“Postmodernism is a punk band from Oklahoma.”
—New York City cab driver
Let me declare my interests at the start. I am primarily a freelance composer and video/computer graphics artist who also writes criticism. Critical writing for me is a utilitarian activity. I write criticism for three reasons—exposition, propaganda, and because my friends ask me to. I don’t have an academic position, and it doesn’t help get me gigs. At best, writing helps me make things clear for myself, at worst, it’s distraction from my other work. (As in, “I’m not doing this either for my pocketbook or for my health, you unnerstan‘…”) I say this at the start not to be ingenuous (or insulting), but simply to make clear that my writing is primarily from the viewpoint of a practitioner in the arts, but one who is quite aware of trends in current critical theory.
My expository articles come about because there is some aspect of artistic activity that I notice is being consistently misunderstood or ignored by my colleagues, and so I immodestly write to set the record straight. (And I am egomaniacal enough to think that I can do this and have enough competence to do so.) An example of this was the series of articles on postmodernism I edited for The Australian Music Centre’s journal, Sounds Australian, to which Nicholas Zurbrugg was one of the contributors.1 I had noticed in earlier issues of the journal that a number of my colleagues were maintaining that postmodernism in contemporary Australian art music consisted simply of the use of either appropriation or a neoromantic idiom in an effort to either a) “serve the
people,” or b) get popular enough to make a living from it. While these may both be understandable motives, it was clear to me that this showed a deep misunderstanding of both the history and nature of postmodernism. Therefore, I wrote and edited a series of articles in which practitioners from different disciplines explained the history and uses of postmodernist thinking in their areas. These included articles from choreographer Nannette Hassall, semiotician/composer Benjamin Thorn, poet/composer Chris Mann, and musicologist/cultural theorist Linda Kouvaras.
As to the propagandistic writing, I attempt to share my enthusiasms with like-minded people, making them aware of things I’ve enjoyed that they might also enjoy. An example of this was my history of Australian experimental music published in the first issue of Leonardo Music Journal.2 Having experienced much of this work first hand, and having noticed an almost complete lack of interest from other Australian music writers on this topic, I wrote the article to show the rich range of music that existed, and what some of its historical precedents were.
Other than that, my interests in critical writing are limited, and I find that although I possess quite catholic tastes in artistic activity, I have quite narrow ones when looking at criticism. The main theme of my critical articles is that our tastes continually need to be broadened, that we should, in the words of composer Kenneth Gaburo, “convert every either-or statement into a both-and statement.”3 Critics that do not advance this view get very short treatment from me. Further, while understanding the value of criticism as a valid form of literary expression, if, from reading a particular critic, I learn more about their tastes, desires, and prejudices than I do about the object of their criticism, I rapidly become disenchanted and uninterested.
In arts training, negative reinforcement used to be a standard procedure. The pupil would show the teacher their current production, and the teacher would criticize it severely, pointing out the student’s inadequacies. This kind of “criticism” trained many students to understand very well their teacher’s tastes, and, if they admired the teacher, how to imitate them. It seems to me that the majority of criticism I encounter is still written in that negative mode, which for me mainly illustrates the tastes, personality, and desires of the critic. More recently, several teachers have been using other methods, involving both positive feedback and a radical reorientation of the critical process. Two of these are the Melbourne-based improvisation workshops of choreographer Al Wunder, and the composition seminar given from 1981–92 at the University of lowa by the late Kenneth Gaburo.
In Wunder’s case, after a student’s presentation, each member of the workshop must make a comment to the student, but the comments can only deal with that aspect of the performance the observer enjoyed. This has a twofold effect. First, the performers are reinforced to do those things that produce positive reactions in their fellow participants, and second, it focuses the attention of the observers: sometimes they have to work really hard to find something they like. The results of these workshops are impressive. Many of the most active and successful of contemporary Australian dance/theatre improvising performers have passed through Wunder’s workshops, and they continue to produce interesting and challenging performers.
In Gaburo’s case, the restriction on discussion was even more stringent. The two statements not allowed in discussion were “I liked it because…” and “I didn’t like it because…” Getting rid of personal opinions and dealing with the matter at hand was often difficult for students, but once they adjusted to this, they seemed to thrive, and learn quite rapidly. One of the questions Garburo continually asked students in the seminar was, “Are you criticizing the work you heard, or the work you wanted to hear?” Again, the results of this reorientation of critical discourse were impressive. Every time I would visit the U.S. and pass through Gaburo’s seminar, I heard and saw some extremely interesting and challenging multimedia works.
Now if advanced teachers of creative activity can use these methods—which involve a rethinking of the purpose and methods of criticism—successfully, is it too much to ask of critics that they adopt these methods as well? Or, to state it more personally, having seen these re-evaluative critical methods work so well in arts training, it becomes boring to then have to put up with old style negative feedback, complaining about methods of criticism in the world of print.
In the end, I find that I’m really not all that interested in what someone else likes or dislikes. It’s all so bloody contingent, anyway. Someone wakes up in the morning, and their coffee tastes bad, and the result is that they write that someone else’s work/idea/activity doesn’t correspond to their idea of what it should. And though we’re all supposed to be nice boys and girls and accept that our critics have the best and most responsible motives at heart, I’ve been around too many critics for too long to accept them and their works as anything but all too humanly fallible contingent self-expressions. Too often, when I read criticism, I’m simply reading about the critic’s worldview, and not the work. Evaluations I can make for myself (and hopefully, in the interests of good taste, keep to myself). What would really interest me is a critic (or a cultural reporter) who told me what I didn’t know, and who alerted me to possibilities and cultural resources I could investigate for myself.
I understand that evaluation is an important part of the life cycle of a creative activity/artifact, but the thought keeps occurring, again and again—how dreary must someone be who, on encountering something, first thinks, “How can I evaluate that?” All too often, I see evaluation being used as a substitute for experience, rather than being an adjunct to it. Further, in the face of much contemporary critical writing that seems concerned solely with its own values and issues, I begin to revert to Marxist methodology and ask, quite seriously, “Whose class interests does all this writing serve?” And while not quite willing to accept an anonymous colleague’s irreverent answer of “It serves the interests of the academic class in their quest for [ever disappearing] tenure,” I do begin to appreciate the cynicism behind such a reply.
Which brings us to the matter at hand, Nicholas Zurbrugg’s specific frustration at a number of contemporary critics who consistently seem to “get it wrong,” and his more general frustration at a literary critical environment that refuses to recognize even the validity of those multimedial art forms he has the greatest enthusiasm for. During our many collaborative projects, I have listened many times to Zurbrugg complaining about the attitudes of his literary colleagues, some of whom even reject the notion of creativity as a useful thing. His frustration at having to deal with views of this sort, when there was a whole world of exciting and new activity that he wanted to share his enthusiasm about, was palpable. Adding further to his frustration was the fact that those writers that most consistently seemed to “get it wrong,” such as Jean Baudrillard, were held in high esteem, and were, in fact, often taken by the creative community as guides. To state it more crudely, Jean Baudrillard (for example) writes in a wrongheaded way about Andy Warhol, and for the next five years we have to put up with art school students making bad Warhol imitations. For those of us trying to show the joy available in new possibilities of art making, this sort of endless boogie of recycling ideas that were weak in the first place has a tendency to get a bit annoying. So if Baudrillard (for example) is going to (probably much against his own will!) have that kind of influence, can we at least get him to write intelligently about things, please? This seems to be the crux of Zurbrugg’s argument, and in the essays contained in this volume, he has articulated a number of examples where critics have, for one reason or another, failed to deal intelligently, if at all, with the wide variety of expressions available in both new and old media. This collection, then, is to be applauded. Not only does it document a debate on the nature of criticism that seemed crucial to us in the eighties and nineties—importantly showing how weak and flawed the arguments of postmodern theory were, and often how inapplicable those arguments were to the cultural activities of the time—it also provides a guide to a lot of very exciting work from artists as diverse as Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett, William S.Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Henri Chopin, John Cage, Bill Viola, and John Giorno, to name but a few.
