Foreclosure

In November 1961, before I had moved to New York, I wrote a group of compositions inspired, to be sure, by the model of La Monte Young's early word pieces, which he had been sending me since mid-1960, and Henry Flynt's concept art pieces, which he shared with me in early 1961.

[show word pieces]

All of the early 1960s word pieces, by George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, and the rest, were in an important sense efforts to break through the relativist impasse that John Cage's chance approach had implied. Looking back now, I can see that we pursued five different responses.

One way to proceed, even if the choice of specific musical events were to be recognized as arbitrarily related to the listeners' taste, was for the composer to expand the circle of esthetically engaged material. By specifying new objects of musical contemplation, the composer could redirect and instruct the listener, as for instance when La Monte Young asked that the piece involve feeding hay to the piano. Happenings followed from this approach.

Henry Flynt inaugurated the notion that after Cage the site of compositional activity had to shift completely from the contemplation of sonar objects to the contemplation of the approach taken by the composer, and even more, to the contemplation of approaches to, or ideas about, esthetic modalities in general. This led to his concept art.

In my short pieces, something different has happened; the pragmatic structure of composition--the titling of an instruction set--is shrunk to a tight tautological loop. This in effect shuts down the pragmatic structure of composition completely--so completely, in fact, that there was no outlet for these works.

The collaborative "Dream Music" group that La Monte Young founded, including him, me, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela, adopted the approach that the institution of the score, and consequently the role of composer itself, could be abandoned by entering directly into the architecture of the sonic environment and carefully manipulating it in real time performance. The collectivity of the enterprise further undermined the individualist ethos that had overwhelmed post-Enlightenment Western music.

Finally, both Flynt and George Maciunas saw ways to attack the institution of Western music composition directly from a radical political standpoint. I joined Flynt to picket Stockhausen's New York concert in 1964. Our stated program was "(1) not to produce more Art (there is too much already); [and] (2) not to concede [even] in private that non-European culture might have an "ethnic" validity."

Of all these approaches, only the last demanded the foreclosure of activities that were dissonant with the adopted direction. Happenings, Dream Music, concept art, and my tautological pieces were each complacent with the other, and in fact existed in an extremely mixed milieu of cultural activities. It was the heyday of the Undergound movies; in summer 1963 I was playing the mummy in Jack Smith's Normal Love .

[Video clip of cake sequence]   

However, by the late 1960s conflicting approaches in a turgid art market induced an increasingly moralistic tone among the prevailing critics, springing from Clement Greenberg's pontifical tone of an earlier time. Michael Fried constructed the term 'theatrical' as a kind of moral slur--"and theatre is now the negation of art," (125) he states, invoking the mathematical logicality of "negation." [Fried opposed theatricality to what he called presentness --"a kind of instantaneousness : as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it." (146, original emphasis) [Fried, Michael, "Art and Objecthood." In Battcock, Gregory, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), 116-47.]   Even music was to be gauged by this ostensibly idealist measure, albeit music "shares with theatre the convention, if I may call it that, of duration...." (146n20) Fried's conceit that duration itself should be regarded as a convention intimates at the moral distance from which he felt himself to be speaking.] While Lawrence Alloway disclaimed that New York minimalist work was an "appeal to idealism," [Alloway 52] [Alloway, Lawrence, "Systematic Painting." In Battcock, Gregory, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), 37-60.] the underlying message was that fundamental values were being arbitrated, and those outside the circle of discourse were esthetically and morally exposed. With the emergence of "conceptual art," the morally progressivist tone was only accelerated. Ultimately, the ethical underpinnings of progressivism of course exposed late modernism to the feminist critiques of the 1970s and the consequent ruptures that restored a more heterogeneous field of play in all the arts.

In the late 1960s progressivist and absolutist environment, newness or firstness were morally authorizing parameters. Though an artist might legitimately reduplicate triumphalist works, doing the same piece over and over for the marketplace, he (or sometimes she) was expected to move "onward" as well. There is no clearer display of the way that artists and filmmakers were miles apart on this issue than George Maciunas's criticism of P. Adams Sitney's "Structural Film" essay. In a terse chart, Maciunas "corrects" Sitney's "errors" of priority by citing early Fluxus films that anticipated the minimalist terms of Sitney's unfortunately-styled "structural film."   [Maciunas, George. "George Maciunas (Dec. 5, 1969): Some Comments on Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney ( Film Culture No. 47, 1969)." In P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (Praeger, 1970), p. 349.]

The extraordinary flowering of this "structural film," in the work of Snow, Jacobs, Gehr, et al., took place within a film world that could be intellectually focused without being exclusionary. Andy Warhol's films by themselves display this range of esthetic eclecticism, ranging from Empire to Andy Warhol's Frankenstein .