Written in 1951, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is scored for twelve radios. Two performers “play” each radio, one dialing the frequency, the other changing the volume and tone. The work is notated conventionally, i.e. with notes expressing duration placed on a five-line staff, and was composed using chance operations (in this case coin tosses), as was Cage’s Music of Changes, written at the same time. Though their compositional methods were identical, the two works differ in one fundamental respect: given the nature of the instruments they employ – the piano in the former case and the radio in the latter – Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is indeterminate whereas Music of Changes is not.

The indeterminacy stems from the fact that radios produce sounds that vary according to frequency, time of day, and geographic location. It follows that those sounds cannot be determined in advance, and thus that each performance of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 will be different in ways that cannot be predicted. According to Cage himself, the experience of indeterminacy was the motivation for the piece:

When I wrote the Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios, it was not for the purpose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpredictability already inherent in the situation through the tossing of coins. Chance, to be precise, is a leap, provides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself. (quoted in CCJC, 57)

The “leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself” that Cage refers to here was to become one of his guiding principles, the goal being to eliminate individual will, preference, and desires, in a word, to give up control. The Western musical tradition, with its emphasis on originality and individuality, not to mention the regimented, hierarchical nature of the orchestra, indeed of diatonic harmony itself, had become suspect to Cage. Throughout his career he sought ways around these impediments, as he saw them, and at the time he clearly hoped that composing for the radio via chance operations would allow him to bypass them, as he explained in the concluding lines to an article detailing the compositional procedure of Imaginary Landscape No. 4:

It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and “traditions” of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration. (CDPC, 59)

In the mid– to late-1950s Cage would write three more works for radio, namely Speech (1955), Radio Music (1956), and Music Walk (1958), before abandoning the instrument, though he did later compose for television, audio tape, records, and other electronic sound sources.

·

·

• John Cage Database: “Imaginary Landscape No. 4”
• John Cage Links

·

Above the Clouds

For many years, the name Peter Schmidt was uniquely associated in my mind with Brian Eno. It was Schmidt who did the cover art for Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Evening Star, it was also he who made the four prints included with early pressings of Before and After Science and who collaborated with Eno on Oblique Strategies, and Eno often spoke of him in interviews, mentioning his sadness at Schmidt’s untimely death. Attracted by the work, impressed by the high esteem in which Eno held him, and admittedly intrigued by the relative lack of information that seemed to be available about him, I recall sniffing around for anything I might find out about Peter Schmidt in the pre-internet days of the late ’70s and early ’80s but came up with nothing of consequence and eventually gave up.

Well, nowadays of course it’s people and things that don’t exist on the internet that are the exception, and fortunately that is no longer the case of Peter Schmidt. In January 2008 John Emr created a website and a blog devoted to Schmidt, and both are invaluable resources for those who wish to learn more about the artist and view a broad sampling of his work. The blog in particular is interesting in that it contains examples of finished pieces, preparatory sketches and notes for paintings, writings, and a variety of ephemera about Schmidt, public showings of his work, etc. Through his contact with Schmidt’s family, friends, and collectors Emr is able to present many pieces that I imagine have never been displayed publicly before. Collectively, they give an idea of the surprising breadth of Schmidt’s work, and allow us better appreciate what he was able to accomplish in his unfortunately brief life.

I’ll admit a bias for his watercolor still-lifes and landscapes, many of which are striking examples of the understated beauty of otherwise mundane objects and unspectacular scenes and views. These to me embody what is most interesting about Schmidt’s work: its indifference to the monumental and the superlative, and its focus on the quiet, the “insignificant,” the intimate. For this reason I have always thought that Schmidt’s phrase, “In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting,” was a perfect epigraph to both his work and the position he occupied in the art world of his time.

You can see a selection of Peter Schmidt’s paintings in the Peter Schmidt gallery. Having visited the gallery, I hope you will feel sufficiently inspired to explore John Emr’s website and blog, listed below.