This frustration Zurbrugg and I have shared is not limited to literary critics, for critics in many other media are similarly guilty of having such a limited scope. For example, in “Do We Really Need More Arts Coverage?” written for the Winter 1990 issue of Sounds Australian, I asked why Australian classical music critics did not cover experimental music events when those events took place outside the established venue of the concert hall.4 Given that much of the most interesting contemporary music activity today is taking place in multimedial contexts—such as installations, radio, art galleries, sound-poetry performances, community music events, and the like—I wondered why music critics expended so little effort in seeking these out. One answer that I got informally from one critic/colleague was that my article was highly offensive to him, that his area of expertise was reviewing concert hall music, and that if I wanted to read writing about non-concert hall activities, I could bloody well do it myself.
If I then decide to temporarily agree with this colleague, I begin to wonder why Zurbrugg is complaining so. Rather than dealing with critics who fail to get the point of those things he is enthusiastic about, why doesn’t he just tell us about those things he appreciated, or even enjoys? Or if he believes that criticism is important, why doesn’t he just (in his academic role) train a new generation of critics? Leaving the old fogies to their world, why doesn’t he just get along with his? For example, he convincingly shows how Fredric Jameson (by his own admission) uses a critical language that is unable to deal with contemporary video art. However, unless Fredric Jameson’s approval is important for video art’s survival and reception (and I, for one, can’t see how it is), why even deal with Jameson’s impotent and ignorant responses? Why not just tell us about some video art we might appreciate?
The issues of approval and acceptance, however, seem very important to Zurbrugg. For him, it seems that it’s not enough that good work exists and is made available—it’s also important that that work be accepted by his colleagues in the academic and critical communities, for it is these writers who often spread information about new works, and provide frameworks of introduction to, and understanding of, those works. This informational role is one that I agree is very important, and it is therefore important that critics do indeed “get it right.” This is a matter of prime concern for Zurbrugg, who is concerned that the artistic history of the century be accurately documented, with proper attention being paid to those who originated ideas, or at least combined older ideas in striking and unexpected ways. Therefore, his concerns about the shortsightedness of editors such as D.J.Enright in his first essay, while they may distract us from his main subject matter, the rich and wonderful heritage of experimental and technologically informed twentieth-century poetics, are indeed warranted. (I just wish, at times, that the complaints about Enright didn’t have to form the “frame” around the valuable historical material in this essay)
But there is another, more generalized frustration being manifested in these essays. As a child of the radical artistic thinking of the sixties, it must be very depressing for Zurbrugg to be faced with the unadventurous and conservative criticism of the seventies through the nineties. It is a depression I share with him. As one who was raised on the optimistic and visionary writings of John Cage, R.Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter, to name but a few, the rise of pessimistic and limited thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson is indeed cause for a regretful sigh or two. Fortunately, there are other streams of critical writing. For example, any of Guy Davenport’s critical anthologies, or Suzi Gablik’s The Re-Enchantment of Art, which was for me a fine antidote to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.5 And the ecological, mystical and even psychic concerns expressed by much of the art in Gablik’s book forms a positive alternative to literary-based theories of culture. Among artists working in this way might be mentioned the work of Australian sculptor, composer, and architect Elwyn Dennis, who has produced a remarkable series of sound works, such as Wimmera and Dry Country, which explore concepts of soundspace and time that are quite different from those used in works that do not have an environmental basis. Dennis insists that still, in this age of materialism and media saturation, it is the artist who is responsible for the consciousness of society. Responding to my question of whether his ecologically-based ideas were not just another form of rugged individualism, Dennis replied that they were not, but were designed to show the relative unimportance of the individual in the larger-scale scheme of things. The plea for humility implicit in Dennis’s aesthetic is one that perhaps the world of cultural theory might well heed, and which Zurbrugg would agree with. A criticism that understood its own (admittedly limited) power and put the forms of that power in perspective would indeed be welcome. The rise of critical conservatism in the past three decades was not isolated, but was paralleled by a rise in conservatism in other areas of society as well. The rise of right-wing “economic rationalist” policies since the 1970s (which has in so many ways affected all of our lives) is too well-documentedto rate any more than a passing mention here, but it is worth pointing out that there have also been parallel movements in the arts. The multimedial forms that arose or re-emerged in the sixties, such as electronic music, postmodern dance, conceptual performance, computer art, and experimental poetry, among others, may have been fun, exciting, and important, but it was not easy for people to figure out how to pay for them. On the other hand, traditional forms (whatever their content) such as painting on canvas, ballet, chamber and orchestral music, and linear-narrative novels already had recognizable support mechanisms, and recognizable ways of being dealt with, so it was no surprise that conservative critics rallied to the side of these activities. The survival and thriving of these socially conservative forms at the expense of the more adventurous forms strikes me as more than just a desire to stabilize and recuperate after a period of “radical reform” (I can’t agree, for starters, that the “reforms” were all that “radical” anyway!), but rather as being just one symptom of a colossal and depressing general failure of societal nerve. It’s not for nothing that my colleague, composer and computer scientist Arun Chandra, said to me that he felt postmodernism, with its interests in recycling older materials, and its anti-originality stance, was “the philosophy of giving up”
(The stalling of the various space programs can be seen as another symptom of this failure of nerve. Whatever one thinks of the politics involved, it’s simply true that the momentum of the earlier space programs have been dispersed by a variety of political, economic, and social factors. And in contrast to Baudrillard’s complaints about how the postmodern era makes everything “weightless,” this exact “weightlessness” was for me and my colleagues, a source of excitement. I remember Randy Cohen, a fellow composition student, shortly after we had first encountered the Moog synthesizer in 1968, saying that here, finally, was a tool where we could indeed escape musical gravity [tonality and the endless beat], and write music that was truly weightless. We then speculated that such music would only really come into its own when people could “dance,” or maybe “float” to it, in space stations. Little did we realize how long it would be before this idea, the recreational use of space and weightlessness, would be possible.)
This is not to say that profound and important work has not occurred recently in the more traditional forms (some of my best friends write for orchestra…) but simply to point out how conservative economic, artistic, and critical trends have gone hand in hand, creating an environment in the eighties and nineties that was far less exciting than it might have been. Zurbrugg’s pointing out how various prominent critics are seriously misinformed about the nature and context of the work they are dealing with, is one attempt to correct this.
However, I would go further than this. If I demand of my creative colleagues that they be open-minded and inclusive in their work, getting, whenever possible, beyond the immediate limits of their own personal tastes (and I do make this demand), then I see nothing wrong with demanding the same of critics. So when I see a semi-conservative literary critic like Roland Barthes paying attention to a semi-conservative writer such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, it is entirely understandable, but disappointing. My desire, however unrealistic, is to see critics being enthusiastic about work which is more than simply a reflection of their own aesthetic and financial interests.
I do sense that things have changed. Around 1993, I began joking that now that postmodernism was over, it was time to get on to more serious work. I even coined a wisecrack name for our new era—the “Paleo-Cyberian.” Quickly, however, I realized that what I had coined in jest actually had a serious core, and was an idea worthy of serious consideration. I must admit, though, that I found most of the definitional debates around what constituted postmodernism in the various arts were largely a waste of time. The terms of the debates were never clearly defined, and it largely became a game of “I’m more postmodern than you, so there, nyah nyah!” For example, when I was an undergraduate, from 1967–1971, I thought what I was learning was “modern art.” Years later, I realized that everything I was taught about art as process, interaction, and contextuality was actually “postmodern,” or even “poststructuralist,” and the seeds of the kind of cybernetic interactive work that I am now doing, my “PaleoCyberian” work, were already germinating then. Further, the definitional debates often proceeded without a knowledge of the history of the genres involved. As I mentioned earlier, in art music, “appropriation” was taken as a sign of the postmodern. This made no sense to me whatever, because I could see that appropriation was a common thread throughout twentieth-century art music. Early modern composers like Charles Ives, with his collage symphonies of the years 1910–1919 and earlier, later moderns like the young Paul Hindemith with his performing with phonograph records in the 1920s, and neo-classical composers such as Igor Stravinsky, with Pulcinella literally composed on top of a copy of an eighteenth-century Giovanni Battista Pergolesi manuscript, had all been involved in appropriation. Further, the 1930s compositional linguistics work of Harry Partch (surely some of the earliest examples of musical postmodernism), the 1950s tape collages of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer, and the multimedia and sampler work of dozens of composers in the sixties through the nineties, such as Salvatore Martirano (with L’s. G.A.), John Zorn, or the Tape-Beatles surely formed an unbroken line of working with appropiational ideas. So if appropriation had been used continuously in music since at least the early 1900s, (actually, it’s been used continuously since at least A.D. 1000), how was the use of appropriation in music a distinguishing feature of musical postmodernism?
