essential factor in this complex history, which cannot be dealt with in any great detail here, was purposeful action in the sphere of culture. Namely, the education of artists from the early ’50s primarily by means of efficiently organised grant schemes directed mainly towards the USA (Fulbright) or Paris. Tito’s policy aimed to shift art to the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’, to the very heart of the mainstream – abstract expressionism and its affiliated artistic languages.

The early 1950s were also characterised by the beginning of Tito’s policy of ‘sitting on the fence’ between the USA and the USSR (the ‘Western’, capitalist bloc, and the ‘Eastern’, communist bloc), which would intensify after Stalin’s death in 1953. This also marked the beginning of the era of 'socialist modernism'. Even though the Cold War was at its peak then, Yugoslavia solidified its international position, and culture became an important and obvious link with 'capitalist countries', the most visible and symbolic representation of that policy. The regime paid particular attention to various forms of the modernisation of art, for such art, characterised by a changed ideological key, could represent a clear signal to the new ally, the West, not only of a changed semantic landscape but also of the seriousness with which Tito’s regime was undergoing change.

Still, this desirable pro-Western art was subject to certain forms of political control from the shadows. Speaking of the attitude of the state/Party authorities towards the liberalisation of culture, one should have no illusions about their tolerance, and in particular about the possible visual literacy of the Yugoslav politicians of that time. Judging by the views expressed in the course of the 7^th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia we can conclude that, in the 1952-1958 period, the Party’s tolerance of modernist trends was most likely strategic in nature. The Yugoslav situation was unique, 'softer' than in the Soviet Union, especially when the socialist realist dogma was abandoned and new, not so easily discernible and more intelligent criteria were established. As opposed to the Soviet brand of dogmatism, where the bureaucracy ordered artists to do things in a particular manner, in Yugoslavia the political establishment made unofficial agreements with artists or gave recommendations against doing something.

In post-war Yugoslav art, 'socialist' modernism played two historically vital roles. The first one consisted in liberating the fine arts from the direct influence of the Party’s ideology of socialist realism in the period after 1949/50. In this respect, its effect was highly evolutive, visionary and progressive. The second role, under the given political circumstances, had to be shared with the political establishment willy-nilly. Here modernism played the politically useful role of providing an enlightened 'civilisation wrapper'. Socialist 'underdevelopment modernism' unfolded on the loose foundation of a society which, although unprepared and in the midst of its own contradictions, very quickly turned away from real communism and socialist realism towards the acceptance of Western models of living, working and creating. The high modernism of Yugoslav art was a symbol of Tito’s Yugoslavia and a half-real, half-virtual modernisation; it was eventually institutionalised in the sphere of the official Yugoslav culture of enlightened socialism as 'socialist modernism' – a symbol of the new state, just like other inventions including socialist democracy, the self-management system and the non-alignment movement.

It is clear that EXAT ’51 – a group that, today, can be considered the ideological and linguistic precursor of [New] Tendencies – was not built on similar foundations and did not please the Party ideologues who liked 'recommending' an acceptable 'modern' manner of expression. A polemical climate was created as early as 1951/52, mostly to do with EXAT’s activities. Abstract (that is, non-objective) art was sharply criticised, first of all as an art whose 'ideological basis was vague and uninvestigated', as being 'hermetic', and as a consequence of uncritical acceptance of 'foreign' influences (Tito was fond of using the term 'Westernisation'). EXAT was the earliest and the most consistent proponent of the supremacy of abstract art and of a new profile of art and the artist; a synthesis of 'pure' and 'applied' art. Also, it would be more correct to view EXAT as a project or concept of the modernist total work (as evidenced by the Manifesto of 1951) than as a group pursuing a conventional course of artistic action attempting to effect changes within a single area of practice. In this respect, EXAT was a multidisciplinary (‘total’) project. The abolition of the allusive and the associative, as well as the destruction of principles such as the harmony of painted elements in a 'composition' (more precisely, the rejection of the heritage of L’Ecole de Paris and the principle of 'push-and-pull' composition inside the 'frame' unique in ex-Yugoslavia’s modern art), certainly must have disturbed an establishment used to a 'feeling of harmony' and to that 'soft' modernism that provided a warm, conformist shelter through its elegant aesthetisations. In this sense, the advent of EXAT does not only represent a watershed for Croatian art, but a generator of tectonic disturbances on the Yugoslav art scene at large. It is also one of the rare movements that clearly broke with the convention of 'composition', that is, the deeply rooted heritage of French modernism, cultivated to the level of a cult.

Despite the historical classification of EXAT, as well as various subsequent 'new tendencies' in Croatian art, as 'abstract' and 'geometrical', neither the truth about them, nor their essential historical significance, lies in their morphological structure. Their prime significance, I believe, lies in their overall ideological weight and ideas of progress that lift them above the modernisms of their contemporary national culture and, essentially, single them out as strong international avant-garde movements within a primarily European cultural space. Geometry, then, is a tool. Progress, then, is the goal. The 'bit international' concept is actually the only Yugoslav project of yearning for an electronic age, a kind of reverie about the computer as the most perfect, impersonal artist; a wake up call to computer art.

