Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Gage: What I want to do today is I'll talk for I think around 15 or 20 minutes and I
want to introduce the idea of conceptual writing to everybody and talk a little bit about its
links to conceptual art and to LeWitt in particular. Standing here, I'm a professor of literature
so I always feel envy of my, I've always felt envy of my art historical colleagues who get
to show paintings and beautiful art in a classroom and students will be there and they will just
gaze upon these works and how easy their job is as compared to my incredibly difficult,
laborious job of bringing [penguin 00:00:42] classics to life. Actually it's way harder
to be an art history professor because nobody wants to hear from you, they just want to
look at these cool things around you. I'll do what I can and you can have your minutes
of silence gazing at the LeWitt around us. This particular LeWitt is called "All Two
Part Combinations of Arts from Corners and Sides and Straight, Not Straight, Broken Lines".
I, myself, like LeWitt's draftsman need a set of instructions so I'm going to speak
casually, but I'm going to have my instructions here with me while I do that. The question
I want ask today is what could writing learn from LeWitt? What could literature have learned
from LeWitt? What would literature that had learned from LeWitt and other conceptual writers
look like? If they had learned from LeWitt and other conceptual writers would we want
to read it? If we don't want to read it, are there other things we could do with it? Could
we listen to it? Could we look at it? Maybe we could just think about it.
The remarkable thing, for me anyway, someone who mostly works mostly on the 19th century
novels and a little bit on contemporary, on creative writing, conceptual writing, and
contemporary poetry is how the practices that are pretty much institutionalized at this
point in visual arts, things like say setting up instructions to be executed by unskilled
craftspeople, like LeWitt's wall drawings all of which are executed in this case by
someone other than Sol LeWitt, or say with Warhol's silk screens, other people's photographs,
or even of newspaper photography, or even Picasso or early 20th century collage work.
Those things that are routine in art now are still really conspicuous and bug people in
literature and in writing. Those collage works in writing tend to really get under people's
skin and people will regard this as outrageous in some way that you would write say, maybe
a novel comprised entirely of quotations from someone else's novel, or in the case of one
of the works we'll look at today, a 600-page book comprised entirely of words and phrases
that end in the "shwah" sound and the "er" sound. Arranged alphabetically according to
syllable count or a work called "Dictèe" that
is the 800-word poem of all the words in "Moby ***" that start with "un". We won't read
all of those. I guess I could just begin by noting that LeWitt's hand is not actually
involved in producing this work that's around us and if you want to find the LeWitt it's
in the [inaudible 00:03:31] outside of this room. This room is unusual in the sense that
you would actually have to go outside of it. Those instructions are painted on the wall
there. One of the things that's really important to notice is that LeWitt is bringing language
into painting. He's bringing language into the production of art and the context for
conceptual writing is 60's and 70's conceptual art and I want to talk a little bit about
that more as context on the point of departure for conceptual writing. When conceptual art
comes out, it starts to emerge in the 60's and 70's, I feel a conspicuous talking about
this, there are historians in this room that know so much more about this than I do, but
I'll just continue to go along and then you can correct me later. [Inaudible 00:04:11]
with some writing early moment in the 20th century and in particularly thinking about
Marcel Duchamp's works. That is things like the "Urinal" or "The Stool" or the "The Snow
Shovel Suspended" that is ready-mades. Things that actually changed a lot about the context
of art that is no longer a question of is this something that was made by an individual
an artistic status that didn't depend on intrinsic qualities, but simply contextual in seeing
it within a museum. This changed a lot of the fundamentals assumptions of art, I think.
Those Duchamp did and a couple later generations in the 60's and 70's. We tend to think of
paintings and poems and novels and other kinds or artwork as having authors, but Duchamp's
ready-mades, these industrial produced type objects are something presented and recontextualized.
This licenses a different kind of artistic practice something where you can work with
things that can be appropriated and simply placed in a new context so they can be framed.