I was grateful then for Zurbrugg’s definition of the general dividing line between the modern and postmodern eras as being around the beginning of the Second World War, as shown in his article “Some Further Thoughts on Post Modernism,” in which he advances the idea that a succession of cultural ideas in the “modernist” era (1880 through the 1930s) were paralleled by a similar succession of ideas in the “post-modernist” era of the 1930s-1990. To quote Zurbrugg: Rather than contrasting cultural eras in terms of the mono-dimensional—and usually utterly fictional—conflict between alleged pure order and disorder, it surely makes better sense to consider such eras in terms of re-explorations of paradoxical sequences of attitude. In other words, Modernism displays many ideas. Early pessimism and early optimism in the 1880s and 1890s. Riotous confident exploration in the 1900–1918 years. More considered, catastrophe theories and utopian theories in the final decade from 1920–1930. In diagrammatic summary—or in diagrammatic hypothesis:
| 1930 | early pessimism | early optimism |
| 1950 | (Sartre, Beckett) | (Cage) |
| 1950 | relatively accessible "mainstream" experiments | relatively inaccessible "avant-garde" experiments |
| 1970 | (Beckett, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Grass, Lessing) | (Lettrism, Concrete Poetry, Sound Poetry Cut-ups, Multi-media performance art, Minimalism, Cage's collaborations) |
| 1970 | popular late obscure catastrophe theory | late Utopian avant-gardism |
| 1990 | (Baudrillard, Jameson, Virilio) | (humanistic/ historical/ autobiographical/ multi-medial)6 |
…My point here is that Modernism evolves at several speeds and with conflicting values. Some Modernists had a clear sense of design and purpose, such as Piet Mondrian; some explored the laws of chance, such as Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp. Some were popular and accessible to the intelligentsia, such as James Joyce; others remained mysterious and obscure, such as Hugo Ball and Marcel Duchamp. And so on.
The same categories and conflicts re-emerge very generally in the Post- Modern years in which initial après-Modern pessimism (such as Sartre and Beckett’s writings of the thirties and forties), and initial après Modern optimism (such as John Cage’s early work), leads to the relatively accessible Post-Modern experimentation of the fifties and sixties (such as the writings of Samuel Beckett, Günter Grass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Natalie Sarraute, Doris Lessing, and Jorge Luis Borges), and the still relatively inacessible avant-gardes of the fifties and sixties (the cut-ups and permutations of William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysin; the concrete poetry movement; the sound poetry movement; multi-media performance). In a way, the “mainstream” and “avant-garde” work of the fifties and sixties is still more confusing in terms of its dominant structuralist aesthetic; a formal impulse which now seems to have dissolved in the eighties, but which misleadingly tempts cultural historians to deplore the neutrality of Post-Modern creativity…. At the same time apocalyptic theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and their numerous disciples typify the popular catastrophe theories of the late Post-Modern era…. Catastrophe theory is fun, but the gestures, experiments, and achievements of the utopian late Post-Modern avant-garde merit serious attention too. As the following diagram attempts to suggest, Post-Modern culture as a whole is as varied—and in many ways, as predictable—as the phases of Modernism. What we witness is not some crude oppositional relationship, but the contemporary re-play, re-animation and reconsideration of problems old and new, with solutions old and new.
| 1880 | early pessimism | early optimism |
| 1900 | (Nordau) | (Mallarm6) |
| 1900 | relatively accessible "mainstream" experiments | relatively inaccessible "avant-garde" experiments |
| 1920 | (Joyce, Woolf, Eliot) | (Futurism, Dada) |
| 1920 | popular late catastrophe theory | obscure late Utopian avant-gardism |
| 1930 | (Spengler) | (Marinetti) |
I noticed that Zurbrugg’s large-scale time periods were also paralleled by changes in political and technological conditions, that these eras were not just cultural, but had political and technological features that also distinguished them from each other.
First, there was the political situation. The period before World War II was the one that Lenin characterized as “Imperialism—The Highest Stage of Capitalism”; that is, the period when the colonialist empires were struggling for supremacy. After World War II, the world divided into two camps, the West and the East, led by two powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, who previously had been lesser players on the world scene. After the “fall of communism” (inaccurate, fatuous term though it is) of the early 1990s, the world is now in a much more fluid political position, with only one superpower, a whole host of reemergent nationalisms, and a corporate sector that seems determined to assert itself one way or another as the true controller of global destiny. Another way of looking at this political situation is from the perspective of the Third World. Before World War II, they were colonies; after the war, they were the Third World. Now, they are the “emerging nations.” (In all three cases though, the fate of their people remains the same: they’re being screwed.) Second was the technological situation as reflected in the means of communication. The period before World War II was the period where cinema, telephone, radio, and newspapers were the dominant media. After the war, we saw the rise of television as the primary communications media. Currently, we’re seeing the rise of global computer linkups such as the Web, and the increased use of portable communications media such as cellular phones and modems. Where previously the computer had been an adjunct to peoples’ lives and communications, now it was becoming central, and omnipresent.
According to one set of ideas, cultural periods move hand in hand with economic and social periods, sometimes reflecting them, sometimes moving in advance of them. It seemed only logical to me that if the “modernist” explorations of, say, Charles Ives, Kasimir Malevich, Isadora Duncan, Kurt Schwitters and Frank Lloyd Wright had paralleled the political and technological developments of the early twentieth century, and the postmodern era of TV and two superpowers had been paralleled by the work of, for example, Robert Ashley, Mario Merz, Trisha Brown, Jas Duke, and Philip Johnson, then the current changed political and technological climate would both produce, and be articulated (and even predicted) by a different set of artistic concerns and techniques. (Guy Debord’s ideas of “the spectacle” which might be seen as the archetypical understanding of media life under postmodernism, seem to me to encompass the whole of the century, with different means of controlling and promulgating (and even subverting) “the spectacle” being offered by different media.) Seeing as how it’s impossible to go “post-post-” anything without appearing silly, I decided to name my new era based on its primary technology, the computer. And seeing as how the level of technology, still, in 1997, is so damn primitive, I decided that this must be the old computer era. Having a Paleo-Cyberian era, an old computer age, implies a Neo-Cyberian era, a new computer age. (Presumably, this will be when all this damn cyberjunk begins to work.)
So given the idea that we’re at the beginning of a new cultural period, perhaps I can sense the depression and frustration expressed in Zurbrugg’s essays beginning to lift, as changed conditions promote a new flowering of radical ideas, or at least a new recognition of the consistently important work of radical thinkers throughout the century. This recognition will, in all likelihood, not come from the generation of critics Zurbrugg criticizes. He would like, I believe, to change the views of the theorists of the seventies and early eighties who have set the terms of a more conservative critical discourse in motion. On this, I remain more pessimistic than he does. I don’t think that these critics will change. I think that a new kind of criticism will more likely come from a new generation of writers and academics, who, thoroughly sick of the pessimism and hopelessness of the current generation of critics, create a new criticism, one that is completely comfortable with the new technological tools and cultural expressions at hand, and which understands the value of curiousity over condemnation, of openmindedness over dismissiveness, of exploration over classification, and of the necessity of cultural work (even revolutionary political and cultural work) over ennui and defeatism.