It is therefore the art of its European time, but art outside its socialist Yugoslav time and particularly outside 'socialist modernism' and its status quo aesthetics. I imagine that Tito’s diatribes 'against abstraction' (1963, 1964, 1966) may have been provoked by works that irritated him, such as Knifer’s Meander (the Graz exhibition shows a historical specimen dating from 1960, when Knifer 'invented' the Meander), or works by Picelj, Aleksandar Srnec, Vjenceslav Rihter, Vojin Bakić and Vlado Kristl dating from the late 1950s or the first half of the 1960s. Judging by some of Tito’s speeches (which, however, had no political consequences for the artists concerned due to the image of tolerance the Party was cultivating), this is quite certain. Excerpts from various speeches he delivered in the course of 1963 clearly show a considerable degree of ambivalence, if not the outright schizophrenic nature of the above-mentioned 'sitting on the fence':

[...] In literature especially, and in art generally, there are a lot of foreign elements, irreconcilable with our socialist ethics, something that is attempting to divert the course of our development from the one determined by our revolution. These are various decadent phenomena, brought in from abroad. We must fight against them; however, we must do it not always by resorting to administrative measures but through political action. [...] I am not against creative searching for the new [...] but I am against spending our community’s funds on some so-called modernist works that have nothing whatsoever in common with artistic creation [...]. [4]

Also, it is clear today that, as Professor Denegri remarks, EXAT was better known outside Yugoslavia, so that no particular echo of these innovative initiatives was felt inside the country, not even in Zagreb itself. However, the situation changed with the first [New] Tendencies exhibition, the groundwork having been laid by people who were aware of EXAT’s contributions and their possible further consequences, such as Vjenceslav Rihter, Radoslav Putar, Božo Bek, Matko Meštrović and others. 'Exatians' also joined [New] Tendencies. Knifer and Kristl, for example, strongly influenced the shaping of the earliest phase of NT, which was founded on various non-gestural, 'pure' and primary, geometrical, visual structures. Picelj, on the other hand, worked on the level of optical, kinetic-visual constructions. Until 1968, that is, when NT entered its most original phase and began gathering around the ideas of bit international, one should not underestimate the impact of EXAT which was much deeper than it initially appears

Even though they were, without doubt, of paramount importance for radical modernism, and outside the context of 'socialist modernism', I dare say that NT achieved their true aim with artists like Vladimir Bonačić. He (otherwise a PhD and an electronics engineer) first hit upon the idea of visually generating the scientific results obtained while working with computers: 'This was’, he said, ’best evidenced when, researching polynomials, we got pictures that also expressed certain aesthetic values'. This paved the way for his creation of the first light-kinetic objects, whose screen displayed a sequence of over 65,000 differently structured visual situations (obtained researching Galois fields). But he did not wish his scientific, visual investigations to be a mere aesthetic object placed on a pedestal in some museum or other. He therefore produced ambient installations or temporary installations in situ (where the architecture of the building was used as a ‘host’ for the computer controlled experiment with light, visible from outside and together comprising a giant ‘sculpture’). in the centre of Zagreb (the NAMA department store and Kreditna banka). These Computer-Controlled Light Installations completely integrated the formal-aesthetic aspects established in the early phase of NT with his scientific, visual and early electronic investigations – a special form of 'electronic iconics' which produced the NT 4 emblem. Bonačić developed this concept further by means of very complex audio-visual and kinetic constructions (GF-4 32/71, 1971, today located in the UNESCO building). Proceeding from his visionary works, authors like Tomislav Mikulić, not being content with the possibilities of computer graphics or objects, arrived at the first Yugoslav computer generated cartoons (Mikulić’s Random, 1976).

Tendencies 5 (1973), even though it was the last exhibition of its kind, opened the door to the coming phenomenon of neoavant-garde, conceptual art (John Baldessari, Giuseppe Penone, Sol LeWitt, Endre Tot, On Kawara, Goran Trbuljak, Braco Dimitrijević, Iannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini...). As a linguistic and aesthetico-technological art practice, but also as an ideological and ethical construct of sorts, in the period between 1961 and 1973, NT found themselves 'squeezed' in the European cultural space between two dominant artistic poles. They stood in antithesis, on the one hand, to Art Informel, the painting of matter and gesture, and, on the other, to that trend of conceptual art embodied by the Turin Arte Povera circle around 1968, which notionally refused any form of technical, technological craftsmanship or aesthetic determinants. NT were also 'squeezed' in the Yugoslav cultural space between the politically acceptable 'socialist modernism' with its mostly non-experimental models of a work of art, and the radical artistic action and behaviour that appeared in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, gathered around the Belgrade and the Zagreb Students’ Cultural Centres, whose prime exponents were Marina Abramović and Braco Dimitrijević. By the time of Tendencies 5, Belgrade’s Students’ Cultural Centre was already engaging in radical international projects; the Centre was headed by its spiritus movens Biljana Tomić, one of the greatest Yugoslav gallerists of avant-garde and neoavant-garde movements, educated, small wonder, though the exhibitions and colloquia of Zagreb’s [New] Tendencies. That was how, in symbolic terms, a series of uncompromising artistic concepts came full circle – from Zenit, through EXAT and [New] Tendencies, to Belgrade’s April Meetings: concepts, projects, action, creation and conduct that paid no heed to the dead end street of socialist modernist aestheticism and the unbridled era of happy consumption, characteristic of a cushioned, neither-socialist-nor-bourgeois state.

