Hi Josh (and all),
Doesn't Georgina Born mean, in the first part of this sentence, that the
viewer/listener/perceiver must recognise that what is performed or displayed
is art and not an activity (for instance, washing socks or having a haircut)
for it to be meaningful to the viewer/listener/perceiver as art?
Here's an example, which happened in 1984: Two students decide to interpret
part of Paragraph 5 of Cornelius Cardew's _The Great Learning_ by cutting
each other's hair. Given the weirdnesses which happen in some performances
of this paragraph AND given the setting - the pulpit of Union Chapel in
Islington, during the Almeida Festival of modern music - even a casual
visitor will recognise this haircutting as art/performance/music rather than
the need for a short back-and-sides (get yer 'air cut, ya hippie!).
The visitor may not agree that such performance is art ("What's the matter
with a good old-fashioned sing-song?"), but they realise that it is
presented and intended as art. Of course, critics know better ("It's art
and better than the sad-eyed clowns you hang on your wall, ya Philistine!").
Here's an example, which doesn't happen often enough to me: Dilip is cutting
my hair at Heads of Leicester II. A passerby walks in - is it a haircut or
performance? The passerby will conclude that it is a haircut. This
activity may have meaning as a haircut to the passerby (perhaps as
remembrance: I haven't seen that style since I was in high school) but not
meaning as art. But it might be art or, rather, some kind of performance:
say, that Dilip and I are recreating that part of that performance of the
Cardew. It may be that Dilip has decided that Heads of Leicester II is the
title of a work which he has written and that his whole life of cutting hair
is performing this work:
Heads of Leicester II
Cut hair
Sweep hair off of the floor
Occasionally perm or colour hair
Keep scissors sharp and brushes clean
Tell no-one about this piece
Because I don't know the score (quite literally!) I think that I'm having a
haircut. There are aesthetics to haircuts, of course, but mainly what it
means to me is that my hair doesn't cover my eyes. Dilip's private system
(one might see also Gavin Bryar's experimental music, which mostly deals in
secret or private systems, or Tom Johnson's _Private Music_, which is
explicitly forbidden for public performance) is there, but it has no meaning
AS ART to me. What's more, it has no meaning as art to anyone else, so the
criticism by the arts world won't impinge ("Dilip's highlights moved me to
tears"), nor will funding (Dilip will not be short-listed for the Turner
Prize, nor get an Arts Council grant). For these things to happen, Dilip
must announce that his shop is an art work. If he does so, Heads of
Leicester II will have meaning to others as an art work. However, because
he breaks the injunction to keep the system secret, he is not performing
Heads of Leicester II and it's badly-performed art, if art at all.
Too much from me. Back to lurking.
Cheers,
Virginia
> Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 21:31:07 -0700
> From: "Josh Ronsen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: FLUXLIST: RE: Questions (anti-art)
>
> A day after I posted my question, I came across the following passage in
> "Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the
> Musical Avant-Garde" by Georgina Born:
>
> However much an avant-garde attempts to produce work that is unclassifiable,
> shockingly different, it is a truism that in order to be meaningful [sic!] it
> must, by definition, ultimately be classifiable as "art" by an audience; or it
> may be understood as the negation of art -- the reaction that the avant-garde
> typically sets out to provoke in the "Philistine" audience. The latter
> "against art" classification appears, historically, to be particularly
> permeable, so that by the intervention of critics, "against art" comes
> eventually to be undersood as "part of art." There remains some avant-garde
> art that is unacceptable to all but small and "knowing" audience. But as long
> as "anti-" or avant-garde art is recognized as legitimately "part of art" by
> the dominant institutional apparatuses, it is granted the status of art and
> becomes a negational statement within the field of art: a powerful agrument
> for the ontological priority of the institutional over the aesthetic.
>
> So there.
>
> But what can she mean by meaning can only be found in art?
>
> - -Josh Ronsen
> http://www.nd.org/jronsen
>
--
Virginia Anderson
Leicester, UK
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Experimental Music Catalogue: <http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk>
...experimental music since 1969....