For this generation, the work of such critics as Zurbrugg will provide a guide to the cultural riches of their predecessors—who actually never went away, even in the darkest days of their work being ignored and marginalized. In making ideas about their work (and in his curatorial roles, actually making the work itself) available, Zurbrugg is one of a number of cultural heroes, who make sure that work that they consider important is not ignored or dismissed. Zurbrugg’s complaint, then, is twofold: first, that many of the current generation of critics are so blinded by their own pessimism and critical languages that they are incapable of evaluating the interesting work that goes on around them, and that, second, these critics, in refusing to broaden the canon (often promoting their own writing and discourse at the expense of this work, which they do not even recognize), produce erroneous critical perspectives and cultural models. Zurbrugg’s vastly more important celebration, however, is that this important work exists, and is more than worthy of our attention. Hallelujah.
Praiseworthy as these essays are, I still have some problems with them. These problems may arise from my viewpoint as an observer who is also a participant in the arts described. My knowledge of the “nuts and bolts” of the art may color my perception of writing about it. In “Marinetti, Boccioni, and Electroacoustic Poetry: Futurism and After,” for example, in the very first sentence—“One of the most difficult tasks for the comparatist is the definition and categorization of successive phases in the art of the contemporary avant-garde”—problems arise. Why, for example, is this definition and categorization necessary? Admittedly, if we are going to take the avant-garde work of this century seriously, we’re going to need some kind of framework to approach it—some set of conceptual tools to deal with the wide variety of expression we will encounter. I just wonder, however, if “definition and categorization of successive phases” is the right framework for such an initial approach to take. A more valuable approach might be what Zurbrugg refers to as suspension of theoretical disbelief, in that almost any theory so far advanced will only be able to deal with a portion of the work produced by this century’s avant-gardes. (Perhaps, like Russian art music and improvising composers, who developed the notion of “poly-stylism” in the 1980s, we need a notion of “poly-theorism” to come to terms with the rich artistic heritage of our recent past.)
The very next sentences of the article set the tenor for the rest of the essays, as Zurbrugg then identifies a critic who not only fails to comprehend the work he wishes to draw our attention to, but actually dismisses it out of hand, and, from a position of cultural power, actually prevents us from finding out about the work in question. In this case, the critic in question is D.J.Enright, who is in the “powerful” position of being the editor of The Oxford Book of Contemporary 6Verse.7 This immediate dealing with adversaries of the work, rather than the work itself, quickly establishes that we are here dealing with a world, not of artistic productions, but of the reception of those productions, and questions of who controls access to those productions.
Taking a cynical insider’s view for a moment, it may be that such concerns are misplaced. If I want to find out about contemporary experimental poetry, it would never occur to me to go to such a limited collection as The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse. The very name Oxford would warn me away, reeking as it does of establishment validation. If I wanted to find out about more radical poetic activities, I’d go to my local experimental poet, or small press knowledgeable bookshop, and find out from them. Or I might even go to a larger library and find out if they have back-issue copies of Stereo Headphones, the journal Zurbrugg edited for many years. Zurbrugg’s point is that the Oxford collection should be the place where one can discover interesting work. My view, based on years in the field, is that institutions like the Oxford collections are largely a lost cause, anyway, and the really interesting work, whether conservative or radical, is always going to take place in the margins. (I still feel this, even though I recently contributed an article on electronic music to The Oxford Companion to Australian Music!) The problem, of course, with such a cynical insider’s view is that it is just that, a view from the inside, from one who already knows where to find interesting contemporary activity. For the vast majority of, say, literary undergraduates, I suspect that if they have any interest in the subject at all, for the most part they would be encouraged by their conservative and remarkably un-curious teachers (who, relying on the critics that Zurbrugg is taking to task, will also be unaware of the avant-garde work of this century) to look in just such establishment collections as those of Oxford.
My own quests for experimental musical activity while I was still in high school in the mid- 1960s bear witness to this. Early on, I knew I was interested in something that was different In hindsight, I call this my “search for the weird,” though I doubt that I thought of it that way then. Rock and roll seemed too staid and rhythmically uninteresting, Broadway too trite, and “classical” music seemed only to be written by dead people. As a kid who had been to the New York City Ballet every summer season, and had seen most of the Stravinsky-Balanchine collaborations by the time I was fifteen, I knew that this was not the case, The Stravinsky works (especially Agon and the Huxley Variations) seemed marvelous, and were pointers to a world that only existed as glimpses in my upstate New York high school world. But a search of the local public library only turned up two records of interest—Stravinsky’s Persephone (surely one of his more minor works), and Messiaen’s Trois Petite Liturgies (whose onde martinot solos I found absolutely compelling). It was only when I reached university a few years later, and was, in that university, lucky enough to find nonconservative people who made the stuff, that I realized that simultaneous with my high school searching, and only 150 miles south, in New York, the musics I had been searching for existed: among these would be included both the late, ecstatic, improvisatory work of John Coltrane, and the beautifully austere middle-period indeterminate electronic, instrumental, and dance works of John Cage and David Tudor.
I was lucky. I found what I was looking for after only a few years of searching. For those who weren’t so lucky, their sources of information might indeed be things like the Oxford collections, and they would remain sadly unknowing of important work that might excite them. So Zurbrugg’s concern over Enright’s conservatism is, from a pedagogical point of view, entirely justified. And his articulating of the “key problems attending anyone attempting to analyse avantgarde literature: the frequent inacessibility of exemplary works and the absence of any conceptual framework for their analysis” strikes me as almost, but not quite, spot on. Not quite because I would point out that if there were such a “conceptual framework” already existing, the work in question might fail to be “avant-garde” (or whatever term we’re going to feel comfortable with to describe cutting-edge work). Again, only a few paragraphs later, Zurbrugg writes “What is the best way of defining such a bewildering movement, still ‘in the making’?” His solution is to trace the history of the genre carefully. This tracing might hopefully eventually lead the reader even beyond the limits of the history as given in the essay, allowing them to assemble their own history from a plethora of carefully documented examples.
It is important to not present such a collection of examples as a disconnected field. Connections do exist, and a well presented history can show this. Zurbrugg’s describing Henri Chopin’s work as a postmodern avant-garde realization of a modernist avant-garde aspiration is a case in point To show that radical works do not exist in a void, but are part and parcel of an ongoing web of knowledge investigation and creation is important work.
We should be careful not to take this sort of thing too far. For example, the connections between the American composer, sound-sculptor, music-theorist, and music-theater director Harry Partch and the Irish poet W.B. Yeats are clear. We have letters and writings from both of them about their meetings in the 1930s, and the sensitive observer can clearly hear a Yeatsian strain in Partch’s vocal works, at least through the 11 Intrusions of 1950. However, to then observe that Yeats was a member of the occult group The Golden Dawn, and to try to extrapolate some sort of connection between that and the seemingly mystical, but actually practical, music-making numerology of Partch’s just intonation tuning theories is probably taking things a bit far.
It is also true that much of the multimedial work Zurbrugg discusses is confusing. For people accustomed to putting art into neat boxes labeled “poetry,” “music,” “drama,” the work of someone like Henri Chopin, which participates in all of the above, can indeed be confusing. If you have developed one way of responding to poetry, and another way of responding to music, work that lives in an uneasy middle ground between the two can seem either alienating or deliciously disorienting, depending on one’s attitude toward encountering the unexpected.
This disorientation can also be a product of venue, that is, where one encounters the work. For example, contemporary sound-poetry might be encountered in a poetry reading, or it might be encountered in the “weirdos night” at the local pub that puts on experimental events, at a computer music event in an art gallery or a university, or in a performance art event.