·

• Peter Schmidt Web
• Peter Schmidt Weblog

·

Learn more about him and his work at the Peter Schmidt Web and the Peter Schmidt Web Blog

Return to “In a roomful of shouting people.”

·

Double Window Picture

One more thing about Oskar Schlemmer’s Fensterbilder (which were the subject of an earlier post): the paradoxical use of the window motif.

Traditionally the window has been used as a framing device intended to guide the viewer’s eye to an essential part of the picture, and Schlemmer himself often made use of it in this way. When it came to the “Window Paintings,” however, he took a slightly different approach.

First of all, we are seeing through the window – we do not see it itself. Though the viewer stands, as did the painter, behind it, i.e. in the room looking out, the window itself is not visible. There is certainly nothing unusual about this, only it has nothing to do with a window per se, which here is merely a vantage point from which to paint a picture, not a framing device. So the series’ title, Fensterbilder, is somewhat ironic given that the window in question does not actually appear in any of the paintings.

A second paradox comes with the subject matter of several of the “Window Paintings,” numbers II, III, VII, XIII, and XVII, for example, where the window is used to frame another window, that is, the scene depicted is a window seen through a window which is not seen (cf Schlemmer’s description of the “Window Paintings” as “views from my window into the neighboring window”). What’s more, the window seen serves as much to reveal as to conceal: it offers us a glimpse into the inner world of the neighboring family while at the same time obscuring that view with its muntins, shades, and curtains. Thus the principal function of the window is subverted, at least in part – it gives to see, yet partially conceals, and that part which is hidden or otherwise obscured cannot be completely known. It must be guessed at, imagined, and thus retains a certain mystery, constituting a sort of “mystique of the optical,” as Schlemmer himself described it.

Finally, it is interesting that in several of the Fensterbilder, including those mentioned above, one looks out of a window in order to see in a window; the outside itself is not represented. In fact, in those paintings the window is used as a interiorizing device, allowing the painter, and thus the viewer, to look from the inside in. That second interior can be seen as a metaphor for Schlemmer’s inner state at the time he made the “Window Paintings.” Living far from his wife and children to whom he was deeply attached, he seems to have used them to capture or recreate visually a domesticity that he had to forsake in reality.

You can see a selection of the “Window Paintings” in the Fensterbilder gallery.

·

Title Screen

The Brothers Quay are writerly filmmakers, and in saying that I’m not just referring to their penchant for working from literary sources. Though they have drawn inspiration from works as varied as The Epic of Gilgamesh on the one hand and the writings of Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser on the other, aside from the relative obscurity of the latter two and the former’s apparent resistance to filmic adaptation (only two Gilgamesh movies in 4,000 years, and one of them by the Quays), there’s certainly nothing unusual in that. No, the Quays’ interest in writing has nothing to do with the shepherding of short stories and novels from the page to the screen; rather, it’s all about the obsessive visual exploration of writing as both an activity and an artifact that permeates their films.

Working through their filmography one cannot help but be struck by how often and how cleverly writing is incorporated into their work, the 1988 black and white short Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies being exemplary in this regard. The spartan calligraphic title screen, with its spindly fraktur letters and graceful decorative initials, sets the tone for the entire film, whose aesthetic might be described as baroque minimalism. The title screen plays a functional role as well, serving as a window into the filmic world: above the triangular “A” of “Anatomies” is a peep-hole which the camera approaches, then peers through. On the other side we see a tiny, disembodied hand writing furiously. Two other intertitles follow, both bearing captions written in a flowery script dedicating the décor of the film (not the film itself, just the décor, a testament to the importance they attribute to it) to both the London Underground and to an “anonymous anatomical specimen,” presumably the puppet protagonist.

