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Content: #15 – Spring 2013 (All texts in English)
MIGUEL ANGEL TOLOSA
INTRODUCTION
STEVE RODEN
265 x 433 (EXCERPT)
Excerpts from a diary of daily performances of John Cage’s 4’ 33’’: Notes, sketches, lists of sounds, concrete poetry, short prose texts.
ANTOINE BEUGER/SAMUEL VRIEZEN
ASKING QUESTIONS, TRYING ANSWERS
Documentation of an e-mail-coversation: the inside and the outside name of music, the pre-existence of pieces, intercorrelations in music, the politics in musical form, participation, extra-musical influences and atmosphere, is there ever an end to be written?
MANFRED WERDER
SCORES
Six score facsimiles and a photo. Objets trouvés in performance
WILL MONTGOMERY
FIVE WAYS OF LOOKING AT MANFRED WERDER
Five experiences from watching the endles in-space-performances by Manfred Werder. Sound and absence, space and awaiting. The feeling of abundance.
WADE MATTHEWS
THREE SUPPOSITIONS
Music as a dishrag: music as something that absorbs what it touches. Invading and shaping sound. Music as a die: the graceful and fragile gesture of flinging out a tone. Music as a mark: creating meaning and orientation.
MATTIN
NOISE VS CONCEPTUAL ART
A political text. The anarchy of noise. Noise as meta-chaos. Noise in the state of crisis. In extremes we meet!
1. If conceptual art is clean, noise is dirty. If conceptual art is subjective, noise is a subjective. of course, it is the artist who produces his or her conceptual artwork. By contrast, noise is everywhere.
2. Anybody can make noise. one does not need to be an artist, or go to art school, or understand the specifics trends of art-making such as conceptual art, institutional critique or relational aesthetics. the everyday qualities of noise have been with us for a long time.
3. semantic jailers may complain about my different usages of the noun noise in this text. If there is a term that one needs not to be puritanical about, it might well be noise. I would rather play with its different meanings, than perpetuate noise as a musical genre.
4. ‘capital does not like noise’ – Miguel Ángel Fernández ordóñez, governor of the Bank of spain. countability, separability, measurability are intrinsic qualities of capital. For a com- modity to achieve its value and therefore become a commodity, it needs to be counted as one. rumour is elusive and unstable, impossible to count, it can be defined as noise. noise exceeds the logic of calculability.
5. If we take on theodor Adorno’s claim that there is a strong connection between the forces of production and art, we can see how conceptual art and the dematerialisa- tion of the art object coincides with the end of gold as the standard equivalent form of value. Lack of control, pollution and intelligibility: all attributes of noise, connect today to a level of abstraction that capitalism has reached with its credit booms, toxic assets and high-frequency trading. Inevitably, fictitious capital brought us into a state of crisis. capital reconfigures itself in order to give us the appearance that we are done with the crisis – nevertheless producing more crisis. noise never hides itself, it is permanent crisis pushing constantly all its elements to their extremes.
6. to perceive ‘noise in-one’ (François Laruelle) without applying capitalist logic, understanding its elements in their specificity without making formal hierarchies over whether one sound is more valuable than another, knowing that we are always going to miss something, makes demands upon us to be as perceptive as possible.7. common denominators, totally predictable improvisations, vulgar ways of re- sponding to one another, average volumes or brutal noises. how many noise con- certs that sound like noise concerts do you want to attend? Anything (such as an idea, a concept or any other element) can be used if it helps us to stop reproducing the stereotypes that we constantly make when we improvise or when we make noise. these elements might help you to go further from what you would do with your own intuitions, repetitive intentions and emotions. the incorporation of concepts in noise and improvisation might help us to develop unexpected ways of playing that can challenge the situation that we are in. ways of playing that we might not dare try out otherwise.
8. ‘I have found that the limitations imposed by decisions based on my personal “tastes” are absolutely stifling. choices made through the criteria of subjective likes and dislikes are to me nothing more than a kind of therapeutic ego titillation that only inhibit further the possibility of sharing an artistic vision (as if it weren’t difficult enough a thing to do as it is). Besides, I really believe that truly good art is always made of broader stuff than the personality of the artist.’ – Adrian piper, ‘A defence of the “conceptual” process in art’.
9. It is precisely in the limits, in the borders, in the beginnings and ends where one can find the hidden ideological contradictions and interests that rest on the constructions of the situations that we are in. we have more tools for expressing ourselves but also there are more laws that try to regulate our creativity. It is precisely that which frames the context in which we operate which must be severely questioned. these are the limitations that are constantly producing our subjectivity.
10. In conceptual art the artist frames all the activity that occurs in the moment of the artwork’s presentation. the concept of ‘piece’ is antagonistic to noise, as one cannot totalise all the noise and say, ‘this is mine’. even when we make very loud noise, there are always elements escaping us. when we speak of John cage’s 4’ 33”, we are not listening to the specific noises of each situation. we are talking about a specific piece by a specific composer.
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Excerpt from Mattin: Noise vs Conceptual Art
Read more in the physical issue #15 !