He’s interesting to me as an intelligent artist who never produced comparably intelligent work. Knowing and liking him for decades, I can’t explain why not. Well-educated in France, always sympathetic to avant-garde aspirations, he came to America initially in the 1960s as a subsidized guest of a graduate school program. In America he would have graduated summa cum laude from an arts college or perhaps a research university. For some five decades, he has written, lectured, and exhibited both in America and in his native France, indeed maintaining studios in both countries. He married intelligent women and cultivated intelligent friends. He reads art magazines in more than one language.
Nonetheless, he didn’t quit as most do when they fail to earn the success they wished; nor did he languish as a tenured academic. I’m not aware of any personally self-destructive habits, such as drugs or drink or laziness. My friend’s works should be as brilliant as he palpably is, in both English and French; but if any are, nothing has come to my attention. While his professional résumé is a mile long, indicatively nothing is claimed for any particular work, not even in his own publicity.
Why he disappointed, not only himself but those around him, I can’t identify, the question thus puzzling as well as challenging me. Did he fail to develop any strong idiosyncratic ideas? Or the unique SIGNATURE that marks major art? Is the answer simply that personal brilliance doesn’t necessarily generate artistic excellence? I withhold his real name(s) because he’s actually several people, including some women, and I’ve known in passing yet more undaunted artists like him.
(29 May 1922–4 February 2001)
Born Greek in Rumania, Xenakis was trained in architecture in Athens; between 1947 and 1959, he worked with LE C ORBUSIER, reportedly contributing to the spatial installation of EDGARD V ARÈSE’s Poème électronique at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. While working in architecture, he studied music with OLIVIER M ESSIAEN and Darius Milhaud (1892–1974). Using various kinds of mathematics, Xenakis has advocated what NICOLAS S LONIMSKY called “the stochastic method which is teleologically directed and deterministic, as distinct from a purely aleatory [i.e., JOHN C AGEAN] handling of data.”
The composer JOEL CHADABE identified Xenakis’s indebtedness to statistics and systems theory outside musical traditions:
He heard the cicadas of a summer night as clouds of sound made up of particles too small to be treated as individual events but understandable as statistical system, with energy distributions, and he thought of pizzicatos, for example, as events that could be understood and controlled with a mathematics based upon probabilities.
Xenakis also founded and directed the Centre d’Études Mathématiques et Automatiques Musicales in Paris (and for a while a comparable Center for Mathematical and Automated Music in America), purportedly in competition with PIERRE B OULEZ’s IRCAM.
All the verbal claims notwithstanding, much of Xenakis’s music has thickly atonal textures, which sound like bands of frequencies in the tradition of tone clusters, often distributed among many loudspeakers. For the French pavilion at Montreal’s EXPO 67, Xenakis also created, as an accompaniment to his audiotape, a spatially extended flickering light show.
(1970s–)
This mode of art began to flourish in the 1980s with the improvement and the nascent omnipresence of the effective photocopier. (It is hard for us to remember now how poor in quality photocopies were prior to the 1970s and how daunting any photocoping was before 1965.) Although xerographic art can take many shapes (including simple image degradation and serial imagery), its major form is a method of collaging, occasionally called xerage or xerolage. While some xerages are merely photocopied collages, constrained by the somewhat limited reproductive capabilities of available photocopy machines, the most expressive examples bring together elements in new and interesting ways: by actually copying (rather than pasting) one image over another, by combining different colors of monochromic xerography, by degrading individual images, and by distorting images after computer scanning.
With the advent of digital photocopiers in the 21st century, xerographic art has been diminished. The accuracy of these new copiers produces a sharper image, and generational xerographic degradation no longer creates the muddy look so prized by the xerographic artists of the 1980s.
—with Geof Huth