(c. 1960)
While liberal arts institutions at various levels tend to have continuous reputations, arts colleges go up and down, which to say that they have stronger years and weaker ones, often inexplicably. Consider that among those getting a graduate degree in the visual arts at Yale around 1960 were RICHARD SERRA, EVA HESSE, CHUCK CLOSE, Nancy Graves (1939–95), Rackstraw Downes (1939), Janet Fish (1938), Brice Marden (1938), and both Sylvia Plimack Mangold (1938) and Robert Mangold (1937). Though they came to Yale from disparate colleges and places, they and yet other contemporaries all had visible arts careers.
Though I’ve personally known several of these artists, I’ve never developed a clear notion of why Yale should have been so much stronger then than either before or later. Putting aside one hypothesis about the quality of the tap water in New Haven at the time, I sense that they learned to learn more from each other than from their teachers and then developed their arts further as they all moved to DOWNTOWN Manhattan, many of them becoming early residents of ARTISTS’ SOHO. One truth about the development of consequential artists is what happens to them within the initial few years after they finish schooling.
(14 September 1910–17 April 1937; b. Kim Hae-gyeong)
An architect, graphic designer, and typographer, he was in his short life also a poet whose most prophetic work, according to Min-Soo Kim (1961), “consists of persistent time-space conceptions as shown in the domain of modern visual arts.” As professor Kim has it, Sang’s work reflected Western advances in modern design as developed in the 1930s, particularly by MOHOLY-NAGY.
While working as an architect for the Japanese occupiers of Korea, Yi Sang published poems initially dismissed as incomprehensible. Some involve numerals that are reversed left to right (as though seen in a mirror). Another poem, “A Memorandum on Line No. 1,” is ostensibly a grid of dots, arrayed ten across and ten down, with numbers in sequence along the top from left to right, and along the left margin from top to bottom. Accompanying this simple image is a series of ten numbered statements. These can be read into the grid both horizontally and vertically. One is “(The cosmos is of power by power).” Three reads: “Quietly make me a proton of an electron.” Seven reads: “The smell of taste and the taste of smell.”
In an inspired interpretation, professor Kim regards this poem as reflecting “quantum physics, which represented new ideas about existence in modern physics, replacing Newtonian-classical physics” and thus that line seven illustrates, “according to the theory of relativity, two events which are seen as occurring simultaneously by one observer may occur in different temporal sequences for other observers [as] all measures involving time and space lose their absolute significance.”
Admittedly, Kim’s pioneering readings represent an intelligence developed sixty years after the “incomprehensible” poems were written – indeed, sixty years after the poet died; but if Kim is persuasive, then Yi Sang ranks among the great avant-garde poets.
(3 November 1905–30 May 1995; b. A. Middleton Y.)
An American eccentric inventor who dabbled in philosophy and astrology, among other precious activities, he gained renown for designing the sleek first Bell Helicopter. Technically, Young is also credited with inventing “the stabilizer bar” that was used in many early helicopters after World War II. Principally for the quality of its design, the Bell Helicoptor entered the canonical MoMA collection.
Early in the 1970s Young founded an Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, CA. His magnum philosophical opus, a commercially published book titled The Reflexive Universe (1976), offers a theory of evolution that synthesized, in one summary, “geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, and parapsychology.” Later Young books appeared necessarily from smaller publishers.
Only in America perhaps do successful industrialists retire early to write eccentric books. Of the name partners in Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge, very much about post-World War II aerospace engineering, Simon Ramo (1913–2016) wrote The Islands of E, Cono & My (1973) and Tennis by Machiavelli (1984), while Dean Wooldridge (1913–2006) published an awesomely peculiar mechanistic psychology as The Machinery of the Brain (1963). More eccentric yet is Four Jews on Parnassus (2008), an imaginary conversation among WALTER BENJAMIN, THEODOR ADORNO, GERSHOM SCHOLEM, and ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, all heavy-hitters, by the chemist Carl Djerassi (1923–2015), who developed during the 1950s a pill providing women with birth control, before writing plays, novels, and tracts that literary commentators rarely acknowledge. Believe me. Nothing in this entry is imaginary.
(14 October 1935)
The truest MINIMAL composer, this Young has devoted most of his professional life to exploring the possibilities of a severely limited palette. After beginning as an audacious post-Cagean composer who, among other stunts, released butterflies into a performance space as a piece of “music,” he hit upon The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964–) in which Young along with a few colleagues produce a continuous, barely changing, harmonic (consonant) sound that is amplified to the threshold of aural pain. Designed to last several hours, filled with dancing overtones, the piece is usually performed in a darkened, enclosed space that contains the odor of incense and projected wistful, abstract images made by his wife Marian Zazeela (1940). (Sometimes called The Theater of Eternal Music, the resulting concert could be accurately classified as an E NVIRONMENT, which is to say an artistically defined space.) Though audiotape recordings of this work exist, in my experience The Tortoise works best as a theatrical experience that depends upon multisensory overload to move its listeners.
Young’s other major composition is The Well-Tuned Piano (1964), a five-hour piano work (in the great tradition of comparably exhaustive keyboard pieces by J. S. BACH, Dmitri Shostakovich [1906–75], Paul Hindemith [1895–1963], JOHN C AGE, and WILLIAM D UCKWORTH), in which Young plays a Boisendorfer piano that has been retuned to just intonation. To the charge, heard often, that Young’s music represents a “dead end,” consider From Ancient World (1992), a composition by his sometime piano tuner Michael Harrison (1958), who develops a harmonic piano that realizes a different form of just intonation with twenty-four different notes within an octave.