This invisible line of continuity, which we can understand today owing to post festum insights, including, among other things, the Graz exhibition, could not be as pronounced in the 1970s. Indeed it remained submerged until the mid-1990s, with NT’s efforts languishing in the bywaters of local art the way the avant-garde efforts of ZENIT and EXAT had done before them, and seemed irretrievably lost, first in the inarticulate climate of transavant-garde tendencies of the 1980s, and then in the brutal political and merciless wartime climate of ex-Yugoslavia. A visible inrush of 'new tendencies' into the ex-Yugoslav cultural space occurred in the latter half of the 1990s, owing to the influx of contemporary digital technologies and the possibilities of artistic expression they afforded, conducting the process of artistic creation outside the domain of matter and the material. However, the lines of development of recent art directly connected to digital technology are numerous and conceptually and ideologically diverse in each of the former Yugoslav cultural centres (Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Skoplje, Sarajevo, Podgorica), and truly constitute a separate subject for consideration. Let us just add that today, the contemporary artists of ex-Yugoslavia are collecting the shards of that world of concrete utopia, one of the main advocates of which was none other than the [New] Tendencies project.

Lidija Merenik, PhD, is a Professor at the Department of Modern Art History of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University

Footnotes

[1] J. Denegri, Apstraktna umjetnost u Hrvatskoj 2 [Abstract Art in Croatia 2], Split 1985

[2] Ex-Gallery of Contemporary Art

[3] M. Šuvaković, Pojmovnik moderne i postmoderne likovne umetnosti i teorije posle 1950 [The Terminology of Modern and Postmodern Fine Arts and Theory After 1950], Belgrade 1999

[4] J. B. Tito, Govori i članci [Speeches and Articles], XVIII, Zagreb 1966

Copied from Mute Magazine, published 3 October, 2007

Anthropométries and Fire Paintings, Yves Klein - two performances, 1960

During the last two years of his life Yves Klein devoted himself to the creation of large-scale "Fire Paintings" and "Anthropometries"--body prints made by nude, usually female models covered in blue paint and directed in their movements by Klein. At the Ludwig, these works were shown in an immense, all-white concluding gallery. The room was divided diagonally by a free-standing white wall about 30 feet high, on top of which was set a vast horizontal disk of white scrim; the disk was dramatically lit from below so that, stretching out over the gallery, it seemed to hover weightlessly in space. The dazzling whiteness of the enormous room created a startling sci-fi setting for Klein's most flamboyant works.

The 10 "Anthropometries" on display ranged from modest single-figure works to a sprawling 9-by-14-foot canvas in which the human forms have become quite illegible and all that is visible is a central expanse of smeared blue pigment on a white ground. In their insistent figural quality, some of the works are strikingly reminiscent of Rauschenberg's blueprints of outlined bodies from the late '40s. Klein, however, continued to vary the details of his presentation: the works are carried out sometimes on linen, sometimes on unpigmented white silk. Some works are made by means of straightforward body prints, others by spray-painting around the models' bodies. Some works are meant to be hung conventionally on the wall, others are allowed to "float" upright within a light-blue Plexiglas box. As the constantly playing video monitor in the gallery confirmed, it remains difficult to separate these works from the film footage shot in 1960 of Klein in action at the Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain in Paris. The film portrays a dapper Klein in formal attire, accompanied by a small orchestra, directing three nude models before an audience of terminally jaded members of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie.

The dozen "Fire Paintings" included both minimalistic pieces created by singeing a bare canvas with the flames of Bunsen burners and epic-scale works whose dramatic molten forms were produced with the aid of a flame-thrower. There were also four "Fire-Color" works, all modest in size, in which flames were directed at pigment-covered canvases. The resulting distressed surfaces are animated by scorched and reticulated puddles of color. Klein's carefully staged making of these pieces, too, was shown via period film footage on video monitors in the gallery.

Despite their imposing size and unusual means of fabrication, Klein's "Anthropometries" and the "Fire Paintings" seem visually and conceptually a step backward--a return to the congealed formulas of French painterly abstraction and Tachisme of the early '50s. They are, in the end, rather conventional expressionist paintings arrived at by unconventional methods. The same can be said of Klein's late "Cosmogonies," works made by exposing painted canvases to the effects of rain, wind and flowing water. Like many artists in the 1960s, Klein may have sensed the possibilities of nonmanual mark-making procedures; unfortunately he never took the time to carry out more than a small series of very uneven works. Instead, during the last years of his life he relentlessly courted mass-media attention with ever more theatricalized performances; in the process he settled for increasingly predictable pictorial results.

above copied from: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-16878543.html

4'33" John Cage, with David Tudor

4′33″ (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds) is a composition by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer to not play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece. Although commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence", the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Over the years, 4′33″ became Cage's most famous and most controversial composition.

Conceived in 1948, while Cage was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ was for Cage the epitome of aleatoric music and of his idea that any sounds constitute, or may constitute, music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism[citation needed], which Cage studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage has stated that 4′33″ is, in his opinion, his most important work.

Background and influences

In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. They are also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

There has been some skepticism about the accuracy of the engineer's explanation, especially as to being able to hear one's own nervous system. A mild case of tinnitus might cause one to hear a small, high-pitched sound. It has been asserted by acoustic scientists[attribution needed] that, after a long time in such a quiet environment, air molecules can be heard bumping into one's eardrums in an elusive hiss (0 dB, or 20 micropascals). Whatever the truth of these explanations, Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."The realisation as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4'33″.

Cage wrote in "A Composer's Confessions" (1948) that he had the desire to "compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 4 [and a half] minutes long — these being the standard lengths of 'canned' music, and its title will be 'Silent Prayer'. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape or fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibly."

Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly "blank" canvases (though painted with white house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. This inspired Cage to use a similar idea, as he later stated, "Actually what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings… when I saw those, I said, 'Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging'." Cage's musical equivalent to the Rauschenberg paintings uses the "silence" of the piece as an aural "blank canvas" to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance; the music of the piece is natural sounds of the players, the audience, the building, and the outside environment.
Cage was not the first composer to conceive of a piece consisting solely of silence. One precedent is "In futurum", a movement from the Fünf Pittoresken for piano by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. Written in 1919, Schulhoff's meticulously notated composition is made up entirely of rests. Cage was, however, almost certainly unaware of Schulhoff's work. Another prior example is Alphonse Allais's Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, written in 1897, and consisting of nine blank measures. Allais's composition is arguably closer in spirit to Cage's work; Allais was an associate of Erik Satie, and given Cage's profound admiration for Satie, the possibility that Cage was inspired by the Funeral March is tempting. However, according to Cage himself, he was unaware of Allais's composition at the time (though he had heard of a 19th-century book that was completely blank).

Performances

The premiere of the three-movement 4'33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the second and third movements. The piece had passed without a note being played—in fact without Tudor (or anyone else) having made any deliberate sound as part of the piece. Tudor timed the three movements with a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score[citation needed].

Richard Kostelanetz suggests that the very fact that Tudor, a man known for championing experimental music, was the performer, and that Cage, a man known for introducing unexpected non-musical noise into his work, was the composer, would have led the audience to expect unexpected sounds[citation needed]. Anybody listening intently would have heard them: while the performer produces no deliberately musical sound, there will nonetheless be sounds in the concert hall (just as there were sounds in the anechoic chamber at Harvard). It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that are to be regarded as constituting the music in this piece. The piece remains controversial to this day, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.

The title and therefore the length of 4'33″ is in fact not designated by its score. The instructions for the work indicate that it consists of three movements, for each of which the only instruction is "tacet," indicating silence on the part of the performer or performers. The title of the piece in each performance is determined by the length of silence chosen. Cage chose the length of the famous premiere performance by chance methods using I Ching models, the results of which happen to coincide with average lengths of pieces of so-called 'canned' music, where the applicability of those models is valid too, because both fields are dealing in some or the other way with the attentiveness and concentration abilities of humans. There is no evidence supporting the claim that Cage chose the length deliberately, four minutes and thirty-three seconds being 273 seconds and absolute zero being a temperature of −273 °C.

above copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″

No Rehearsal-Aspects of Media Art as Process

Rudolf Frieling
«No Rehearsal—Aspects of Media Art as Process»

«Art Vital –no fixed living-place/permanent movement/direct contact/local relation/self-selection/passing limitations/taking risks/mobile energy/no rehearsal/no predicted end/no repetition» (1)