In each of these cases, the venue the work appears in will probably focus our attention on it in different ways. Faced with a confusion like this artists themselves have adopted a number of strategies. A practical solution was Australian linguistic performance artist and event-organizer Chris Mann’s decision to consider himself a “composer,” even though he mostly dealt with words and speech because a) the rates of pay in music were slightly better, and b) he found that there was at least a conceptual framework for people to deal with what he did as “composition” whereas this framework was missing in the more formal world of “poetry.” A more philosophical solution was philosopher-composerHerbert Brun’s all-embracing definition of a “composer” as someone who “brings about that which without him cannot happen,” which allows for practically any activity to be considered under the rubric of “composition.”8 The aim of these strategies is to find a place for the work to exist, so that people can discover and enjoy it. A delightful fringe benefit of these strategies is that they tend to expand one’s outlook and output, allowing an inclusively wide variety of activities in one’s work.
Zurbrugg’s essay on electroacoustic poetry strikes me as one of his most valuable pieces, And yet, I find several points where, if I do not totally disagree with him, I feel there are alternative views to the ones he expresses. For example, he is surely correct when he states that Boccioni’s and Marinetti’s views partially, but not wholly, help one understand the work of such technological sound poets as Bernard Heidsieck and Charles Amirkhanian. And his quoting of Lázló Moholy-Nagy, who states that the guidance for the student of modernist literature can be acquired by being “acquainted…with…the tendencies of contemporary composers” is also accurate. However, guidance could also be found by using any of a number of perceptual strategies, which, even without acquaintance with other works, could prove helpful.
For example, Denis Smalley, in “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era” deals with two main modes of listening: autocentric and allocentric.9 Autocentric listening focuses on emotional responses to sound, including the feelings of pleasure and displeasure. Allocentric listening is more focused on the structures and features of the sound itself; enjoyment is gained through concentration on these structures and features. Although both modes of perception are often used by listeners, the emphasis on allocentric modes of listening can often be helpful, allowing perceptions and insights that might not occur if a strictly historically based mode of perception were being used.
Similarly, when Zurbrugg states that “when considered in terms of Marinetti’s associations, Boccioni’s distinctions and Chion’s categories,” the surprises of contemporary electroacoustic poetry will make sense, he is correct. However, even without those categories, the works could still make sense if one used a “beginner’s mind” approach—that point of emptiness and openness discussed in both Zen and Christian mysticism—experiencing a work as if it were the first of its kind, looking and listening clearly to what the work was, rather than what one wanted it to be. This is an important point, one that composers such as Cage and Gaburo were insistent on: that even the most radical work could “make sense” if it was approached in this way. Classificatory schemes such as the ones given in this essay are extremely valuable, but they are not the only way one can meaningfully encounter such work. There are other philosophies of reception/perception that offer insights equal to the Western intellectual/critical one.
Another valuable thing that I think this essay offers is its pointing out of cultural behavior patterns. One of these is shown in the Boccioni quotation that states that the Futurists are not tainted with the “archaism” that led the French artists of the period to study, for example, African sculpture. This pointed out to me how many artists go through a first rejective phase followed by a later embracing, integrative phase. That these patterns keep being repeated strikes me as both bizarre and tedious. When will people simply learn to accept and integrate right from the start? While admitting that trial and error does have its value, I keep wondering why the errors of the past (such as fascism) keep being brought back for new trials. Why a continual repetition, generation after generation, of the same silly patterns? Isn’t there another way to learn?
Another such pattern is pointed out in Michel Chion’s identifying of a phase in the history of electroacoustic music where artists attempted to gain a “certificate of cultural nobility” for their efforts by imitating established forms. This concern with validation is, as has already been noted, a leitmotiv in Zurbrugg’s essays. Whether it is the artists themselves seeking validation by writing, say, electroacoustic symphonies, or whether it is Zurbrugg’s (and others’) concern that the work is both not available to those who might be interested in it and not recognized by those whose works might have the potential of reaching those who might be interested, the concern is the same. Understandable as this is, I wonder if we might not also come to accept the view that, except financially, a concern with validation is a sign of intellectual weakness. (That is, after working this racket for twenty-seven years, I would be really happy if I could have an income greater than upper-level poverty/ lower middle class (please note—I’m considered a success by my colleagues!), and it would be nice if I could get copies of the work to those who were interested in it, but as for being liked and/or feted and praised by the critical establishment and/or the academy, well, as Benjamin Boretz says, “that’s only for simps anyway.”10 To have relied on critics for information in this period would have been dangerous. To have relied on them for reputation would have been suicidal.
Finally, it should be pointed out that this essay was published in 1982, and that things have moved on since then. For example, the French electroacoustic sound poet Henri Chopin could, in the 1960s, talk about the tape-recorder allowing the poet’s voice “infinite possibilities of orchestration,” True at the time, it was also amazing how quickly so many of us came to the limits of these “infinite possibilities” and then, like one of Zurbrugg’s beloved Burroughsian junkie characters, needed more, more, and still more. Although the tape-recordergave us many new possibilities, we quickly learned to hear very many of these as part of a larger category called “tape-manipulated sounds” and began to look for other vocal modifications that didn’t sound like that. This “categorical perception,” which seems to be yet another of those predictable human behavioral patterns, can frequently blind us to subtlety, and we find that we are continually having to retrain our perceptions in order to stay aware of those subtleties. And then, eventually, the analog tape-recorder became obsolete, and harder and harder to find. The techniques it did make available were, in some cases, replaced by the capabilities of newer computer-based systems, but in some cases, were lost. For example, with two analog tape-recordersplaced several meters apart, extremely long delays of sound repetitions, of up to a minute’s duration or more, could be easily accomplished. Today, with digital delays, these extremely long delays are not available. Computer-based systems can sometimes implement these delays, but the level of expertise (and expense) required to accomplish them is far greater than that required to simply put two tape-recorders a few meters apart and run the tape from one machine to the other. A simple mechanical skill was replaced by a more complex software skill, and yet the result is almost the same. Almost, but not quite—the decay of sound quality produced by multiple analog tape generations, which tended to “sweeten” the sound, has been replaced by the harsher “granulation” of digital sound processing. Each new generation of equipment has, it seems, its own artistically useful inadequacies, which reveal the true nature of the equipment, but the general trend of the engineering profession is, in the name of simplification, to make things more and more complex.
Zurbrugg’s reformist impulses are shown most clearly in his valuable “The Limits of Intertextuality,” in which he clearly reveals the limitations of an excessively literary approach to contemporary cross-media work. One way he does this is by constantly inserting quotes from William S.Burroughs, quotes which, at first reading, seem jarringly inappropriate. On later readings, I began to appreciate them for what they were, quotes from a literary wild man chosen to show just how wide the social gap is between the freewheeling creativity of the radical artist and the “po-faced” seriousness of the world of literary criticism.
In his cogent analysis of Barthes’s work, showing how Barthes’s ideas evolved, and giving us an inkling as to where they came from, Zurbrugg criticizes a number of contemporary critics who have taken Barthes’s ideas far too literally and used them as the basis for constructing whole edifices of critical theory. Unfortunately, except for Jonathan Culler, none of these acolytes are mentioned by name. Perhaps this was for libel reasons, or out of professional courtesy, but I feel that it’s a pity. I would have liked to have known who these people were, so I wouldn’t have to waste my time dealing with them. (What ever happened to the notion of criticism as a public service?)
More seriously though, the most valuable parts of this essay for me were where Zurbrugg showed how once Barthes began to deal with non-literary areas, his ideas on authoriality had to be revised. After the non-body-oriented world of words on paper (how many people have you seen jogging while reading?), it is quite a shock for Barthes to attend a concert and realize that as well as the sound, it is the body of the performer that is conveying much of the meaning. And as Zurbrugg points out, it’s only a short step from this realization to being plunged from the world of words on paper into the world of words as sound—into oral culture. (You’ve probably seen many more people jogging while listening to “talking books” on their “Walkmen.”)