We then move into the inner world of the film, whose action alternates between two distinct but communicating spaces – a light room with impossible, Escher-like staircases and white walls decorated with a proliferation of bar code-like lines and phrases written in flowery script, and a dark room with a gloomy, black and white striped fabric covering the walls, the bed, and which is also piled up here and there. In the light room several fantastic, robot-like beings exist, among them two pterodactyl-like compasses which come to life and glide across the white floor like ice-skaters, tracing calligraphic curlicues as they twirl. In the dark room, two shadowy figures languish, looking sickly and forlorn. One rubs its forehead with a circular motion of its hand, echoing the gesture of the robot-like protagonist in the white room, and the rubbing motion strongly recalls the agitation of the writing hand, which returns repeatedly throughout the film. At times several writing hands appear, all scribbling away simultaneously.

As the film moves to its conclusion we have another intertitle bearing a hand-written dedication, this one to “the other Fragonard” (Honoré, the anatomist) and to the Musée Orphila (the anatomy museum of the University Paris V), then come the credits. Both are written in the idiosyncritic script of the preceding title cards, thus giving Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies a palendromic structure that emphasizes its inner coherence – the writing specimens at the beginning and end frame the activity of writing which runs like a leitmotif through the film.

Other works like In Absentia, their 2000 collaboration with Stockhausen, and The Calligrapher, a sequence of three “idents” commissioned (and rejected) by BBC2 in 1991, also foreground writing as an intransitive activity interesting in and of itself. Like the Quays’ fanciful hand-written title screens, intertitles, and credits, all of these films betray a fascination with the mechanics of verbal expression, with manual techniques and processes, and with the graphic arts in general, characteristics that are readily apparent in other aspects of their filmmaking, particularly in their use of stop-frame animation, hand-made puppets, and elaborate décors which often feature etchings, advertising bills, bar codes, and other printed ephemera. As they themselves put it in an interview: “We’re not writers but we respect writing.”

You can see a selection of the stills in the Brothers Quay gallery.

·

• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page
• André Habib, “Through a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers”

·

Return to “Picturing Writing.”

·

A Humument, page 1

The first page of Tom Phillips’ A Humument is emblematic of the entire work. Textually and graphically it touches on some of the book’s central concerns and provides clues to certain of its mysteries.

It begins with the epigraph, “volume And / side I shall lie / bones my bones,” which is significant in many regards. First of all it reveals the dualistic nature of the book, which is made up of both a “volume” and a “side,” and further suggests that the two share an underlying structure. This is of course the case as A Humument was “written through” W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document. The use of the first person implies that the work itself is speaking here and thus that the book is its own narrator, in other words that we are dealing with a metatext. The verb “to lie” is interesting for its ambiguity: it could be “lie” as in an epitaph (“Here Lies…”), and that is in fact the sense of this passage in Mallock’s text, p. 367); of course it could also be “to lie” as in to not tell the truth, that it is a question of a fiction. Finally, the fact that this textual fragment was taken from p. 9 and collaged in here (and will be reprised in slightly altered form on p. 367), also foregrounds the collage technique that is both a method and a theme of the work. Thus the epigraph explains and demonstrates an essential quality of the book.

Next comes the title, which appears just above that of its source text: A Human Document. The crossed out letters demonstrate Phillips’ m.o.: A Humument was made by highlighting certain words and letters of the source text and concealing others. The fact that the title of Phillips work appears above that of Mallock’s further suggests that the former was superimposed onto the latter in the manner of a palimpsest, which indeed A Humument is.

The text of the introduction gives additional details about the type of book we shall be reading: it is a work of conceptual art (“a book of art, of mind art”) created by appropriation via the process mentioned above (“that which he hid reveal I”). This is supported graphically by the two word-strings superimposed on the image of a box as if they have been extracted from it, which they have. The arrow pointing right metaphorically suggests that the present work is moving beyond or breaking out of the box (of the original work, of the traditional book, of traditional notions of originality and authorship), and pictographically tells the reader that he or she should now move on to the following page.