There are two big moves that I think are important for conceptual art and then in turn for conceptual
writing and the first is that conceptual art starts to privilege the intellectual over
the individual. Ideas over representations and start to emphasize the logistic play.
Duchamp says early in the 20th century, "Everything was becoming conceptual. It depended on things
other than the retina." A shift away from the object itself and shift away from the
experience and from the experience of [inaudible 00:05:39] appreciation or emotional intensity
into something like the act of perception itself. LeWitt has a version of this if you
look at, we can look at these later, his paragraphs on conceptual art LeWitt says, "What the work
of art looks like isn't too important. That is the idea or the concept is the most important
aspect of the work and the idea itself, even if not made visual is as much a work of art
as any finished product. It's value in process or product, it's deestheticized, deskilled,
unexpressive", and then there's a serial logic to it like permutational logic. If you go
through the three floors of this exhibit you'll see there are a lot of variations in the kinds
of the work that LeWitt is producing. These are, in some ways, almost stripped down and
then you get all these bright colors one floor up from us. They're basically all permutations
of the same set of formal concerns, around the same size, all working through different
sets of instructions.
The second big moment I think is that in conceptual art it allows artists to begin to think about
language in general. That is to bring language into their art, to draw upon language from
any place, like newspapers, advertisements, or in books and bring those into art. A couple
of big moments in this, Robert Rauschenberg in 1961, he was asked to contribute a portrait
for a portrait show for the Iris Clert Gallery and all the artists were meant to do a portrait
of Iris Clert for the show. Roshenberg sent a telegram that reads, "This is a portrait
of Iris Clert if I say so." That is, substitutes in language for representation. A second moment
is Robert Smithson's piece in 1966 called "A Heap of Language". This was in a gallery
show in New York in 1967 called "Language to be Looked At and/or Things to be Read".
It was simply, it was handwritten; it was literally a pile of language. Words like,
"speech", "tongue", "phraseology", "dialect", "brogue", and about this big and piled up
in a pyramid.
When conceptual art starts to begin to present text as art it actually began to ask what
the status of painting is when its subject is language. For example, John Baldessari
a conceptual artists who produces a series of text paintings, and at that time he would
have someone else prime the canvas. He would often have a commercial painter paint the
actual words and those words were often lifted from elsewhere. They're unattributed quotations,
so for example, this is a 1966 work, and this is "The Work". The title was "The Work" and
these are the words. "Everything has been purged from this painting but art. No ideas
have entered this work." This is a great thing. This is like a Harpo Marx painting. That is
he can't speak but can actually express [stuff 00:08:31]. It's like an own goal in soccer,
where you hit the moment where you say there are no ideas, right there are ideas.
A few things that conceptual art and conceptual writing share that is one of the things is
these writers and artists tend to set up a set of rules and then just produce works out
of those rules. That is just follow them. Then the artist's job is to inventory those results. A second thing
is to in some ways get us away from the notion of the artist as original or as genius. Wordsworth
in the later part of the 18th century or early part of the 19th century is writing poems
actually begging Congress to extend copy write because he says, "My work is so crazy original
that it's going to take a couple generations for people to really appreciate it, and I
don't want my grandchildren to get the dough from my copy write." Wordsworth is the epicenter
of this cartoon version, epicenter as viewing artists as original and artists as genius
and that's what these artists are really trying to get away from. Then a third thing is mimicking
of commercial or amateur processes in the art as LeWitt [finds 00:09:43] other people
to actually execute these painting and those people are not trained. As LeWitt says, "All
the planning is undertaken before hand and the execution is perfunctory affair."
The first writer that I want to talk about is not a writer at all. It's Andy Warhol.
He's not even a conceptual artist. He's a pop artist, but I think that his novel which
is "A Novel", produced in 1968 is actually the length that is really crucial for these
later more contemporary conceptual writers. What this novel was meant to be, many people
hardly know that Andy Warhol wrote a novel. He didn't. He recorded a novel and then he
hired other people to transcribe those tapes. It wasn't really a novel it was actually just
him in the factory with all of his pals and the other superstars, so it's simply the recordings
of their conversations. He then hired typists to transcribe those tapes, but gave them no
instructions about how to do it. There is radical changes in the layout of the book.