The reintroduction of the body into artforms which were tending to become over-cerebralized is one of the important trends in twentieth-century arts. Harry Partch’s insistence on “corporeality” in his music theatre productions, postmodern dance’s use of body therapies such as the Alexander Technique and Feldenkreis work as a stimulus for choreography, and a whole host of “body-art”performance artists bear witness to this. The continuing presence of the oral poet, whether in the person of the early-twentieth-century verbal experiments of a Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters, or in the mid-century ecstacies of more traditional, linear poets like Alan Ginsburg and Gary Snyder, or in the late-century work of performers such as Chris Mann and Amanda Stewart, has been how this reinsistence on the body has manifested itself in literature. This phenomenon has caused a lot of difficulty for literary critics who view words on paper as the most important aspect of literature. (But hey! They’re just going to have to learn how to boogie, right?)
A most recent example of this orality is 24 Hours, a massive book by Melbourne poet Pi O.11 In this book, the speech of Australian migrants is transcribed faithfully. Accent is extremely critical here, as are fracturings of grammar and syntax. The book, even for someone as enthusiastic about Pi’s work as I am, is hard reading. Imagine the difficulties a conservative literary critic would have with it! But it is rewarding: once the words are decoded, and the accent is revealed, the words leap off the page with a phsyicality few other poems have. And if you’re lucky enough to hear Pi read the work himself, the results are miraculous and joyful. In fact, as marvelous as 24 Hours is on the page, I feel that it is only in the live reading that it really comes to life. The book here is not the final object, it is more akin to a documentation of a living process.
And this reinsistence on orality is only one small part of the transdisciplinary developments that characterize all contemporary arts. When I first heard of “intertextual” criticism, I naively assumed that this was criticism’s version of these transdisciplinary tendencies. And indeed, in the more open of its practitioners, it is. Just as artists were applying ideas from one form to another, so too should critics. A good example of this is Michel Chion’s applying of concepts from cinema history to the development of French musique concréte.12 (And it’s worth pointing out that Chion is also a very fine composer who does know how to boogie.) For the truly “intertextual” critic, anything can, and should, be a text. And for work made in ways that cross traditional genre boundaries, it seems only logical that such boundary crossing would be the ideal method of writing about it. How disappointing, then, to find out that there are a whole legion of critics, some quite well known and powerful, who have chosen to retain narrow boundaries for both the work they choose to deal with, and the ways they choose to deal with that work. I am quite surprised, for example, that Zurbrugg’s comparison of Burroughs’s and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work would be considered radical. I would have thought that such comparisons would be a matter of course. And I’m equally surprised that literary critics would not have realized that new means of criticism would be required to evaluate texts generated in new ways.
For example, the text of my Post-Colonialist Poem on the English Language, a radio piece for two readers and concrete sounds, consists of ten pages of computer-generated permutations of the syllables in the phrase “Werribee Mitsubishi Minnesota Bonsai.” To apply traditional methods of literary analysis to this admitted non-sense would be unproductive. But rather than dismiss this non-sensical text as “nonsense” (as Zurbrugg implies that many literary critics would), I would have thought that a truly “intertextual” critic would draw upon ideas from radio drama, electronic music, arithmetic, and linguistics (which are among the areas I drew ideas from in making the work) in order to deal with it.
I do wonder about Zurbrugg’s assertion, though, that “the fact that such experiments have received negligible attention (or none at all) from most intertextual theorists typifies the way in which a preoccupation with ‘prior discourse’ has led contemporary intertextuality to neglect contemporaneous discourse.” While this may be true, it occurs to me that as a class, those practicing and being trained to practice intertextual analysis might just come from classes, or social groups, where just such notions of “contemporaneous discourse” are frowned upon. That is, intertextual critics and transmedia artists might constitute two totally different groups, and the concerns of the one might not be the concerns of the other. (Conservative establishments breed their own successors far more often than they are swept away by generational changes.)
The most important issue, though, that is raised by this essay is the way that the new possibilities offered by new media and tools are unable to be dealt with by a literary theory which, while not denying the possibility of something “new” being created, does its best to suppress such a notion. Barthes’s comment that such innovations may be “born technically, occasionally even aesthetically,” but have “still to be born theoretically” points this out.13 That this statement implies the heretical notion that theory follows practice seems to be not noticed by many writers of critical theory. This is a point that Zurbrugg returns to again and again in his essays. Caught in a web of referentiality and mutual influence, many cultural theorists often forget that the stuff they’re dealing with has to come from somewhere. One of the many places the stuff comes from is artists, who somehow combine things in a way that hasn’t existed before, which is what I, at least, understand as originality.
An example of a technological innovation that has made possible something new is in the field of computer music. Finally, after a century of development, we have the ability to precisely specify the harmonic makeup of each tone we use. It was long thought that certain scales were dissonant, or unpleasant, because of the nature of their intervals. A scale such as thirteen tone equal temperament (placing thirteen notes within the space of twelve on the piano) was thought to be irredeemably unpleasant. Now, however, with the ability to tune each partial of each tone, composer and theorist William Sethares has found that if the partials of a tone are themselves tuned to the pitches of the thirteen tone scale, harmonies made in that scale cease to be dissonant: they sound totally unfamiliar, but very pleasant.14 Let me make this point emphatically. At no point in history, before the invention of electronic instruments, was it possible to make these tones. This is literally the first time (since, perhaps, Atlantis or some other mythological high-tech past) that these tones and harmonic combinations can be heard. This research has occurred since 1993, and the first articles about it are just now appearing. The world of psychoacoustics is just beginning to deal with it. It will be quite a while before the world of criticism also does so. Eventually, this knowledge will become an accepted part of the composer’s repertoire. And the notion of eventual understanding implied by this is extremely important. Sometimes a newly made work just needs to sit for a while in order for you to see and hear what it is.
It is also clear that we are dealing here with several notions of “theory.” In science, a theory is just one step below a law, and in order to be a theory, has to have some predictive value which can be proven. In music, theory usually describes the “nuts and bolts” of pre-existing compositions, as in “if you use these rules for combining notes, you’ll be able to write a piece that sounds something like a choral written by Johann Sebastian Bach.” More recently, a field has arisen called “speculative music theory,” where tuning and structural concepts that have not yet been tried out are proposed with the aim of finding out what they sound like. And in the field of criticism, “theory” has yet another meaning, being, as far as I can see, speculations about possible structures and connections that might exist among and between works, groups of people, ideas, and so on. And in different fields, there will be different minglings of these kinds of theory. One group of contemporary choreographers in Melbourne, for example, deal extensively with French feminist theory while also pursuing the quite independent and different body-based ideas contained in Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body.15 Both are necessary for the work they currently create.
However, it should also be made clear that each of the above concepts of theory still deals with the idea of rules, of establishing rules of physical behavior, or of trying to find the rules by which a certain work or phenomenon has come into existence. The articulating of these rules is of the greatest service to creative artists, for, once decoded, these rules can act as guides for what not to do. As Kenneth Gaburo wrote, “as a composer, the statement: ‘a given system is the only tenable one,’ constitutes the only challenge necessary to disprove that statement.”16 As a composer, I realize the challenges I am giving music and critical theorists. My recent series of microtonal electronic compositions (1991 to the present) for example, quite consciously uses a different tuning, and a different set of structures in each one.
Faced with this diversity, it is quite understandable if a critic who is concerned with larger scale sets of rules that might exist between works would be baffled by these. Only when the rampant pluralism implied by such a series of works is dealt with will a critic be able, I feel, to approach these works in a meaningful way. For contrary to many trends in contemporary critical thought, I am still primitive enough to believe that the function of an artist is not to follow rules, but to make (and break) them. Artists, no matter how conservative, are essentially anarchists. Critical theorists, by the very nature of the field they choose to deal in, aren’t. Experimental artists, moreover, are, in Allan Vizents’s words, “problem finders,” or, in Chris Mann’s, “problem seekers” or in Herbert Brun’s formulation, “interested in the art we don’t like, yet.”17 Thus there is an essential dissonance between the activities and natures of those who make things in a boundary-challenging way, and those who seek to classify them. Those who seek to indulge in both activies, such as Zurbrugg and myself, keenly feel the tensions of such a contradiction.