This programmatic statement by the artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay conveniently summons up the various ideas and practices to which the term «performance art» has been applied since the late 1970s. Performance is directly descended from the happenings and actions associated with the Fluxus movement, such as Nam June Paik's early «action music», or Stockhausen's «Originale» and the «24-hour Happening», but it also has connections with the idea of «Intermedia», (2) with the «Expanded Cinema» actions of Peter Weibel and Valie Export, and with other forms of experimental and avant-garde art whose history extends back to Dada and the Surrealists.
The boundaries between happening, action art and performance are fluid, but a rough distinction may be drawn quite easily. A happening involves a set of instructions, a location and an open dramatic concept (sometimes with a script or «musical» score), but the participants are free –at least in theory –to decide how far they wish to involve themselves in the events. (3) Actions, by contrast, are based on an idea that is enacted by one or several performers, but the sequence of events is essentially open, since the action takes place in a public space where unplanned encounters with the everyday world are inevitable. At the end of the 1960s the talk was of «anti-art» or «non-art». (4) Performance art approximates most closely to the traditional mise-en-scène, requiring a clear demarcation between actors and audience. Here, the events may be meticulously planned or relatively spontaneous: the significant point is that they always revolve around the individual personalities of the performers. (5) All three genres are concerned with a special kind of intensity, a process-orientated quality that is incompatible with –and stubbornly resists –the commodification of the art work. Though it follows an identifiable conceptual pattern, an artistic event of this type is inherently unique and cannot be reproduced. The events may be scripted, but they have their own dynamic, which often includes an element of randomness. No matter whether the result is esoteric, shamanistic, didactic, entertaining or provocative, the actors and viewers are always involved in a direct exchange, a relationship which we now call «interactivity»: the magic word that has replaced the «communication» of the 1970s.
Exploring or controlling communication by electronic means is a first step towards a process-based media art. For example, John Cage's «Variations VII» takes a range of sounds from several different sources, using telephone lines, microphones and frequency generators, and brings them together in a single space; in the field of «Expanded Cinema», Peter Weibel's «Action Lecture» (1968) allows the audience to regulate the showing of a film through the loudspeaker frequencies; Hans Haacke's installation «News» (1969/70) (6) includes a tickertape machine to receive the latest headlines from the news agencies in real time, thereby allowing the outside world to infiltrate into the sphere of art. Art and life as a system of communicating vessels, art as a «live» event –the two areas, normally distinct, are brought together in an «intermedia» relationship. Only the crossover into television proves difficult to encompass: in the USA, Paik succeeds in luring passers-by from the street into the studio in order to participate in the recording of «Video Commune» (1970), but the attempt of Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini in 1968 to stage a happening («Black Gate Cologne») on German television is foiled. (7) Television and action art are fundamentally incompatible: television is a one-way communication relying on detailed programme planning, and feedback is restricted to viewers» letters and phone calls, whereas process art is based on a genuine exchange, a two-way flow of information between a sender and a receiver.
In the context of political emancipation in Germany, the impetus for actions in the public arena came from the questioning of authority –in such variously ordered systems as television, museums and the theatre –and the wish to expose the prevailing mechanisms of discipline and control. (8) Vostell speaks of «disturbing» realities by employing a model familiar to the audience, such as a television set or a car, in such a way that it causes «a disturbance in reflection, in the audience's awareness». (9) As a sculptor, he works with life itself, instead of relying on metaphorical signs. His «Action Sculpture» uses a real car, covered with concrete, and the process aspect takes on a solid and very tangible form. (10)
Valie Export and Peter Weibel, the noted analysts and critics of cinema, also made a calculated attempt to provoke the bourgeois audience and the authorities. In 1968 they caused a considerable outcry with their «Touch and Feel Cinema» in Munich and their actions at the XScreen events of experimental film in Cologne. A few years later, when the hunt for the Baader-Meinhof terrorists was in full swing, Germany was scandalized by a further, even more radical artistic action that integrated the outraged comments of the press into the video documentation. In «There's a Certain Criminal Element in Art» (1976), the artist known as Ulay (F. Uwe Laysiepen) adopted the underground strategy of stealing a symbol of the bourgeois aesthetic –Spitzweg's sentimental painting «The Poor Poet» –from the National Gallery in Berlin, which he then deposited in the apartment of a migrant worker family, before telephoning the media and revealing who had taken the picture, which was eventually handed back to its owner. Mike Steiner recorded the action with a concealed video camera and organized a public discussion on the events, which for obvious reasons had to take place in secret, with no spectators present. Today, twenty years on, the principle of reality TV allows the audience to be everywhere, at any time, although the critical intentions of the 1970s have very little in common with the live television culture of the present. Leaving the political aspect aside, this also constitutes part of the fascination of action art: it is hard to think of another situation that confronts the audience so directly with a dramatic reality.
Happenings are designed to spur the audience into activity, but the spectators often refuse to accept the challenge: the equation «art=life» does not always work. (11) Actions, by contrast, allow art –with a critical or provocative or disturbing impact –to intervene in life. Performance, finally, insists on the artistic character of the process, since «life is no performance». (12) But art can still be «vital» in the sense of the quotation from Abramovic/Ulay that serves as the motto for this essay. The artist alone is at liberty to decide what should happen (or not happen) (13) and when –in the attempt to subject the art form itself to a closer interrogation.
It is difficult, in the public arena, to translate media-specific phenomena into practice and to reflect on their conceptual basis. Apart from the various one-off events and festivals, a number of specific locations were established for experimental work in action art and video. By the end of the 1960s the «art intermedia» gallery in Cologne had already set up a so-called «action space». Ingrid Oppenheim founded her gallery in 1974 and sponsored the work of various performance and video artists until 1979. The first presentations of action art and performance in an exhibition context were «ADA 1/2 –Aktionen der Avantgarde» in Berlin (1973–74) and «Projekt «74» at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. Mike Steiner's gallery in Berlin became one of the most important venues for video performances. In every case, the purpose of the –often radical –experiments in these various settings was to explore alternative models and ways of seeing, establishing an emotional and mental framework that integrated the performer and the audience via a direct appeal to the senses. This approach goes beyond the actions of Joseph Beuys and his concept of social sculpture, whose main aim was to initiate new processes of thought («Thinking is sculpture»).
The emergence of performance as an art form more or less coincides with the introduction of video, the new electronic medium. Its first practitioners came from the USA, where artists such as Joan Jonas, Charlotte Moorman and Carole Schneemann began to exploit the freedoms offered by an entirely new form that was not yet burdened with the canons of art history. Performance promptly allied itself with video, as a democratic medium, a tool which was far easier to work with than film, and which women could use for themselves to formulate an independent position in relation to the media society.
In Europe, too, the art world faced the challenge of a new generation of artists, whose members notably included Valie Export and Ulrike Rosenbach: two women who are now universally regarded as pioneers of video and performance, art forms that had not yet crystallized into male-dominated structures. Their work, which is usually specific to a certain site and time, embodies a successful feminist strategy of experimentation with an alternative aesthetic, and exemplifies the general idea, found throughout the genre, of artistic practice as a vehicle of self-liberation. Subsequently, this orientation towards the self led Rosalind Krauss to describe video as the «narcissistic medium». The process is enacted either in public or in a studio (as, for example, in the performances of the American artist Nan Hoover, working in Germany). Video cameras can be integrated directly into the events, in the form of a closed-circuit installation, or they may be used purely for documentation purposes. Friederike Pezold also calls on women to develop a visual vocabulary of their own, but in her own «new embodied sign language», the main emphasis is on formal aesthetic criteria rather than on the confrontation with suppressed thematic content. And sometimes, emancipatory practice is defined from outside: in 1977, Nan Hoover was accused by Berlin feminists of adopting a «male» aesthetic in her semi-abstract performances, which explore the immateriality of light and bodily contours.
The body and the mechanisms that control it have been the subject of gender- and media-specific analysis. Much (self-)reflexive attention has been devoted to the themes of video surveillance and the confrontation of the public with electronically generated representations (of the performer or the audience itself). Video performance has its main strengths in the direct control of the image and composition, but it also offers scope for dramatizing the production techniques associated with the medium: for example, in Klaus vom Bruch's live displays of video editing as a spontaneous process involving free association. Here, the attention of the camera and the public is focused on the artist, instead of the end product of a linear tape. But the boundaries between egocentric demonstration and the artist as medium are fluid: «Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium ... stems from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community». (14)
For Marina Abramovic, the public is more than a mere voyeur: «You can get an immense energy from the public that takes you beyond your physical and mental limits». (15) In «Rhythm 0», she challenges the spectators to do whatever they want with her, and provokes them by her sheer passivity. But who decides when the limit has been reached? Here, as in many other performances, the artist's own body becomes the central motif, the site on which extremes of psychological and physical experience are publicly explored. Hence, too, the proximity of performance to body art. The most interesting works by Abramovic and Ulay are precarious balancing acts, offering a genuine liminal experience that calls for stamina and personal courage –and there are no rehearsals. Similarly, the performances of Jochen Gerz have often involved situations of serious artistic and personal vulnerability. For instance, in «Purple Cross for Absent Now», staged in 1979, he demonstrates the dangers of viewing everything through the media: the performer is observed by a camera in a closed room, so that only an electronic image is available to the viewer, who is encouraged to act out his latent fantasies of violence by tightening a noose round the artist's neck. As well as formulating a critique of the medium, Gerz therefore poses the question of violence in his own individual way.
Performance art confronts the traditionally passive spectator with an ambivalent situation. Which parts of the performance are planned and which are not? How much punishment can the body –and the audience –ultimately take? Should we stay or leave, should we intervene or simply watch and listen? The questions remain open: there is no printed programme to provide us with ready answers. Initially, the spectator stands at a distance from the events, but the ambiguity rapidly produces a very strong emotional involvement. In one case the issue of physical violence may be resolved by a viewer who decides to intervene, and in another by the performer's own decision to stop the show. The space between artist and public is charged with a psychic energy that either side can release. But performance can also be effective in the absence of group dynamics. Vostell's «Electronic dé-coll/age Space» (1968), which can only be entered by one person at a time, had already made it clear that an artistic event can take place in a personalized form. Since video facilitates communication between quite separate spaces and times, the staging of processes purely for this recording medium was an obvious next step, which American artists such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci were quick to take. In such works, the «live» communication between actor and public is replaced by a mediated relationship, founded on distance, yet this quality is promptly transformed into intimacy by focusing on the individual personality of the artist, often in its most private aspects: «Experiences in the sphere of interpersonal perception are the basis of my work. Desires, feelings and projections emerge via the investigation of a specific person». (16) Rebecca Horn's performances and «exercises» are reworkings of psychic states, employing aesthetic techniques which, as Jochen Gerz indicates, can serve in other works as a means of responding to the inadequacy of political action: «We can now say that, in our highly industrialized part of the world, the real catastrophes are not the atom bomb, or pollution, or war or energy crises, but rather the dismal state –the lifelessness –of our daily lives.» (17)
The attempts to counter this with a living art form, requiring real physical and psychological involvement, have ultimately proved too demanding, for performers and spectators alike. The permanent transgression of social and physical limits eventually blunts the public's sensibilities. When combined with the anti-auratic quality of video, the auratic uniqueness of performance is at once a strength and a weakness. The fundamental question invariably remains: where do we go from here? What happens next? In direct opposition to object-related art, media art has insisted on the temporary nature of a process whose uniqueness and unpredictability can only be documented by the use of recording media. But in the long run, happenings, actions and performance art cannot escape the risk of commercialization and empty posturing, even among their custodians. (18) The appropriation of Beuys's actions by museum culture is only one especially striking example of this trend. Many of today's spectators will regret not having witnessed the events «live». No document can replace the action itself, and relics are a poor substitute for memory.

