David Grubbs
BLUSHING ENCOUNTERS
BLUSHING ENCOUNTERS
Not temperamentally inclined towards "making" premonitory statements, I'm attracted therefore to the cockeyed clearsightedness of a text such as John Cage's 1937 "Future of Music: Credo". "There's" a vision for you of a yet unknown art - Cage's prophetic words about electronically-produced music. Surprisingly, "Future of Music: Credo" is no less interesting for its prescience or its accuracy; it proves an exception to the rule that the more profoundly mistaken, the more an alternate-universe vision holds the greater interest, precisely for being unrealized. It's difficult to imagine a yet-unknown that remains to become recognizable or understood as art. For instance, I don't see a yet unknown practice emerging that positions itself as anti-art or anti-aesthetic, nor one that exploits the boundaries between art and non-art. At present, and very much from the perspective of my chosen field of music / sound, I'm preoccupied with the re-valuation of historical avant-gardes. These include musical minimalism (Tony Conrad's well-publicized battle with La Monte Young, the return of Charlemagne Palestine, the archival re-introduction to Terry Riley), indeterminate composition (given a platform via projects such as Sonic Youth's Goodbye Twentieth Century recording and performances), and - not surprisingly - a resurgent, surpassing interest in earlier musique concrète and electronic music (particularly by DJs and younger electronic music producers). These keep bubbling up in the art context given the current curatorial thirst for sound art. When I write that I'm preoccupied with this re-valuation, I want to stress that the activities of research-recovery-recontextualization are at present so ingrained that it's difficult - and also less than imperative - to imagine the category of a yet-unknown. My own research into Cage was undertaken for the sake of a better understanding disciplinarity from the 1960s onward. I was struck by the fact of different disciplines "coming to" Cage in different historical periods. My sense is that Cage himself didn't so much gravitate towards other fields (visual art in the 1960s, a sound art conceived as separate from music composition in the early 1970s, experimental poetics as exemplified by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group in the 1980s) as that these artists came to Cage in different periods, owing in great measure to a lack of interdisciplinary communication. (In lieu of a "coming-to Cage", one could also describe a coming-to indeterminacy, a coming-to aesthetics of chance and indifference, etc.) The realization of a hitherto-unknown art in these instances had to do primarily with the revelatory nature of otherwise isolated disciplines finding themselves in blushing, heated encounter. That's still the best predication I know for the otherwise-unknown. David Grubbs New York |