The position of critical theory, criticism, and the like, in relation to the mass medium of television, is interesting. Canadian comic-book artist Dave Sim has recently identified television, correctly, I feel, as the only mass medium.18 Although many critics have a great affinity for the mass media, and may think of their work as part of it, sales figures show that compared with the billions that television reaches, the few thousands who read any given critical work, and the few tens of thousands that deal with all criticism are very small indeed. In Sim’s case, he points out that the twenty to thirty thousand copies he sells a month of his ground-breaking Cerebus in no way qualify his work to be considered part of a mass medium, or indeed, to be considered part of that nebulous entity sloppily called “popular culture.” (In my case, with sales of my recent CD already in the high tens, this is even more the case)19.
In “Postmodernity, Métaphore Manquée, and the Myth of the Trans- AvantGarde,” Zurbrugg quotes Jean Baudrillard’s accurate rephrasing of views earlier expressed by Jerry Mander as to how the mass media neutralizes an image’s power and reality until the image bears no relation to any reality whatsoever, and becomes its own pure simulacrum. That this home truth was pointed out by one of the chief cultural theorists of our era was useful. Why, then, did legions of artists and critical thinkers in the eighties and nineties do everything in their power to become part of this mass medium? I knew so many artists in the eighties and nineties who read their Baudrillard and then proceeded to attempt to become part of mainstream popular culture with their absolutely non-mainstream work. Almost to a man or woman, they failed, and were mystified. I, too, was mystified as to why they hadn’t realized that the mass medium was a totally separate world with its own rules that would subvert your message more than you could subvert its.
And though I am enthusiastic about this part of Baudrillard’s analysis of the mass medium, and also very much in love with his hymn to the Los Angeles freeway system in Amérique, I must confess that most of Baudrillard’s views are completely alien to me. For example, being involved in music and video/computer-graphics technology as I am, the thirty years from 1967–1997 have been incredibly exciting. A constant stream of new ideas and possibilities has been made available. The pace of change has been breathtaking, and with each new development, ideas that I had years ago, or which my spiritual grandfathers such as Henry Cowell or Percy Grainger once had, now become realizable. When, in 1984, I read Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, written in 1919, I realized that here was an agenda for computer music research for the next ten years.20 This was, for me, a personal example of the point Zurbrugg makes about much postmodern creativity being realizations of earlier modern aspirations. Therefore, when I read Baudrillard’s views about how postmodern technology has become a source of stasis and superficiality, or Achille Bonito Oliva’s views on the “collapse” of the technological avant-garde, or Barthes’s views on the last century largely being one of reiteration, or Fredric Jameson’s associating of the postmodern temper with a schizophrenic experience of signifiers that fail to link up, I am simply bewildered. I mean, I can’t even keep up with all the things that I want to do that I now can do, and these guys are complaining about STASIS, COLLAPSE, and THINGS NOT MAKING SENSE? Whatever can these European and American academic boys be talking about? Dunno, but maybe things look different from Paris than they do from Melbourne.
And the further I get into Baudrillard’s writings, the less I find that I can even relate to. I mean, I’m a pretty optimistic kind of a guy, and so his nihilism and pessimism cut no ice with me. And when he makes his hyperbolic statements such as “Irony is the only spiritual form in the modern world,” I would simply reply, “No, irony is not the only spiritual form in the modern world.” (Depends on how you define “spiritual form” and “the modern world,” doesn’t it?) Or when he writes that “All philosophies of change…appear naive…. Not only transgression, but even destruction is beyond our reach,” having been involved in work which has made changes, I can only disagree.21 Even granting a large amount of literary license, such statements seem simply silly and gratuitous.
So much of Amérique seems alien to me. I find it saturated with a European romanticism that I just can’t relate too. It makes me wonder, why do we allow certain people, certain ideas, to have power over us? The idea that Europe is an “older world,” unable to participate in the excitement of the New World, for example. It manifests a certain sense of need for an other, that I’ve also seen in the attitudes of many cultivated Europeans who, with all the best intentions, inadvertently reduce the art of such sophisticated and globally aware intellects as Australian Aboriginal artists Leah King-Smith (who makes complex, layered computer graphics dealing with urban Aboriginal ancestry and their relation to their land) and Rover Thomas (who makes powerful, stark, almost [to Western eyes] “abstract” canvas paintings depicting Northern Territory landscapes and dreamings), among many others, to the expressions of “primitive, untainted truths.” They might just as well be more honest about the implied, mythologizing racism in these attitudes, and call these major late-twentieth-century artists “noble savages.” This clearly shows me how much this type of European needs a concept of wilderness and frontier, and Australia (or, in Baudrillard’s case, America) is as convenient a dumping ground for these concepts as any. What relationship this has to the Australia I live in (where, the last time I saw Leah, she was upgrading her computer with the latest version of PhotoShop) is tangential and coincidental at best.
(A German friend visiting Melbourne recently said to me that he found the idea of a European-style city out of place in the Australian landscape. I replied that I found the idea of a European-style city equally out of place in the European landscape. Just ask an Etruscan or a Celt how they felt about being displaced.)
Baudrillard claims that as a European (and it’s interesting how his choice of authorial voice makes it appear that he thinks he’s speaking for all Europeans— who is this royal WE he continually refers to?), he’s incapable of participating in radical modernity. And yet, Baudrillard’s Europe is filled with institutions and individuals who are participating in precisely that radical modernity that he has to go to America to find. The computer and telecommunications artists of Austria, gathered around Heidi Grundmann and Robert Adrian X, the computer music studios STEIM in Amsterdam and LOGOS in Ghent, the work of many of the choreographers at the European Dance Development Centre are all as close to the cutting edge as anything happening in America. In a world that, thankfully, is becoming more and more decentred (and I am writing this in Melbourne, remember), it is bewildering to still encounter people who regard Europe (or Manhattan, or…) as “the center.”
Our mutual acquaintances inform me that Jean Baudrillard is a charming and gracious man, and I, someday would like to have the pleasure of meeting him. Maybe then his writings would make more sense to me, I would understand where he was coming from. This, again, is not a gratuitous point. It’s well known, but not discussed much in critical theory, that knowing an artist changes the way you perceive their work. It may be finding out something about their attitude to their work, such as my knowing British composer John White makes me appreciate his neo-tonal piano sonatas of the sixties, seventies, and eighties as ironic musical equivalents of Warhol’s silkscreens, rather than as the nostalgic yearnings for a lost past that the equivalent George Rochberg pieces are. (And this knowledge makes White’s work exciting for me, while I regrettably find most of Rochberg’s current work dull, even when the “sound” of their pieces is similar.) Or it may be just knowing something about their body language, or the quality of their voice, that then forms the way you relate to their output. And I think this sort of personal relating to art is a good thing. I have never been happy with the idea of “objective” views of art, probably because I never had any. It might even be that concepts such as objectivity are a partial result of having work available in print, recordings, scores, films, and so on. If it’s possible to experience a work without the artist being present, then strategies for appreciating the work without that presence, like “objectivity,” or as a logical extension, “the death of the author,” will develop. And in a field such as traditional literary criticism, where the idea of personal presence is almost alien (it all happens in books, you know?), no wonder the myth of objectivity is so rampant. Therefore, I am not being flippant when I say that my further dealing with Baudrillard’s work is on hold until I can have a cup of tea with him. I only hope that there is more to establish than a simple confirmation of mutual irrelevance.