1 Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Ulay/Marina Abramovic, «Relation Work and Detour», Amsterdam, 1980, p. 19.
2 The term, coined in 1966 by Dick Higgins, describes an interdisciplinary art, operating between the media.
3 In 1959, Allan Kaprow defined the happening as simply allowing «something to take place». (Kaprow later took part, with Vostell, Wolf Kahlen and others, in the show «ADA 1 –Aktionen der Avantgarde» in 1973 in Berlin.) On the history of the happening, see the documentation compiled by Hanns Sohm to accompany the exhibition «Happening & Fluxus», Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1970.
4 «The term «anti-art» comes from the German Dadaists (...). In France and the English-speaking countries, «non-art» is the more common usage. The German expression is more accurate, since it conveys the idea of active opposition rather than mere negation. For the Dadaists, art was and still an inescapable fact». Heinz Ohff, «Anti-Kunst», Düsseldorf, 1973, p. 8.
5 For an extended treatment of the subject, see Joachim Diederichs, «Zum Begriff Performance», in the catalogue of the «documenta 6», Kassel, 1977, pp. 281 et seq.
6 «Prospect 69», Düsseldorf, also shown in 1970 as part of the New York exhibition «Information», an early general survey of media art.
7 See the text by Wibke von Bonin in this volume.
8 The continual actionist interventions of groups such as the Provos (for example, by releasing white chickens at military parades) led to an extended concept of the happening, as in the ideas of Lebel, «who sees the 1968 student riots in Paris as the most significant happening of his lifetime». Ohff, op.cit., p. 97.
9 See interview with Vostell in this volume. Vostell sees the purpose of happenings on television as «to implant a barb in the public mind», although his only interest in television form is as a pure information medium for a mass viewing public.
10Franz Erhard Walther's conception of the art work belongs in the same context. In Schum's «Identifications», he demonstrates a principle by which his cloth objects can be used.
11 No stage, no applause, «but much whistling and booing. The audience (...) generally has difficulty in playing its required role of creative partner.» Ohff, op. cit., p. 94.
12 See the essay thus titled by Herbert Molderings on the performances of Jochen Gerz in: G. Battcock/R. Nicklas (ed.), «The Art of Performance. A critical anthology», New York, 1984.
13 The film «IMI und IMI» by Imi Knoebel and Imi Giese, featured in the 1969 «Intermedia» exhibition in Heidelberg, consists entirely in the assertion that the film will be shown, whereas Jochen Gerz's «Transsib. Project» (1977) assembles the material traces of a journey to prove that the action did indeed take place.
14 RoseLee Goldberg, «Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present», rev. ed., London, 1988, p. 8.
15 Marina Abramovic, cit. in: Anja Oßwald, «Steiner Art Tapes», Berlin, 1994, p. 95.
16 Rebecca Horn, catalogue «documenta 6», Kassel, 1977.
17 Jochen Gerz, «Das hat doch nichts mit Performance zu tun», in Jochen Gerz, «mit/ohne Publikum/public», Bielefeld/Paris, 1981, p. 28.
18 It is significant, for example, that Marcel Odenbach was greatly acclaimed by the Basel art market in 1977 for his performance «The Great Misunderstanding», which caricatures the performer as an entertainer with the attributes of a clown.


