Hi Jon (and all),

In reading Michael Nyman's classic "Experimental Music: Cage and 
Beyond," it comes clear to me that Cage was able to arrive at 
proto-fluxus, instruction-based performance work earlier than most of 
his contemporaries in the "visual artists" not simply because he was 
a genius (whatever that means), but because he inherited and began 
with a medium that was instruction-based and event-based rather than 
a medium based on the production of a singular, discrete object.

With the neo-Lituus example you mention, that is an instrument 
(techne), not a discrete work of art, an event, or event an event 
score. I'm sure there are parties concerned with its historical 
(in)accuracy, but they are musicologists and historians, not art 
archivists.

With the Flavin wiring technique, that is technology (again, techne). 
The difference between it and the neo-Lituus seems to be that the 
wiring tech is only once removed from (that which the Flavin estate 
hopes to be considered) an art object -- the tubes themselves. 
Whereas the neo-Lituus is thrice removed from the "art" -- the 
instrument + a bach score + an orchestra = the event performance = 
the art.

If we take another tack and consider Flavin's tubes themselves to be 
techne, and we consider "the light itself" as an event performed in 
the installation space, this to me seems closer to what his work 
is/was doing. Then economics enters into the picture, because you 
can't sell the performance of light as easily as you can sell 
discrete tubes.

Historically, once visual artists stopped practicing mimetics, I 
think we can begin considering the effect achieved by the art object 
as a kind of event performance, which then makes the art object 
itself an instrument or a score. So a Seurat painting is still the 
"art" itself, because it is still mimetic. He has moved from painting 
an object to painting light, but he's still mimetically 
representing/encapsulating light in the object of his own painting. 
Whereas Flavin's object is emitting light which itself performs in 
the space. Flavin's tubes are not representing/encapsulating light. 
They are not mimetic; they are performative. So Yves Klein's 
paintings are vehicles for proposing a certain way of understanding 
color; Donald Judd's cubes are vehicles that orchestrate a situation 
which causes my embodied self to perform a kind of phenomenological 
awareness, etc. Why else would Judd buy a town? It wasn't simply (to 
poach George Carlin) that he needed a place to put his stuff.

Regarding net art, I consider my work here ( http://playdamage.org ) 
as a series of ensconced and encapsulated micro-performances. The 
speed of each surfer's processor and the size of each surfer's 
browser window affecst the "performance" of each screen. (cf: 
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No2_radical_cloninger.html 
). This is why they are not videos, and why the animations are not 
(for the most part) embedded flash files running at a set frames per 
second rate. But such distinctions are conveniently lost on an old 
media archivist, who is not thinking of the machine itself as a 
performance stage.

I recently saw Margaret Leng Tan perform some cage piecs, including 
4'33''. The academic who introduced her admonished us to turn off our 
cell phones, since they were historically "not in the John Cage sound 
spectrum." Of course, prior to performing 4'33'', Tan herself 
encouraged us to  turn our cell phones back on. The practicing 
musician (techne) got it, whereas the academic (episteme) did not.

It is in the best interest of historical conservativism  (as opposed 
to Bergsonian virtualism) to reify performative works. As objects, 
receptacles, and containers, they are more stable. They become (dead) 
ends rather than (living) vehicles for emergence. The closer a 
performative work is to "objecthood," the easier this reversal 
becomes. This is why Cage is such a wonderful and useful wrench 
thrown into the machine. His works anticipated and are still actively 
sabotaging their own recuperation and calcification.

Best,
Curt



At 7:29 AM -0400 6/6/09, Jon Ippolito wrote:
>I sometimes think of documentation as conservative in both senses of 
>the word--a strategy that satisfies itself with preserving the 
>footprint rather than the animal that made it. But as Alain Depocas 
>and Rick Rinehart continually remind me, documentation is essential 
>to some of the most radical techniques for resurrecting the beast 
>itself.
>
>This was certainly the case for the Lituus, a long-necked trumpet 
>that was ubiquitous in Roman times and cropped up in musical scores 
>by Bach yet disappeared after the Baroque period. Now researchers 
>have re-created a real working Lituus after designing software to 
>emulate its sound, based solely on existing descriptions of the 
>instrument:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/mv8bgs
>
>What's interesting to me about this example is how little fuss 
>people seem to be making about the authenticity of rebuilding an 
>instrument that no one living in the past half-millennium has ever 
>seen or heard. As one of the commenters on Slashdot put it, "What 
>they have here can almost certainly be called a Lituus."
>
>In the visual arts, meanwhile, Dan Flavin's former technician is 
>devising a special wiring technique that the Flavin estate can fuse 
>into certain fluorescent light fixtures that it decides are 
>"authentic" sculptures by the artist. This, despite the fact that 
>Flavin maintained that the medium of his work was light, and that 
>the bulbs were interchangeable. (I suppose if you tried to 
>reverse-engineer one of these wiring schemes, you could be 
>prosecuted under the anti-circumvention clause of the Digital 
>Millennium Copyright Act.)
>
>Yet this visual art world that is so fixated on authenticity is also 
>happy to collect "net art" as JPEGs on CD-ROM and "performances" as 
>silver-gelatin prints. Instead of seeing documentation as a means to 
>an end, galleries and museums too often see documentation as *the* 
>end.
>
>Is this contrast between music and the visual arts simply a function 
>of their different economic models (selling objects versus selling 
>rights)? Or is it a consequence of the fact that, at least until the 
>age of recordings, music was always re-performed based on scores 
>rather than locked away in vaults?
>
>jon
>
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