As I find that I have great difficulty identifying with the nihilism of Baudrillard, I find I also have a similar lack of points of contact with Fredric Jameson, Almost all of Jameson’s statements, as quoted in Zurbrugg’s essay “Jameson’s Complaint” are completely at variance with what I feel. The art that Jameson finds “impenetrable,” for example, I often find too clear, with not enough “mess” in it; what he sees as “ceaseless rotation of elements” I find to be a fascinating and refreshing use of permutational forms. He finds Rauschenberg’s work to be limited; I find it deep and enlightening. Jameson claims that the use of permutational and random forms cannot produce monumental works, that “metabooks” are somehow inferior to the masterworks of modernism. Yet I find John Cage’s Roaratorio, surely a “metabook” if ever there was one, to be one of the profound masterpieces of the late-twentieth-century.22
More than these simple (and ultimately unproductive) disagreements of taste, however, I find Jameson’s work forcing me to ask questions about perception and choice of language. The question, it seems to me, is what do you do when you encounter a new work? What sort of strategies do you employ to perceive it, to process it? And what sort of attention do you choose to give that work? For surely, we can choose how we give attention to a work: we can choose close scrutiny, bringing to bear a variety of critical tools, or we can choose an open mode of attention, where we try to perceive what is there with as little regard to our prejudices as we can manage, or we can choose to treat a work as background to our own reveries. Jameson, surprisingly, seems unaware of this, or at least he adopts authorial strategies that suggest he is.
Most telling for me though, is Jameson’s admission that his critical language may be inadequate for dealing with the subject at hand, video art. (And doesn’t he understand that video [or the computer, or…] is just another tool for artists to work with?) Yet despite this, he clings to his language because it provides an “entry ticket to the public sphere in which these matters are debated.” Rather than changing his language to deal with a new artform, he insists on evaluating the new artform in terms of his old language so he can keep his sense of respectability. He isn’t alone; this sort of thinking was rampant in the 1980s. I once asked a colleague who had produced a very funny radio piece, and then written a very prolix paper full of art-theory language about it, why she had done such a thing. Was she aiming at an ironic contrast between the straightforward humor of the piece and the complex language of the paper? She replied that that wasn’t the case. She had written the paper using that language because she felt if she didn’t use that language she wouldn’t be taken seriously by the art world, and that for her, being taken seriously by the art world was paramount. Thus are we formed by our desires for respect. What a trap! As John Lilly observed, during a lecture he gave in the early 1970s on his dolphin research, “Your communication is limited by the language you know.”23 And yet, many people find it so difficult to step outside their languages to deal with work that was clearly not made to accomodate those languages.
It becomes increasingly clear, then, that the worldview of those critics Zurbrugg takes most seriously (because he gives most attention to them) and the worldview of those artists whose works he admires are almost totally at variance with each other. Given the almost complete dissonance between those who make it and those who theorize about it I am increasingly forced to conclude that the only way the experimental art of this century will get written about in an understanding way will be when the practitioners themselves write about it, or train a new generation of critics to do so. The existing critics and critical theorists have proven themselves incapable of lively, much less understanding, responses. The despair and just plain grumpy-old-man tiredness that emanate from the writings of such critics as Baudrillard and Jameson stands in stark contrast to the sense of wonder of, for example, John Cage. One of my favorite Cage quotes (which I can never find the source of) was from an interview where the interviewer asked about the danger of going to extremes. His reply was typically optimistic, and refreshing: “Unless we go to extremes, we won’t get anywhere.”
Cage’s definition of the avant-garde, quoted in Zurbrugg’s article on Amérique, is similarly clear: “Without the avant-garde, which I think is flexibility of mind and freedom from institutions, theories and laws, you won’t have invention and obviously, from a practical point of view…society needs invention.” (It should be pointed out, though, that Cage is hardly ambivalent on this point. After all, his father was a rather well known inventor.)
In contrast to Jameson’s lamenting of the lack of expressive possibilities in randomly based forms, Cage, in such works as Cartridge Music and Variations II, shows how randomly based forms can be rigorous, tight, and coherent. Over a period of twenty-five years, I’ve made about ten realizations of Cartridge Music, and about four realizations of Variations II, two of Cage’s famous “kit” scores from 1960–1961, where the performer is to follow instructions to realize their own version of the piece. In both cases, if the instructions are followed, what results in each case is a unique member of a “family” that constitutes a piece. That is, each realization of Cartridge Music sounds different, but the same kinds of structures and sounds recur in each version. If realized carefully, it always results in a “cartridge music,” and not, say, a “variations II.” And far from being simply random improvisations, the realization of each score is hard work. To realize the version of Variations II for toy electronic instruments that Australian composer Ernie Althoff and I performed at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in August 1996, I worked for about four days, three hours a day, endlessly drawing and measuring the lines between the points and lines that constitute the score. Out of this were assembled precisely timed lists of instructions, which were then performed with the fidelity of any other classical music “score” What Cage had done in Variations II was to create a paper and pencil physical model of a kind of random-composing computer program. This was clearly the most practical solution for a gigging musician constantly on the road in 1961. (Today, the conceptual grandchildren of Cage’s “kit” scores are such algorithmic composing programs as Kinetic Music Machine and Max.) Working it out by hand took hours. If I had simply wanted “random” sounds from my toy instruments, there would have been far easier ways of achieving that. Making the commitment to realize Variations II was a commitment to rigorously explore a very serious stochastic structure.24
The process is similar with contemporary video art. Many of the contemporary video works I most admire, such as works by Bill Viola, Woody Vasulka, Martha Rosler, and Robert Randall (to name four extremely different artists) are as rigorously worked out as works in any other media. The cheesy Warholian reworked movie star images in Robert Randall’s interactive CD-Rom “Little Gems,” for example, are backed up by some of the most complex chaos-equation-generated computer graphics I’ve ever seen. A critic who only deals with the literary (and in this case, the intentionally and sarcastically stupid) “surface” of this work will clearly miss the point of what’s lurking in its depths.
Similar things might be said about the very refined and austere work of Bill Viola, an artist who shares my skepticism about the competence and relevance of contemporary critical theory. In one sense, to even use contemporary word-basedcritical theory to deal with Viola’s work is a mistake. The major sources of Viola’s work, as I understand it, are not materialistic, verbal or even contemporary. His major sources are such spiritual disciplines as Zen and medieval Christian mysticism. Han-shan, Zeami, John of the Cross, and Theresa of Avila are more relevant starting points for an understanding of his work than are, say, Freud and Wittgenstein.
In fact, one of the themes of Viola’s work, as I understand it (and to a large extent of my work as well), is the primacy, if not the absolute superiority, of nonverbal modes of intelligence, such as sound, smell and color/shape/image, over word-based expressions. A recent major work of his, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, deals at length with the notion of the nonverbal forms of animal consciousness. For my part, verbal descriptions are an inferior mode of expression, their so-called precision being precisely what renders them so vague. But a smell, ahh, there’s no mistaking what’s “meant” by that. I had an epiphany a few weeks ago: two colleagues and I argued critical theory in a local coffeehouse for about two hours. Upon leaving the place, I passed a pitosporum, one of the most fragrant of Australian native trees. It was not yet in blossom, not for about four months yet, but its bark already gave off its distinctive, sweet, intoxicating odor. I can assure you that that one moment of nasal experience was far more meaningful to me than all the words we had expended in the previous two hours. Emphatically I realized that, for me, words were indeed inferior.
This insistence on keeping words in their place was also shared by John Cage. In the fifties, he was asked what he was trying to say in one of his works with Merce Cunningham, His reply was “We are not, in these dances and music, saying something. We are simple-minded enough to believe that if we were saying something, we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.”25 It is important, I feel, to keep making this separation between doing and saying.
And this is a perception that has been shared by many artists throughout the century. In contrast to Wittgenstein’s pronouncement that what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence, the American composer, musicologist and semiotician Charles Seeger pointed out that what cannot be spoken of may have already be danced, painted, sculpted, or sung for centuries.26
It becomes clear that the work of many contemporary critical theorists is as irrelevant to our artistic concerns as our work is to theirs. Surely we, as artists, and as intelligent perceivers of the richness of the contemporary environment, have the right to demand interesting, lively, broad-minded, and informed responses from, and dialogues with, our critics and cultural theorists. And if they fail to measure up to these criteria, surely we have the right to be as contemptuously dismissive toward them, and their works, as they have been toward ours.