Dissonance Day Nineteen: Scattered with too many things to share:

Its funny, whenever I go to talk about something in class that I love or have taught a class on ideas pile up and come out in a jumble. Today’s topic “generative art” comes pre-digested after more than a year’s worth of conversations with Bob, a ten-week class, and now research and thoughts leading toward an article on Cage, Reich, and Eno. Too many observations, too many examples, and not enough time to digest them. So – In class today: The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka – playing as the students came into the room, Reich’s “Come out,” Reich’s “Pendulum Music” – performed by one live mic, moiré patterns, Eno’s Trope for iPad, Thicket for iPad, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz for ipad, Conway’s Life, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, and Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. I also made reference to Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” – played in the first few minutes of class earlier in the term. The process of spending 13 minutes listening to “Come out” proved to be the most useful. Students had great comments about this piece in terms of what demands it does or doesn’t place on the listener and how one might listen to the piece. So this was another day where I struggle with either going back to my notes to hit on a few key points or letting the conversation develop any way it goes. I think part of why I keep coming back to this is that generally I don’t have such a large collection of students interested in talking about this stuff. So it’s a good dilemma to have.

I do want to come back to the process/product question as well as the notion of things developing over time. For me, the visibility of the process is such a contemporary, postmodern thing. That doesn’t mean that the process was invisible throughout the history of art, performance, theatre, etc, but that more and more the process has become a large part of the product to the point where they are indistinguishable. It seems to be the same tings as the whole life/art divide. 20^th century art really does work to collapse this – especially in the last 50 years or so.  That was really the point I wanted to make. But I do find it odd that quite often this term I have been frustrated by my need to sort of summarize everything after the fact. These “wrap up” days – while yielding some great conversations – are often not my most favorite classes in the sequence of project, discussion, analysis/history. Hmmm. I wonder if there is another way into this. Something to think about.  

Dissonance Days Sixteen, Seventeen, and Eighteen: Way too many days running together:

Way too many days running together. That’s what a spring break will do. And actually these three class days do blur together as basically transition days from one idea to the next. The projects have been mostly individual efforts (no one has asked to collaborate yet – so I figure I will wait it out until someone asks), so I figured we need to do more group work. We started day sixteen with an exercise cribbed from Brian Dennis’ lovely book called Projects in Sound. Ostensibly a book for elementary and middle school teachers to have their students explore sound. It has some fantastic pieces in it – some quite sophisticated in terms of the generative quality of sound. Perfect for what we were doing at this point in the term. So – after we warmed up I broke the class up into five groups and handed each group a “map” – well really one of those Situationist psychogeographical maps. Their task as a group was to treat this as a piece of music and perform the map in sound. Some wonderful results. Most groups compartmentalized with each person taking a specific sound that when blended together made a whole piece. Some went all at once, some were orchestrated to add or subtract sounds as the piece developed. Really quite lovely actually. We may do a similar exploration of space when we get to the Bauhaus.

 

After the exercise we spent some time discussing the Fluxus pieces. Some great observations on the nature of control and of letting things go to different interpretations. We also went back over some of the terms techniques that have been developing. I posted this list before but here is a more expanded version:

Suspend intellect (embrace nonsense and the "primitive")

Exploitation of form

Parasitic of history (Duchamp's urinal needs art and the museum)

Antagonistic

Iconoclastic

Collage (of images, text, ideas)

Chance (poem, image, sound)

Juxtaposition (the antithesis of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk)

Spontaneity

Automatic writing (reaching out toward unconscious)

Noise (embraced as aesthetic element, not interruption)

Negation of high art VS low art

Devaluation of skill, training, talent

Simultaneity (multiple meanings simultaneously)

Dynamism (goes with juxtaposition as combination of elements)

Philosophical or aesthetic concerns over commerce

Process over product

Indeterminacy

Open work – interpretation

Life into art/art into life

The next step was to begin to run these ideas through the S,S,&C material and the P2P website stuff. Starting with my favorite Greenberg quote on modernism (“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”) The interesting ting is that most of the folks we have explored are working in-between disciplines. Adds a nice postmodern twist.  At the end of class I gave them their next assignment – the sound machine project assignment. I figured why not make it fun. The boxes each contained a crumpled up piece of paper with a description of a machine drawn from reading Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus.

Day Seventeen started with the warm up and then a sharing of the projects. Some students did some remarkable work – a few working clearly outside their comfort zone with a “machine.” Some appeared to give the project little effort. I debated whether to start back from spring break with a project or not, but I wanted to recapture the momentum we had going into the break. So, I figured this would be a step back, but one that could move us forward. The word “machine” was an interesting one. Most don’t tend to think of artistic expression this way, but some of the machines were beautiful in their movement and execution. I have videos of them and will post – eventually. Given how messy some of these were there was really no time for discussion after class. I can’t wait to see what happens with the destruction projects.

Day Eighteen. Back to word games. Pick out a word from the dictionary and give it the most interesting definition you can think of. Some were very playful. No one passed me the dictionary so I didn’t get to play. At this point we had a discussion about the sound machines. I am glad that I programmed these sort of open discussion days in the syllabus. This is where some of the most interesting work happens. I don’t think this kind of approach (project driven) really works without a follow up discussion. What I am always struck by is how interesting the process is on projects that may initially not seem that interesting. This is exactly what I am getting at in terms of postmodernism as opposed to modernism. One is focused on the process and the other the product. At a school that is almost completely product oriented this lead to an interesting discussion. Some great points about not being afraid to fail since the projects don’t have the same kind of expected outcome as more artistically inclined projects. I pontificate way too much – but the point I am, trying to make is that to sustain a career as an artist in any field means constantly exploring, pushing the boundaries, going out of your comfort zone, otherwise you end up repeating the same thing over and over again.

We largely abandoned my notes since I found the conversation that developed far more interesting. I did draw on two ideas though – Barney’s idea of hypertrophy and how this can be applied to art, education, muscle growth, whatever. We also dealt with the notion of problem solving. I really do believe that problem solving a huge part of being an artist in any field. Its making choices to develop a role, setting up a film shot, interpreting a choreographer’s moves, picking which variation on a guitar chord to use, what color, line, shape, texture to employ, etc, etc, etc. I do think that the idea of problem solving is the key to these project driven courses. That is how you gain an understanding of a subject – but doing it – getting your hands dirty, making mistakes, making changes, adapting, being in a dialogue with the work. Well – that – and then reflecting back on what you have done. Next up we get to explore some generative art – yea haw!