Thus from the start the reader is made aware of the book’s nature, its intertext, and the method used to create it.

·

• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

·

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally, it can be calculated in advance, and becomes part of the ceremony.

– Franz Kafka

(Translation: Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)

Kafka’s parable of leopards in the temple has always struck me as a perfect allegory of the avant-garde in that it points out the truism that in art the transgressive is ultimately absorbed into the canon. The fact that we can speak of a “tradition of the avant-garde” or of “avant-garde art” at all says as much. One is reminded of Susan Sontag’s observation that “The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions,” as well as of the following lines by Quentin Crisp:

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

One wonders in fact whether the transgressive is actually anything more than a doppelgänger of the canonical which, by its very nature, it needs and implies. As there can be no anti-novel without a novel, no meta-cinema without a cinema, no dodecaphony without diatonic harmony, etc., that would seem to be the case. But does not the canonical, by virtue of the qualities and characteristics that constitute its specificity, likewise imply its opposite, i.e. a parallel system that would further define and validate it by the very challenge of its existence? That many anti-traditions are nearly as old as the traditions they seek to subvert seems to confirm that supposition.

Whatever the case may be the two are clearly bound into a dialectic so tightly constructed that they appear to be two distinct yet interdependent modalities of a single activity, as Henri Béhar plainly stated in a comment on Tristan Tzara’s early poems (and on Dada art generally speaking): “There is no such thing as anti-art,” he wrote, “only artistic manifestations against art.”

·

• The Kafka Project
• Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”

·

Addendum [2.6.10]:
I just stumbled across a review of the show “Leopards in the Temple, Sculpture Center, New York” by Ariella Budick. Referring to Kafka’s leopards, she writes: “As a metaphor for the art world, this little tale feels especially apt. The avant-garde systematically infiltrates the canon; yesterday’s outrage devolves into tomorrow’s platitude.” Indeed. If you wish you may read the review here.

·

The following sampler from ShortWaveMusic is intended to fire your imagination. If it catches your ear as well I recommend that you visit the site and work your way through the archive; you won’t be disappointed. The truly smitten may also wish to download the catalog of more than 100 recordings that had appeared on the blog between 2005–’08, and will find instructions on how to do so here. Now, on to the sounds…

·

Dark Radio

“[This is] a short layer piece incorporating what sounds like three or four radio sources. I’m pretty sure this is just a brief recording of one of my all-night sleep installations.”

·

SWM09.04: आकाशवाणी

“I would have remained a music-illiterate myself, had I not been in bed one monsoon with asthma, and listened to the radio to fill the hours. Around 2 a.m., I chanced upon some haunting music being played on the General Overseas Service of All India Radio. While the rest of India slept I listened, and was converted…” – Ramachandra Guha

·

SWM09.00: Qrv Qrv Qrv de ShortWaveMusic

“Station: Unidentified XMTR Test Sequence
Frequency: 11885 kHz
Transmitter: Unknown
Rec Date: Wed 09-Sep-2009 : 0406 UTC”

·

SWM09.08: Modernizing Khan Asparuh

“This piece is an example of ‘arranged folklore’ attributed to the Upper Thracian region of Southern Bulgaria, most likely performed by Donka Koleva, a Bulgarian-born and trained singer now living in New York.”

·

Duelling XMTRs! #3

“…a collision of modern Eastern electronics and Qu’ranic recitation which sounds so natural to our world-fusion-softened ears that it hardly registers as an accident of propagation at all. You could probably even dance to it …”

·

KJES (“King Jesus Eternal Savior”)

“…in certain fluke moments of peculiar propagation and signal chaos, KJES [“one of the weirder evangelical shortwave stations”] occasionally crosses the line from lip-biting strangeness to an inexplicable burlap-dress beauty.”