Some people are into the double column thing, and then other people just started going like
this, or they get tired of the double columns and they have to change it around. I will
read to you from an earlier moment here, from the opening. This is, I should say, a 458-page
book.
"Rattle, gurgle, clink, ***, click, pause, ring, ring, dial, dial, [Undean 00:11:05]
you said dial that, that, if, if, you, pick, pick up the mayor's voice on the other end,
dial, pause, dial, dial, dial, the mayor's sister would know us, be busy, busy, busy,
[inaudible 00:11:15]. We should start from the park, right? OK. Mm-mm. Coin drops. Money
jiggles as coins return. Car noises in background. You're a clunk. Are there any weigh stations
on the way that we have to honk, honk, honk, like, uh, I, what, noise. If we go through
the park is there any place we can keep calling her, uh, I mean right through the, uh, phone
call is there any place where we could keep calling him if we uh, answering service. Are
you, cars honking [inaudible 00:11:37] other different places, other different places where
we could call your ans, oh, want some cake? Nah. A little juice, anything? I know where
you can get some. [Hurriedly 00:11:44]. Oh yes, let's get some. Fantastic baby. Yeah
good. Oh, you can't pretend that you're not here. OK. All right. You're, uh, mean, all
right. You're, uh, you're, you're here? OK. You're here? OK. You definitely are here?
Uh, noise, OK."
That's half of the first page of this book. You're longing for that taking a moment of
silence right now I would expect. There a question here which is how do you deal with
the confusion of this novel? That is, in once sense, how the hell are you supposed to read
this? One thing you could do is just start skimming, looking for plot or looking for
the dirty parts of which there are many, many, many. One of the typist's mothers, one of
the typists was Mo Tucker future drummer for the Velvet Underground. Mo Tucker's mom threw
out one of the tapes because they were too filthy, so it's actually missing some stuff.
When Warhol went through this stuff he edited it, quote edited it but left all the errors
in. He actually likes the errors. You could do a couple things. You could skim. You could
skip over the local disruptions. Try to find something of a plot. When there actually isn't
any plot you have to ask yourself, "OK, so what do you pay attention to?" Then you start
pay attention to things like typography and layout. That is the material aspects of the
language on the page. This is something that we're really not used to doing in reading
novels. If I asked any of my students what the font was for "The Bleak House", the copy
of "Bleak House" I asked them to read they would all be like, "What? Those are just words.
I'm not paying attention to words. I'm just getting the ideas behind the words." For Warhol,
I think that this novel forces us to oscillate between reading it superficially and then
reading it so completely that we might start to feel a little crazy. You could plausibly
read this book letter by letter. There are moments when things are capitalized and you
don't know if they're supposed to be capitalized because of emphasis, that it's trying reproduce
the speech somehow, or if just the caps lock key got stuck on a typewriter. I point this
out to my students; you couldn't do this novel now because Word would correct all of the
mistakes as you go along with your caps lock key. It's hard to get it stuck in that way.
I think two things to notice about this book, one it's deskilled. That is Warhol, like LeWitt
is asking other people to actually write the novel actually produce it in the same way
that assistants produced the LeWitt. Then the second thing Warhol says. He says, "I
wanted to do bad movies and bad art." One of the noted aspects of Warhol's silk screens
I like is they're not that good. The paint ludes out from the edges of where the silk
screen is supposed to be, but that's how we actually know it's a Warhol, that luding.
