There was a movement in the art world beginning, people say, in the 1960s, aiming for the dematerialization of the art object. In 1968, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler called this “ultra-conceptual art”; which “emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively” and “may result in the object becoming wholly obsolete.” This is a conceptual art where concept moves to the foreground, often at the expense of other aesthetic elements. In his book ‘In The Blink Of An Ear’ Seth Kim-Cohen writes, “Art became text based, moving from appearance to conception, from era of taste to era of meaning, from the specific to the generic.”
So in moving from the material to the conceptual I wonder about a further step. As the art object is dematerialized, it still exists as an art object; being a piece of text or a concept, rather than a painting or a music piece. What would be beyond object and concept? It feels impossible to think about.
Kim-Cohen writes “Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness of art.” So art as an attitude is about framing: clipping a part of our reality into ‘Art’, and in doing so we get to explore it feverishly, often gazing/listening/experiencing intensely to find a meaning or even an essence. An example of framing is the frame over a canvas, symbolising some kind of importance of what is inside the frame. In dematerialization it has been shown that we can frame something immaterial, something conceptual.
I saw a Jean Dubuffet exhibition in the Barbican this year. In this piece, he takes something from the world, soil, and frames it by painting it.
How do we cultivate the attitude of art without an object of reference? How do we move beyond material and conceptual realms through art that encompasses the sensory experience? How do we explore the whole reality feverishly, an experience of the world without framing it in material and conceptual borders?
For example, why did Dubuffet not tell us to go out and look at soil, and experience it as part of a wider reality? As I stared at the painting, my body was conformed to an ettiquette of the gallery space.
Framing = context? Is this the decontextualised sensory experience, an array of light, sound, feeling? It begins to feel like a spiritual experience of connection, oneness, emptiness. In some schools of Buddhism, emptiness is “a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.” (Thanisarro Bhikkhu). There is an idea of oneness beyond the frame of each item. The ‘raw data’ is the sensory experience without context.
Pauline Oliveros, a sound artist and composer, covers a similiar theme in her work. She started a movement called Deep Listening, which she defined it as “listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time… Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.” From engaging with her work, we can listen to sounds and let the thought of their source pass by, to be left with the sound itself and the memories and feelings that it inspires, like the ‘raw data’ insinuated by the Buddhist mode of emptiness.
I feel an urge to settle the mind out of intellect, into the body. Art in the body, art as experience. In the era of climate crisis, a disconnect with the natural? world and with eachother, embodied art can awake us into the reality of interdepence: where we rely on wider ecosystems and participate in their survival or destruction. – I feel – the border of my body / not my body is an illusion. I am this planet, I am an expression of life on earth, that being an expression of cosmic intelligence, oneness.
It feels amazing! I am God now!
The deepest experiencing of art is in creating. Pauline Oliveros wanted to spread the practice of Deep Listening, so people can have more creative engagement with the world. As we move away from art being a product to consume and being an experience, I worry that this experience is not equally accessible for everyone. If art practice is an enriching personal journey, why should (only) some people be artists… ?
Daphne Oram writes in “An Individual Note” that modern concerts are designed for the “releasing and excercising of the composer’s and performer’s brain mechanisms… for unclogging their feedback circuits and indulging their rationalising departments.” She requests “Can we also have some music for those not in need of psychiatric treatment?” Last week in Cafe OTO, I gazed at a musician performing improvised sound art thinking of Oram. If the audience is becoming irrelevant, then can we, as artists, try our best to share and facilitate the creative practice for others, to allow others to be artists? In Cafe OTO I wanted the border between performer and audience to disappear and everyone in the room the have the same ecstatic release that the musician was experiencing. I guess it is difficult to avoid a product orientation of art, here in London, in 2021.
Imagine a software that makes a listener a composer and performer. A virtual landscape designed to sound and sing in the preference of the witness. The witness paints a landscape of sound with mind and body. Rather than composed scores, a landscape is composed for the witness to move around in. An autonomist Spotify. An accessible DAW.
Imagine the attiude of art expanding to our whole awareness as an acoustic version of this software.
relational aesthetics, ultra red, after sound, artificial hells, claire bishop, participation documentary, hating peter thatchell documentary