The well-made song

[imomus]

This entry formerly conveyed seasonal greetings to people listed in my Mindmap, a visualisation of LJ relationships so horrifically ugly that I've decided to remove it from this page. Instead, I want to promote some comments based on the colours of the mindmap graph, which became much more interesting than the original entry.

The Mindmap colours reminded me of the Robert Malaval show currently on at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. I found Malaval's paintings hideous, but they've haunted me ever since. I've been wondering to myself "Could they be so horrible that they're challenging my taste in a salutary way?"



In other words, I've been considering the point Clement Greenberg raises here (beware, a lot of reactionary stuff there, delivered in a slurred, alcohol-impaired voice) when he says:

"What struck me, maybe surprised me more than anything else in the audience for new art was its patience with boredom. Conceptual Art was an example of that, quasi-Conceptual art, some kinds of Minimal Art. And it was precisely that because people were bored that they thought the stuff had something -- that it really had something and they were missing it -- and the fact that it was there to be missed meant that it was real new and really important. If they got it, if they got the art, if they enjoyed it some, it was probably slick, it was probably facile and dated. Now, I'm not exaggerating here; this is literally reporting things I've heard."

I was thinking about this very thing yesterday--the suspicion that something enjoyable is "slick, facile and dated"--when I happened to play Swigging Echinacea by the Free French (aka Rhodri of this hemisphere) followed immediately by Waschsalon Berlin by Frieder Butzmann from the Neue Deutsche Welle compilation "Verschwende Deine Jugend", ("waste your youth"). It was one of those iTunes serendipity things, when the program just plays something alphabetically by artist name.

Now, the Free French track is "well-made" (Modernist critics used to call Edwardian salon drama "the well-made play", rather scathingly), it's beautifully crafted; it sounds a bit like Prefab Sprout, has clever lyrics, has the capacity to move you like a well-scripted, slightly sentimental Hollywood movie. And the Butzmann track is, in a sense, a piece of boring, eccentric crap, some random sound effects and repetitive shouting. But I vastly prefer the Butzmann. It just feels so gloriously free; I don't know what's going to happen next. Butzmann has the nerve to have just one sound playing at a time. And there's a spirit of originality and adventure, tied in, no doubt, in my mind, with a certain imaginary reconstruction of what Berlin must have been like in the early 80s. So very edgy! An index of future possibilities, the construction of a new grammar for pop music!

It's precisely because Waschsalon Berlin is, in a way, boring and mad that it's art, not craft. You shift your gaze from the chords, lyrics, riffs etc to the concept, the recklessness, the audacity, the self-given license. Because it's badly (yet adventurously) made, it's far from the "well-made play". It also has the crucial capacity to "repel the weak". It completely separates the sheep from the goats. Few conformists would like it (they'd resent the liberty and reckless playfulness Butzmann has clearly awarded himself) and few radio shows would dare to air it.

I happen to be white van man today, ferrying the contents of my apartment to a storage unit, and it's a reminder of how truly awful FM radio can be (there's one in the cab). Not challenge-me awful, just awful awful, tinkle tinkle, Phil Collins-ish and filthy with repetition. Craft can drag us down into this hell, art never would.

Comments

[fez-rejection.livejournal.com]

those colors are hideous

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

Muck verses Mediocrity is not much of a contest.

[fez-rejection.livejournal.com]

most definitely. i think that happens a lot.
i'll think "what a heinous image," and next thing i'll be telling myself what i like about it and, HEY, it's not so bad after all, is it?
my tolerance for boring art/anything has definitely grown from that.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

That's a nice piece of, uh, "map" you got there. Complete with crisscrossing roads or what to call them.... The spiders net or something....

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Seasonal greetings from outside your hemisphere too!

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Hehe, I'm on top of Dickon.

Merry Christmas.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Art can be like medicine - anything that tastes this disgusting has to be good for me, right?

But there can be great stuff we dismiss unfairly, simply because it's so easy and friendly - no sturm und drang, no outward hostility.

Debussy's music is arguably just as avant-garde as Schoenberg's, but the fact it's so easy on the ear means people fail to notice how much radicalism there is.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

How right you are! I've found that, almost always, the most subversive elements are fine rather than coarse. Coarseness allows those who are easy to confuse to feel subverted.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I sort of disagree with this. People who lack talent in certain areas of detail (for instance, John Cage lacked harmonic skill, by his own admission) often take bigger risks and make more radical gestures to compensate.

In the example of the mp3 files I link here, I think Butzmann may possibly have very little musical skill (although I think the white noise textures that develop as the "song" progresses are wonderfully rich), but he makes up for that by his formal audacity... which may be the direct result of his musical failings. Rhodri, on the other hand, is musically very able (the dynamics are subtly controlled, and the descending semitonal chords with slide guitar solo over them make for a haunting ending) but, poignant and sophisticated though the song is, you can't help wishing early PiL would come in and fire a fire extinguisher or something, just to break the paradigm and inject a little daring.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

So John Cage admitted that he was a "bit crap" at harmonics. A self depricating American.

I'm thinking of someone who looks at an abstract painting and say's "my 5 year old could do that". You might explain that this artist was classically trained and can draw figures and paint landscapes with the best of them. Throw in a bit of history about how photography freed the painer from merely representing reality.