The second aspect of it that I think is worth thinking about is to think about a mediation,
running ideas through other people and seeing what happens. LeWitt says in his paragraphs
on wall drawings, he says, "Errors are part of the work of art. If people make mistakes
that's part of the work." Warhol really, really liked mistakes, so when in one place he talks
about hiring an assistant he says, "You know what I really want in an assistant? I want
someone who misunderstands me a little bit." He wants someone who will mediate his ideas
and twist them unintentionally, so it felt distorted [inaudible 00:15:06]. I think that
that is actually the subject of this book, that is, media systems. That whole first page
is about trying to get a phone call accomplished with a payphone. This was in the old day,
all right with a payphone because it's actually about running stuff through different media
systems.
There are a few differences though, I think, between conceptual art and conceptual writing.
One of them is that conceptual art is oriented toward undermining the idea of a singular
work of art, that is, just one painting as in the case of Warhol. What would it mean
to have an original silk screen if there are 50 of them? That's something that writing
has just taken as a given. There are always multiple copies of a poem or a novel, multiple
editions of something. Writing is always dependent on copies. Then secondly, conceptual art could
work up on canvases or instruction. Actually people are opposed to the idea to an art object.
That is opposing concept versus object. The fact that we actually turning language itself,
whether written or printed words into something not just to be read but to be looked at, to
be treated as art. As conceptual art asks if language can be art, writing has always
treated language as art. A second difference, I think, is that language is conceptually
this super material. That is, it is stuff to be cut and pasted and clicked on and poured
into different containers and reframed. That is, while conceptual art is often abstract
like when there's no painting to look at. Where there's no actual canvas. Conceptual
writing is super concrete also. This is drawing attention to the basic fact of language. Language
always has had a double life. On the one hand, the meaning of a word, such as what is it's
tense, what does the word mean, what does the sentence mean? Then the second is what
would be just like the material connection, what it sounds like, what does it look like?
That's the aspect of language I think we all can tend to forget. We tend to treat language
as if were a translucent container or something, that you just pour ideas into. Conceptual
writing after the language might be treated not as art but as material, like material,
like clay that you can push around. There's a story, Edgar Degas this painter talking
to his buddy [Malumet 00:17:31] who is a poet, and Degas says, "You know I have these ideas
for poems and I just can't get them down." I'm tweeking it a little bit, "Poems are made
with words not with ideas." Conceptual writers want to take that notion really, really to
heart. Conceptual writing tends to set up an algorithm to organized the writing and
then produce something, but unlike LeWitt for conceptual writing what the product is,
really matters. This is not the case of "It doesn't matter what it looks like." For conceptual
writers it really matters what that finished product is.
Another writer, the second of the three that I wanted to just mention today, Kenneth Goldsmith.
He's pretty much a latter day Warhol but in a super minor key as you might suspect for
a writer rather than a visual artist. He was actually trained at [inaudible 00:18:21],
so he trained as a sculpture and did not have a very successful career as a sculpture, so
he made a career move and switched into writing where his stock has since risen exponentially.
He teaches at University of Pennsylvania right now. A few of his works include a book called
"Day" in which he transcribes the entirety of a day of an edition of the New York Times,
every single word, going across. If there was a picture with a car license plate he
wrote out the letters of the license plate as he went along. Then he has a trilogy called
"Traffic,Weather, and Sports". I think you can probably guess what that is if you're
a fan of radio at all because the transcription is every traffic report on Penn Penn [inaudible
00:19:07] for a year and every weather report and then every sports update. They actually
are astonishingly compelling works. It turns out the traffic, that is after [inaudible
00:19:17] to happen and then it kind of fades away. The same with weather, dew is always
hanging over New York City in the form of weather and then it dissipates somehow. Goldsmith
is really interested, I think, in the directory condition of language itself, but language
is not, it's something to be expressive not like those words when you [inaudible 00:19:35]
overthrow of powerful feeling but language in front of you. Something to be organized,
cataloged, and accumulated. You have to know a work called, snappily titled "No. 111: 2.7.93-10.20.96"
a 600-page catalog of [found 00:19:53] language words and phrases that he collected over a
three year period of words and phrases that ended in the "schwa" or the "r" sound. Arranged
into chapters according to syllable count and alphabetized. Begins with single syllable
words and ends with a 7,228 syllable short story, D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse
Winner". He says that he didn't read it he just counted the syllables and then transcribed
it. Here's what's crazy about this book, it reads as, entirely personal. These are just
like languages ready-made. Talking about billboards and internet and magazines and TV, so without
directive of his thoughts. They're not his love letters. There is no emotion, none of
his own emotion. At the same time they are utterly confessional because it's everything
he's been reading and watching and coming into contact with over three years. Here's
just a little sample. This is chapter three, from chapter three,
"Air fouler, airbladder, airfare war, Aktorka, Al Fatah, Al Roker, albacore, Albert Speer,
Alcina, Alcoa, Aldona, aleconner, alegar, Alfalfa, algebra, Algenzir, all cower, all
dogs are, all men are, alnagar, aloha, alzheimer, ambrosia, amoeba, an or a, Ananda, anaphor,
ancestor, and aah-aah, and beaters and better and bigger and bleepers and blippers."