·

If you are as captivated by the beauty of these disembodied sounds as I am, you might consider purchasing a copy of At the Tone, Weiskopf’s “ ‘Little History’ of NIST Radio Stations WWV and WWVH” (you’ll find a teaser for it here). Be sure to keep an ear out for his forthcoming Historical Longwave CD Project, too. In the meanwhile, you can enjoy his first “catalog mix,” 833–45: Howth St PART/SEQ (Pananorama Mix), a sound collage incorporating “shortwave elements, Qur’an recitation, and music,” which you can read about and download here.

·

Window Painting XII

[I] have recently completed a series of pictures, inspired by what I see right around me: views from my window into the neighboring window, done in the evening between nine and half-past nine, shortly before the blackout. When night is falling and clashes with the scraps of interior beige-orange-brown-white-black, it produces amazing optical effects. (LDOS, 399)

In spring of 1942 Oskar Schlemmer, then living in Wuppertal where he worked in a paint factory, began a series of new paintings. As noted in the diary entry quoted above, these new works represented scenes glimpsed by Schlemmer from his window at nightfall. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he gave the paintings the collective title Fensterbilder or “Window Paintings” and described their genesis in a letter to his wife:

I got intrigued by this window. Something is always going on, sometimes a pot is being put out, sometimes something is being done at the table, ironing, kneeding cake dough…, then the table is being set and flowers are put on it. Look, the suit is being brushed and patted, I know that already. Later the husband will be coming home, and then the window will be closed and the light turned on, and then it will get a lot more interesting, because then one sees only their shadows behind the curtain… I have painted that. (quoted in OSMA, 33 · Translation: Frauke von der Horst)

Schlemmer painted a total of eighteen “Window Paintings” and one “Double Window Painting”  between April and June of 1942. As Jurrie Poot has explained, fourteen of them are mixed media works “consisting of oil and/or watercolor over pencil and colored chalk on cardboard,” while three of the four others, painted in Sehringen and Stuttgart, were made using oils on oiled paper. (OSMA, 33) They are remarkable for the quiet, understated beauty of their simple compositions as well as for the uneventful quotidian scenes they depict. The latter must have been particularly poignant for Schlemmer, who was living far from his wife and children at the time. Despite their subdued palette and mood, the Fensterbilder were a source of excitement to Schlemmer, as he noted in his diary on May 12, 1942:

Constant flow of new ideas. In the future I shall do more and write less.

The window paintings: the miracle of the visible, the mystique of the optical. At least in its un-inventability, i.e. one cannot invent that sort of thing. Source of inspiration for free composition.

Concerning the window paintings: I feel like a hunter who goes stalking every evening between nine and ten o’clock. And then: here I can be sure that I am only painting what I see, but the important question is how I see it and especially how I paint it, and that brings up the old question: “what is truth?’ Truth in art – truth in nature… (LDOS, 400)

The “Window Paintings” should have represented a pivotal moment in Schlemmer’s life, inspiring and energizing him at a difficult moment, and providing impetus for new work. Though they seemed to suggest a new beginning for him, in fact they bring his work to a close. Physically ill and suffering from depression in his final years, Schlemmer, who died the following April, would never achieve the same clarity of vision and feeling that he did in these works. Sensing this perhaps, Schlemmer reflected back on the Fensterbilder in late 1942:

“In Wuppertal I painted a little thing, no larger than a child’s hand, a few spots of color, a memory of a window interior – everyone who sees it is captivated, and I myself must say: within this tiny space I have offered my utmost. Is it the wisdom of age, to elevate such restraint to a principle?

[…]

I did the ‘window paintings’ in a state of real enthousiasm, and it is curious that my feelings apparently have a direct impact on the beholder, always the best touchstone for the value of a work of art. […]

One more thing, the window pictures were drawn from reality; they offer impressions of the external world, seen, to be sure, through a ‘loving temperament.’” (LDOS, 405–6)

You can see a selection of “Window Paintings” in the Fensterbild gallery, and read more about them here.

·

·

• schlemmer.org
• bauhaus-archiv

·