I wonder if we cut musicians more slack. Or maybe the Butzmann piece doesn't need to be classified as music. But it is art.

I prefer a film where the filmaker uses the natural sounds from the story to create the sountrack. The music. (Bresson is a good example of this.) The emotions should come from the sounds and images, not from emotional music smeered over the sounds and images.

I slid a bit off topic. It's late. Goodnight.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Very much agree on the Bresson point. Of course, we then get into the circular argument:

* Pure sound is also music.

* If we take this logic far enough, music is also pure sound.

* Therefore music is a form of music.

The problem in constructions like "pure sound is also music" is that we're deconstructing one term but not the other. Pure sound, but not music. Because if we deconstruct both terms (music, sound), the binary collapses and we can't make any statement at all about the relationship between music and sound, let alone clever paradoxes in which one "is" the other. But if we're deconstructing one with the paradox that it "is" the other, and yet they hold themselves in mutually-defining opposition, we are actually deconstructing both, or neither. So we end up with silly formulae like "music is a form of music".

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really thinking of "pure" sound. Bresson put a lot of work into the sound mixing. And he often used "music music".
A difficult urge to express, he admited.

Unlike the dogme guys who drew heavily on Bresson (I think) and took it a few steps further by not allowing the sound to be altered. Interesting experiment, and they made a some great movies.

Once you've captured the pure/natural sound then it is yours to do with as you please. You can bring it into the realm of music or, less specificaly, art.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I meant - a difficult urge to supress.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

I think you partially misunderstand me - by coarseness, I meant the "rough, harsh" definition, not the "of poor quality" or "consisting of large particles" definitions. "Rough, harsh" isn't a reference to level of skill, but rather the inane tendency which has become so common to "try really hard" to be subversive by merely managing to be noisy. Poor quality can often be genius because, by default, it has to be visionary (or anti-visionary) to be interesting.

And be careful not to confuse skill and talent. Skill implies honing something that almost anyone can do: carpentry and playing the piano are skills. Talent can also be honed, but it implies inventive/visionary capability: sculpting and piano composition/improvisation are talents. And it is often easier to be talented when you restrict the types and levels of skill you are willing to make use of. Our limitations often define and embolden our visionary prowess.

I wouldn't say that anyone's imagination is necessarily "better" than anyone else's, but some imaginations tend to be more appealing than others for whatever reason. Figuring out what kinds of imaginations we find appealing would appear to define personal taste, though I wouldn't rule out some portion of taste being innate and/or subconscious. Personally, I tend to prefer beauty over ugliness and talent over skill.

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

Merry christmas, Momus. Even if you think you're a pagan.

[300letters.livejournal.com]

A lot of conceptual and minimalist art operates on a similar trajectory to Zen meditation. "If you get bored after 5 minutes, sit for ten." Of course there is probably some aesthetic etymology one can trace back to the early moderns and post-moderns who were themselves quite interested in Zen and Buddhism. Cage being an obvious example.
True freedom, as opposed to socially prescribed rebellion, can be quite boring to people expecting the latter. Its form is not obvious and its impact unexpected.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I've been considering the point Clement Greenberg raises here (beware, a lot of reactionary stuff there, delivered in a slurred, alcohol-impaired voice)

A critic to avoid is certainly Harold Rosenberg and his book The Tradition of the New (http://www.countrybookstore.co.uk/books/index.phtml?whatfor=0306805960). He sounds like a Marxy of sorts, pointing out the terminal decline of European art, regretting Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, and stating that American art will dominate the world from now on.

Hugo Ball is another one that comes across as a conservative grumpy old man in his book on Dada, always whinging about 'young people these days'.

[(Anonymous)]

Blog entry's seem to have gone the way of the"well made" song "slick, facile and dated" go on get adventurous. Then so might we in our comments.

[elperrodepaulov.livejournal.com]

I somehow see an advantage in the public of the FM radio (the taxi drivers) in relation to the public of the avant-garde gallery: they are sincere (if little demanding). I see so much pretentiousness and wanna-be-coolness in the later that it makes me cringe. They are more often than not ignorant people (as ignorant as the taxi driver) that just want to stand out in a crowd and for that they fool themselves into looking at whatever is hung on the wall of the gallery. I prefer people like Jonathan Richman that can find poetry and beauty in the outside world (i.e. in a chewing gum wrapper, in the neon signs, etc.).

Merry Christmas,
Javier

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

I appreciate this discussion. In my code's defense, some people's datasets form much more attractive renderings than others. Yours is very large and complex, and for various reasons, the inferior code path is employed to create it. Also, color was an afterthought. The original rendering was b&w, and I grafted color onto it as an upsell model.

I basically have the same feelings, having seen hundreds of these... you should not turn a computer loose with a full colorwheel. Alternatively, I experimented with limiting the colorwheel range to, say, half, and the blending was much easier to look at, but the limitation was artificial, and that damaged those awesomely cool cases where the rendering actually worked well to add information to the image. But on the whole, when computers choose pretty randomly from the full spectrum of color, this is the kind of horriffic mess they'll produce.

Have a great new year!!! Best of luck on your new album!!!