That's chapter three and by the time you, it's like a rhythmic catalog. Who knew that
for example, ambrosia and amoeba, those actually sound really good together. Those are beautiful.
Nice little rhymes in there. As it goes on, you start to get these more grammatically
intact sentences but it never actually [inaudible 00:21:37] into a story. This is from chapter
30.
"He caught the workmen to begin to speak in different languages so that they could not
communicate with each other. I found a new desire and enjoyment in rambling about whatever
seems appropriate at the time. So here we are. I had the recorder on so it was just
crazy to listen to it over and over again on the recorder. I hate it that my wife is
drop dead beautiful because I can't even damn head without some fool hitting on her. I hate
it when men have hair on their back especially when it's really dark and it comes out of
the back of their trousers. I haven't had fun with this sappy girl she going on about
the sucky Counting Crows and their stupid lead singer."
Not like real close reading here, but just notice an "I" shows up here, but it's not
him. It's totally impersonal. The thing about it, it's weirdly confessional. It's so intimate.
It's like someone went on your computer and opened up your web browser history and they
found out what you've been reading on the internet, but included everything. It's like
he set up, what's the NSA program, Prism? It's like he set up his own personal NSA surveillance
program but the least useful one of all time because it focused on one dude and it's only
emails and phone calls that end in the "er" sound. Doesn't that want to make you get him
together with Edwin Snowden? What this ends up with is it's a totally useless record book,
but it's utterly precise. You could find out where any phrase is within totally [inaudible
00:22:59]. At the same time, all these controlling exercises are overrated. He couldn't predict
what the results were going to be.
The second book of his, "Soliloquy". This is pretty much the inversion of that book.
This is where he mics himself for a week and then transcribes only his words, so excised
everybody else's conversation, everything else. There are no pauses in here, there's
no takes a breath, but most of all, it's all exteriority. There is no thought. There's
not a single thought in this book. It's all externalized speech. It's like if you took
a Henry James novel, like late Henry James where it's all [colloquialized 00:23:38] to
a particular character and you just get tons of thinking. If you took that and pulled it
like a glove and pulled it inside out, you would have a character where it's just all
talk. I'll just give you a quick taste of this.
"Good morning. How you doing? Yeah. Wait a second. I have my ticket. OK. There you go.
Thanks. See you soon. Oh, oh, oh I thought you could have a good weekend. Oh OK. Have
a good week. See you later. Thank you. All right, all right. Two please. You don't have
to save that for four. Is it OK? Do you have any newspapers lying around? I'll just have
coffee start. Thanks. OK, babe. OK. How you doing? Oh, oh, oh. OK."
It goes on. It's a 600-page book, but he's already moved from his apartment to the subway
and then to a coffee shop. I think that Richard reminds us a little bit of the "Word Heap".
That is of Robert Smithson's "Word Heap". Goldsmith's line about this book, he said,
"The moniker for this work was if every word spoken in New York City daily was somehow
to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard." He's really interested,
Goldsmith's really interested in the accumulation of language. How much would language weigh?