Source: Rudolf Frieling, Dieter Daniels, Medien Kunst Interaktion – die 60er und 70er Jahre in Deutschland, Vienna 1997, p. 163–169.

Joseph Cornell, Filmmaker of "Rose Hobart"

Joseph Cornell (1913-1984)
Rose Hobart (1936 USA, 17 mins)

The first and greatest American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. The best of his mysterious assemblages of dime-store tchochkes and paper ephemera in little hand-made cabinets perfectly realize the elusive sublime at the heart of Surrealism, while avoiding the juvenile theatrics of his European colleagues.

However, Cornell was also one of the most original and accomplished filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist movement, and one of the most peculiar. Just as the ascetic and introverted Cornell himself held Surrealism at arms length, borrowing only those elements that suited his interests and temperament, his films superficially resemble those made by other Surrealists, they are in truth sui generis. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood the genius of films like his Rose Hobart — an unfortunate situation exacerbated by Cornell's own obstinate resistance to public screenings. No one made films even remotely similar to Cornell's for almost thirty years, and even now the perfect opacity of his montage remains unrivalled.

Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn't feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.

While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of "Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne" from Nestor Amaral's Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.

Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell's hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.

But the root of Cornell's genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell's version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart's clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.

Rose Hobart premiered in December, 1936 at the Julian Levy Gallery. Cornell included it in a matinee program of short films from his collection, which Levy titled “Goofy Newsreels.” The first Surrealist exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art was about to open, and many of the artists were in town, including Salvador Dali, who attended Cornell's film program. During the screening of Rose Hobart, Dali became extremely agitated. Halfway through the film he began shouting "Salaud!" — bastard — and overturned the projector. Reportedly, Dali ruefully explained his actions to Levy, "My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it (Solomon 89).” Some prefer an apocryphal — but far more poetic — explanation also attributed to Dali: “He stole it from my subconscious.”

© Brian Frye, November 2001
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html
Senses of Cinema

The above copied from:
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Luis Buñuel: A Statement

Film Culture, No. 21, 1960, pp. 41-42.


RESOURCES:
Luis Buñuel in UbuWeb Film
Presented in partnership with Anthology Film Archives


1. In none of the traditional arts is there such a wide gap between possibilities and facts as in the cinema. Motion pictures act directly upon the spectator; they offer him concrete persons and things; they isolate him, through silence and darkness, from the usual psychological atmosphere. Because of all this, the cinema is capable of stirring the spectator as perhaps no other art. But as no other art, it is also capable of stupefying him. Unfortunately, the great majority of today's films seem to have exactly that purpose; they glory in an intellectual and moral vacuum. In this vacuum, movies seem to prosper.

2. Mystery is a basic element of all works of art. It is generally lacking on the screen. Writers, directors and producers take good care in avoiding anything that may upset us. They keep the marvelous window on the liberating world of poetry shut. They prefer stories which seem to continue our ordinary lives, which repeat for the umpteenth time the same drama, which help us forget the hard hours of our daily work. And all this, of course, carefully watched over by traditional morals, government and international censorship, religion, good taste, white humour and other flat dicteria of reality.

3. The screen is a dangerous and wonderful instrument, if a free spirit uses it. It is the superior way of expressing the world of dreams, emotions and instinct. The cinema seems to have been invented for the expression of the subconscious, so profoundly is it rooted in poetry. Nevertheless, it almost never pursues these ends.

4. We rarely see good cinema in the mammoth productions, or in the works that have received the praise of critics and audience. The particular story, the private drama of an individual, cannot interest - I believe - anyone worthy of living in our time. If a man in the audience shares the joys and sorrows of a character on the screen, it should be because that character reflects the joys and sorrows of all society and so the personal feelings of that man in the audience. Unemployment, insecurity, the fear of war, social injustice, etc., affect all men of our time, and thus, they also affect the individual spectator. But when the screen tells me that Mr. X is not happy at home and finds amusement with a girl-friend whom he finally abandons to reunite himself with his faithful wife, I find it all very moral and edifying, but it leaves me completely indifferent.

5. Octavio Paz has said: "But that a man in chains should shut his eyes, the world would explode." And I could say: But that the white eye-lid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames. But for the moment we can sleep in peace: the light of the cinema is conveniently dosified and shackled.

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AFTERLUDE to the Exposition of EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION

AFTERLUDE to the Exposition of EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION
Nam Jun Paik

My experimental TV is
not always interesting
but
not always uninteresting
like nature, which is beautiful,
not because it changes b e a u t i f u l l y,
but simply because it c h a n g e s.
The core of the beauty of nature is that the limitless QUANTITY of nature disarmed the category of QUALITY, which is used unconsciously mixed and confused with double meanings.
l) character
2) value.
In my experimental TV, the word QUALITY means only the CHARACTER, but not the VALUE.
A is different from B,
but not that
A is better than B.
Sometimes I need red apple
Sometimes I need red lips.


(2)))
2 My experimental TV is the first ART (?), in which the ‹perfect crime› is possible........I had put just a diode into opposite direction, and got a ‹waving# negative television. If my epigons do the same trick, the result will be completely the same (unlike Webern and Webern-epigons) ... that is ...
My TV is NOT the expression of my personality,
but merely
a ‹PHYSICAL MUSIC›
like my ‹FLUXUS champion contest›, in which the longest-pissing-time record holder is honored with his national hymn (the first champion: E Trowbridge. U.S.A. 59.7 seconds).
My TV is more (?) than the art,
or
less (?) than the art.
I can compose something, which lies higher (?)
than my personality
or
lower (?) than my personality.



**************3************
Therefore (?), perhaps therefore, the working process and the final result has little to do,,,,,and therefore,... by no previous work was I so happy working as in these TV experiments.
In usual compositions, we have first the approximate vision of the completed work (the pre-imaged ideal, or ‹IDEA,› in the sense of Plato). Then, the working process means the torturing endeavor to approach to this ideal ‹IDEA.› But in the experimental TV, the thing is completely revised. Usually I don't, or cannot have any pre-imaged VISION before working. First I seek the ‹WAY,› of which I cannot foresee where it leads to. The ‹WAY,›... that means, to study the circuit, to try various ‹FEEDBACKS,› to cut some places and feed the different waves there, to change the phase of waves, etc.,... whose technical details I will publish in the next essay.... Anyway, what I need is approximately the same kind of ‹IDEA› that American ad agency used to use,.,.,.,.,just a way or a key to something NEW. This ‹modern›(?) usage of ‹IDEA› has not much to do with ‹TRUTH,› ‹ETERNITY,› ‹CONSUMMATION,› ‹ideal IDEA,› which Plato-Hegel ascribed to this celebrated classical terminology. (IDEA) = f.i.
‹KUNST IST DIE ERSCHEINUNG DER IDEE.›
‹ART is the appearance of the idea.›
(Hegel-- -- -- -- Schiller.)
This difference should be underlined, because the ‹Fetishism of Idea› seems to me the main critical criterion in contemporary art, like ‹Nobility and Simplicity› in the Greek art (Winckelmann), or famous five pairs of categories of Wölfflin in Renaissance and Baroque art.


’’’’’’’4’’’’’’’
INDETERMINISM and VARIABILITY is the very UNDERDEVELOPED parameter in the optical art, although this has been the central problem in music for the last ten years (just as parameter SEX is very underdeveloped in music, as opposed to literature and optical art).
a) I utilized intensely the live-transmission of normal program, which is the most vari-able optical and semantical event in 1960s. The beauty of distorted Kennedy is different from the beauty of football hero, or not always pretty but always stupid female announcer.
b) Second dimension of variability.
Thirteen sets suffered thirteen sorts of variation in their VIDEO-HORIZONTAL-VERTICAL units. I am proud to be able to say that all thirteen sets actually changed their inner circuits.
No two sets had the same kind of technical operation. Not one is the simple blur, which occurs when you turn the vertical- and horizontal-control buttons at home. I enjoyed very much the study of electronics, which I began in 1961, and some life danger I met while working with fifteen kilovolts. I had the luck to meet nice collaborators: HIDEO UCHIDA (president of UCHIDA Radio Research Institute), a genial avant-garde electronician, who discovered the principle of transistor two years earlier than the Americans, and SHUYA ABE, all-mighty politechnician, who knows that the science is more a beauty than the logic. UCHIDA is now trying to prove the telepathy and prophecy electromagnetically.
c) As the third dimension of variability, the waves from various generators, tape recorders, and radios are fed to various points to give different rhythms to each other. This rather old-typed beauty, which is not essentially combined with high-frequency technique, was easier to understand to the normal audience, maybe because it had some humanistic aspects.
d) There are as many sorts of TV circuits as French cheese sorts. F.i. some old models of 1952 do certain kind of variation, which new models with automatic frequency control cannot do.
e) Many mystics are interested to spring out from ONE-ROW-TIME, ONE-WAY-TIME, in order to
GRASP the Eternity.

aa) To stop at the consummated or steril Zero-point is a classical method to grasp the eternity.

bb) To perceive SIMULTANEOUSLY the parallel flows of many independent movements is another classical way for it.

But poor Joyce was compelled to write the parallely advancing stories in one book with one-way direction, because of the othology of the book. The simultaneous perception of the parallel flows of 13 independent TV movements can perhaps realize this old dream of mystics, although the problem is left unresolved, whether this is possible with our normal physiognommy (we have only one heart, one breath, one focus of eye,) without some mystical training, and IF WELL TRAINED,,,,,,,,he needs neither 13 TVs, not TV, nor electronics, nor music, nor art,.......the happiest suicide of art....the most difficult anti-art, that ever existed.......I don't know, who could have achieved this platonic and steril consummation of art,
because if he REALLY did,
I should not know his name.
I must not know his name.



Source: Paik published a brochure for the exhibition in Wuppertal, 1963, with the first theoretical statement on his works with TV sets. The ‹Afterlude’, whose first part is reprinted here, continues this reflection. Originally published in: Fluxus cc five Three, 1964, reprinted in: Gregory Battcock (ed.), New Artists Video: A critical anthology, New York, 1978.