This began as a performance piece in which he read each page and dropped it from a balcony
as it floated to the ground. I think in some sense you can think about, I threatened you
with these books. They're massive. There's no way I could read aloud. I do assign these
to my students.
If you think about the early 20th century writing themes has been set by [inaudible
00:25:06] difficult language. Think about Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" or even think about
the shorter stuff like "Town [inaudible 00:25:12]. This work I think produces the problem of
quantity instead. Rather than difficulty it's a problem with the massiveness of language
coming over us. If you think about how many words we encounter every day, we encounter
[inaudible 00:25:30] amount 300-way more words in print everyday than previous generations
did. Think a little bit about how we navigate through that kind of data. Goldsmith says
that you don't need to read his work, you just need to understand the idea. He says
that he wants a thinkership rather than a readership. I don't think that's quite right,
but as [inaudible 00:25:51] it takes an account of what he produces.
I'll just mention one last person. It's Christian Bök's "Eunoia", and this is a novel or a
poem rather that has five chapters, a, e, i, o, and u and each chapter only contains
words that use that chapter's particular vowel. There are a bunch other concerns you have
to have a nautical voyage in each one. You has to be a [inaudible 00:26:20], there has
to be a banquet in each one. Christian Bök did this by combing through the Webster's
Third International Dictionary by hand three times over seven years, collating words, as
in only words with single vowels in them. I'll give you a quick taste of something then
I'll finish up here. This is chapter A.
"Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzare damns stagnant art and
scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads
(what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh -- a hand-stamp that can
stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that
charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahanharata), as papal cabal
blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat.
A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark."
This work is the work I think is most like the one that we're standing in. It's utterly
exhaustive. The title of this particular work is "Every Line, All Two-Part Combinations
of Art Form the Corners and Sides to Straight and Not Straight Broken Lines". That's simply
exhaustive that it's the permutation cataloging every single thing which is what "Eunoia"
gives us. I have a few other things, but I think I will invite David to take my place
here and then we'll have a conversation afterwards. Thank you all for listening to this.
David: I have to say, I'm a not scholar so even though I teach at Yale I always tell
my students that they can never use anything I say in front of anyone who knows anything.
Everything I do comes from the perspective of the people who made it, so I very concerned
with the business of making music. That's the only thing I know anything about. The
history of how people make things in music. For example, if you start with John Cage,
four minutes and thirty-three seconds, I wasn't going to talk about this but since it came
up I thought I would tell you a little bit about what that piece means because in a way
Cage is the spiritual grandfather of all of this thinking of all of this idea of saying,
"Well there's a problem between the making of something and the receiving of something
and let's see if we can look at that as a wound that we can stick our finger in as far
as it will go. Where will that get us?" The interesting thing about Cage, Cage was a young
composer once. We think of Cage as being a great genius who worked on thinking allowed
him to take over the entire world. It actually, at the beginning of his life, he was a young
composer whose teacher, one of the strictest most European, most thoughtful composers,
Arnold Schoenberg didn't like him. Arnold Schoenberg famously said to Cage in a lecture,
in a composition lesson, he held up a pencil and pointed at the eraser and he said, "This
end is the more important end.", which Cage thought about his entire life. Cage was a
young composer and when he started trying to make music, nobody would play his music.
All of the things that he did came out of his desire to become a successful composer.
He couldn't find people to work within the music world and so he decided, "I'm going
to do it myself. I'm going to, I can't find lots of [inaudible 00:30:16] to play with
me, so I'm going to put pieces of metal and junk in the strings of the piano so I can
have a percussion orchestra all my own." He started thinking, "I'm interested in all this
interesting music and nobody wants to know anything about it." so he decided to become
a lecturer about all the things that were interested in contemporary music. He started
going out lecturing to anybody who would hire him and in fact you can actually go on You
Tube and see him on television on "What's My Line?" talking about contemporary music
and he makes this incredible realization at one point. "I'm working so hard in all of
these pieces to have them have some proportion. I want to have this measure be the same length
as that measure, and this phrase be the same length as that phrase." because musicians,
we care about how these things are organized. We like to organize things. He started thinking,
"I'm not playing any of my music for anybody I'm just giving talks about music. What if
all of my talks had the same form as all of my pieces? Can I just take the same phrase
length for my music and instead of showing those with notes, can I show them with words?"
He has an incredible book called "Silence" and he actually tells you [inaudible 00:31:38],
"I have this speech and it's exactly the same phrase as this piece of music." In his mind
these things are being confused. What's interesting about Cage and where we get four minutes and
thirty-three seconds, when Cage was a young composer the definition that all composers
talked about, about how you make music. What's the definition of music? People would use
the definition that was invented by the composer Varèse and that is that music is organized
chance. I think we would all agree. What do you do as a composer of any kind of music?
You have some kind of sound and you make some kind of decision about how long it lasts or
the order of things or what you do with it or where it goes. You count this thing and
this thing and you put them in that order. You're doing two things, you're organizing
things and you're making things that need to be organized. You have a melody and you
have a form. You have something to listen to and you have a decision about how you organize
what you listen to. Cage's whole life was thinking about, "What if we imagined those
things as a spectrum?" Can you imagine that there is something that's so far on the sound
side that there's no form left? Can you imagine something that's so far on the form side that
there's no sound left? If we agree that every place on the middle of this is music, it's
something that's just beautiful, melodic and just noodling around, and it's really great
when we hear it. We would all think that's music, just sounds really nice. That's music.
That's sound. Even if it's not organized so well, even if it lasts too long or doesn't
go any place or whatever, the organization doesn't matter, just the sound part of it,
closer to the sound side than the organization side. Cage's big question that he asked himself
his entire life is, "If all the places in the middle of this spectrum are music are
the endpoints music?" If you can imagine something that's just the sounds that are existing in
the world, I think we'd think that was music. Can you imagine a system or a situation or
a proposition where something can be all the way at the side of form where there are no
decisions at all about what those sounds are? Is that music too? Cage would say yes. Cage
basically is saying our job as musicians is to build a box, to build a form, to build
a box and to fill it with interesting stuff to listen to. Cage's contribution with four
minutes and thirty-three seconds is that the farthest end of that spectrum, what if I just
build a box? What if I just say here's your opportunity to listen? I don't know about
you, but in my life, my life is really messy and is really hectic and it's really loud
and is full of all sorts of things batting against me all the time and things I didn't
choose. The proposition that I might just fit and have permission to listen to something,
that's a huge gift and that's Cage's gift. Again, it's not off the topic because that's
the thinking which people got from Cage and which Sol LeWitt got from Cage. This idea
to say we are interested in figuring something out. Our job as experimental artists and experimental
thinkers is to push that idea as far as it can go. Our job and our duty is to keep pushing
until we push as far as we can go.
Now, on having blabbered a little, what I would like to do is I'd like to have all performance
[inaudible 00:35:39]. I'm going to need you all to stand. We're going to perform a piece
from the period of composers who were influenced by Sol LeWitt on some conceptual art. You
all have this incredibly important document. This is a piece from the early 70's by a composer
named Daniel Goode. He's a New York composer and experimentalist who decided to start writing
pieces that were more about action than about where those actions would lead. This is a
piece called "Stamping in the Dark". I'm going to explain this piece. We're going to count
together up to ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. We're
going to do it slowly. Then we're going to go, on where one would be, we're going to
stop counting out loud but we're going to count to ourselves. Where one would be, we're
going to close our eyes so we can't see what anybody else is doing. Then to ourselves we're
going to count to ten. The next time you get to one, you're going to stamp on the ground,
from other cultures and to some extent Phillip Glass and Steve Reich did as well. In New